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

Detachment….” He paused.

A bird was singing in the willow tree. The sun was under a cloud; beyond the long pale green leaves that fluttered ever so slightly in the wind, the sky was full of silvery and cream-colored clouds, with here and there a patch the color of a robin’s egg. Andrews began laughing softly.

“But, Genevieve, how silly those words are, those pompous, efficient words: detachment, battalion, commanding officer. It would have all happened anyway. Things reached the breaking point; that was all. I could not submit any longer to the discipline…. Oh, those long Roman words, what millstones they are about men’s necks! That was silly, too; I was quite willing to help in the killing of Germans, I had no quarrel with, out of curiosity or cowardice…. You see, it has taken me so long to find out how the world is. There was no one to show me the way.”

He paused as if expecting her to speak. The bird in the willow tree was still singing.

Suddenly a dangling twig blew aside a little so that Andrews could see him—a small grey bird, his throat all puffed out with song.

“It seems to me,” he said very softly, “that human society has been always that, and perhaps will be always that: organizations growing and stifling individuals, and individuals revolting hopelessly against them, and at last forming new societies to crush the old societies and becoming slaves again in their turn….”

“I thought you were a socialist,” broke in Genevieve sharply, in a voice that hurt him to the quick, he did not know why.

“A man told me at the labor battalion,” began Andrews again, “that they’d tortured a friend of his there once by making him swallow lighted cigarettes; well, every order shouted at me, every new humiliation before the authorities, was as great an agony to me. Can’t you understand?” His voice rose suddenly to a tone of entreaty.

She nodded her head. They were silent. The willow leaves shivered in a little wind. The bird had gone.

“But tell me about the swimming part of it. That sounds exciting.”

“We were working unloading cement at Passy—cement to build the stadium the army is presenting to the French, built by slave labor, like the pyramids.”

“Passy’s where Balzac lived. Have you ever seen his house there?”

“There was a boy working with me, the Kid, ‘le gosse,’ it’d be in French. Without him, I should never have done it. I was completely crushed…. I suppose that he was drowned…. Anyway, we swam under water as far as we could, and, as it was nearly dark, I managed to get on a barge, where a funny anarchist family took care of me. I’ve never heard of the Kid since. Then I bought these clothes that amuse you so, Genevieve, and came back to Paris to find you, mainly.”

“I mean as much to you as that?” whispered Genevieve.

“In Paris, too. I tried to find a boy named Marcel, who worked on a farm near St. Germain. I met him out there one day. I found he’d gone to sea…. If it had not been that I had to see you, I should have gone straight to Bordeaux or Marseilles. They aren’t too particular who they take as a seaman now.”

“But in the army didn’t you have enough of that dreadful life, always thrown among uneducated people, always in dirty, foul-smelling surroundings, you, a sensitive person, an artist? No wonder you are almost crazy after years of that.” Genevieve spoke passionately, with her eyes fixed on his face.

“Oh, it wasn’t that,” said Andrews with despair in his voice. “I rather like the people you call low. Anyway, the differences between people are so slight….” His sentence trailed away. He stopped speaking, sat stirring uneasily on the seat, afraid he would cry out. He noticed the hard shape of the revolver against his leg.

“But isn’t there something you can do about it? You must have friends,” burst out Genevieve. “You were treated with horrible injustice. You can get yourself reinstated and properly demobilised. They’ll see you are a person of intelligence. They can’t treat you as they would anybody.”

“I must be, as you say, a little mad, Genevieve,” said Andrews.

“But now that I, by pure accident, have made a gesture, feeble as it is, towards human freedom, I can’t feel that…. Oh, I suppose I’m a fool…. But there you have me, just as I am, Genevieve.”

He sat with his head drooping over his chest, his two hands clasping the gunwales of the boat. After a long while Genevieve said in a dry little voice:

“Well, we must go back now; it’s time for tea.”

Andrews looked up. There was a dragon fly poised on the top of a reed, with silver wings and a long crimson body.

“Look just behind you, Genevieve.”

“Oh, a dragon fly! What people was it that made them the symbol of life? It wasn’t the Egyptians. O, I’ve forgotten.”

“I’ll row,” said Andrews.

The boat was hurried along by the current. In a very few minutes they had pulled it up on the bank in front of the Rods’ house.

“Come and have some tea,” said Genevieve.

“No, I must work.”

“You are doing something new, aren’t you?”

Andrews nodded.

“What’s its name?”

“The Soul and Body of John Brown.”

“Who’s John Brown?”

“He was a madman who wanted to free people. There’s a song about him.”

“It is based on popular themes?”

“Not that I know of…. I only thought of the name yesterday. It came to me by a very curious accident.”

“You’ll come tomorrow?”

“If you’re not too busy.”

“Let’s see, the Boileaus are coming to lunch. There won’t be anybody at tea time. We can have tea together alone.”

He took her hand and held it, awkward as a child with a new playmate.

“All right, at about four. If there’s nobody there, we’ll play music,” he said.

She pulled her hand from him hurriedly, made a curious formal gesture of farewell, and crossed the road to the gate without looking back. There was one idea in his head, to get to his room and lock the door and throw himself face down on the bed. The idea amused some distant part of his mind. That had been what he had always done when, as a child, the world had seemed too much for him. He would run upstairs and lock the door and throw himself face downward on the bed. “I wonder if I shall cry?” he thought.

Madame Boncour was coming down the stairs as he went up. He backed down and waited. When she got to the bottom, pouting a little, she said:

“So you are a friend of Mme. Rod, Monsieur?”

“How did you know that?”

A dimple appeared near her mouth in either cheek.

“You know, in the country, one knows everything,” she said.

“Au revoir,” he said, starting up the stairs.

“Mais, Monsieur. You should have told me. If I had known I should not have asked you to pay in advance. Oh, never. You must pardon me, Monsieur.”

“All right.”

“Monsieur est Americain? You see I know a lot.” Her puffy cheeks shook when she giggled. “And Monsieur has known Mme. Rod et Mlle. Rod a long time. An old friend. Monsieur is a musician.”

“Yes. Bon soir.” Andrews ran up the stairs.

“Au revoir, Monsieur.” Her chanting voice followed him up the stairs.

He slammed the door behind him and threw himself on the bed.

When Andrews awoke next morning, his first thought was how long he had to wait that day to see Genevieve. Then he remembered their talk of the day before. Was it worth while going to see her at all, he asked himself. And very gradually he felt cold despair taking hold of him. He felt for a moment that he was the only living thing in a world of dead machines; the toad hopping across the road in front of a steam roller. Suddenly he thought of Jeanne. He remembered her grimy, overworked fingers lying in her lap. He pictured her walking up and down in front of the Cafe de Rohan one Wednesday night, waiting for him. In the place of Genevieve, what would Jeanne have done? Yet people were always alone, really; however much they loved each other, there could be no real union. Those who rode in the great car could never feel as the others felt; the toads hopping across the road. He felt no rancour against Genevieve.

These thoughts slipped from him while he was drinking the coffee and eating the dry bread that made his breakfast; and afterwards, walking back and forth along the river bank, he felt his mind and body becoming as if fluid, and supple, trembling, bent in the rush of his music like a poplar tree bent in a wind. He sharpened a pencil and went up to his room again.

The sky was cloudless that day. As he sat at his table the square of blue through the window and the hills topped by their windmill and the silver-blue of the river, were constantly in his eyes. Sometimes he wrote notes down fast, thinking nothing, feeling nothing, seeing nothing; other times he sat for long periods staring at the sky and at the windmill vaguely happy, playing with unexpected thoughts that came and vanished, as now and then a moth fluttered in the window to blunder about the ceiling beams, and, at last, to disappear without his knowing how.

When the clock struck twelve, he found he was very hungry. For two days he had eaten nothing but bread, sausage and cheese. Finding Madame Boncour behind the bar downstairs, polishing glasses, he ordered dinner of her. She brought him a stew and a bottle of wine at once, and stood over him watching him eat it, her arms akimbo and the dimples showing in her huge red cheeks.

“Monsieur eats less than any young man I ever saw,” she said.

“I’m working hard,” said Andrews, flushing.

“But when you work you have to eat a great deal, a great deal.”

“And if the money is short?” asked Andrews with a smile.

Something in the steely searching look that passed over her eyes for a minute startled him.

“There are not many people here now, Monsieur, but you should see it on a market day…. Monsieur will take some dessert?”

“Cheese and coffee.”

“Nothing more? It’s the season of strawberries.”

“Nothing more, thank you.”

When Madame Boncour came back with the cheese, she said:

“I had Americans here once, Monsieur. A pretty time I had with them, too. They were deserters. They went away without paying, with the gendarmes after them I hope they were caught and sent to the front, those good-for-nothings.”

“There are all sorts of Americans,” said Andrews in a low voice. He was angry with himself because his heart beat so.

“Well, I’m going for a little walk. Au revoir, Madame.”

“Monsieur is going for a little walk. Amusez-vous bien, Monsieur. Au revoir, Monsieur,” Madame Boncour’s singsong tones followed him out.

A little before four Andrews knocked at the front door of the Rods’ house. He could hear Santo, the little black and tan, barking inside. Madame Rod opened the door for him herself.

“Oh, here you are,” she said. “Come and have some tea. Did the work go well to-day?”

“And Genevieve?” stammered Andrews.

“She went out motoring with some friends. She left a note for you. It’s on the tea-table.”

He found himself talking, making questions and answers, drinking tea, putting cakes into his mouth, all through a white dead mist. Genevieve’s note said:

“Jean:—I’m thinking of ways and means. You must get away to a neutral country. Why couldn’t you have talked it over with