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

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 me-e.”

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 vermilion 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 something 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 renumbered the garden where, in his boyhood, he had sat dreaming through the droning summer afternoons under the crepe 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