“How glad I am,” he said, exposing his starched cuffs with a curious gesture, “to have some one to dine with! When one begins to get old loneliness is impossible. It is only youth that dares think. … Afterwards one has only one thing to think about: old age.”
“There’s always work,” said Andrews.
“Slavery. Any work is slavery. What is the use of freeing your intellect if you sell yourself again to the first bidder?”
“Rot!” said Heineman, pouring out from a new bottle.
Andrews had begun to notice the girl who sat at the next table, in front of a pale young soldier in French-blue who resembled her extraordinarily. She had high cheek bones and a forehead in which the modelling of the skull showed through the transparent, faintly-olive skin. Her heavy chestnut hair was coiled carelessly at the back of her head. She spoke very quietly, and pressed her lips together when she smiled. She ate quickly and neatly, like a cat.
The restaurant had gradually filled up with people. The waitress and the patron, a fat man with a wide red sash coiled tightly round his waist, moved with difficulty among the crowded tables. A woman at a table in the corner, with dead white skin and drugged staring eyes, kept laughing hoarsely, leaning her head, in a hat with bedraggled white plumes, against the wall. There was a constant jingle of plates and glasses, and an oily fume of food and women’s clothes and wine.
“D’you want to know what I really did with your friend?” said Heineman, leaning towards Andrews.
“I hope you didn’t push him into the Seine.”
“It was damn impolite. … But hell, it was damn impolite of him not to drink. … No use wasting time with a man who don’t drink. I took him into a café and asked him to wait while I telephoned. I guess he’s still waiting. One of the whoreiest cafés on the whole Boulevard Clichy.” Heineman laughed uproariously and started explaining it in nasal French to M. le Guy.
Andrews flushed with annoyance for a moment, but soon started laughing. Heineman had started singing again.
“O, Sinbad was in bad in Tokio and Rome,
In bad in Trinidad
And twice as bad at home,
O, Sinbad was in bad all around!”
Everybody clapped. The white-faced woman in the corner cried “Bravo, Bravo,” in a shrill nightmare voice.
Heineman bowed, his big grinning face bobbing up and down like the face of a Chinese figure in porcelain.
“Lui est Sinbad,” he cried, pointing with a wide gesture towards Henslowe.
“Give ’em some more, Heinz. Give them some more,” said Henslowe, laughing.
“Big brunettes with long stelets
On the shores of Italee,
Dutch girls with golden curls
Beside the Zuyder Zee …”
Everybody cheered again; Andrews kept looking at the girl at the next table, whose face was red from laughter. She had a handkerchief pressed to her mouth, and kept saying in a low voice:
“O qu’il est drôle, celui-là. … O qu’il est drôle.”
Heineman picked up a glass and waved it in the air before drinking it off. Several people got up and filled it up from their bottles with white wine and red. The French soldier at the next table pulled an army canteen from under his chair and hung it round Heineman’s neck.
Heineman, his face crimson, bowed to all sides, more like a Chinese porcelain figure than ever, and started singing in all solemnity this time.
“Hulas and hulas would pucker up their lips,
He fell for their ball-bearing hips
For they were pips …”
His chunky body swayed to the ragtime. The woman in the corner kept time with long white arms raised above her head.
“Bet she’s a snake charmer,” said Henslowe.
“O, wild woman loved that child
He would drive the women wild!
O, Sinbad was in bad all around!”
Heineman waved his arms, pointed again to Henslowe, and sank into his chair saying in the tones of a Shakespearean actor:
“C’est lui Sinbad.”
The girl hid her face on the tablecloth, shaken with laughter. Andrews could hear a convulsed little voice saying:
“O qu’il est rigolo. …”
Heineman took off the canteen and handed it back to the French soldier.
“Merci, Camarade,” he said solemnly.
“Eh bien, Jeanne, c’est temps de ficher le camp,” said the French soldier to the girl. They got up. He shook hands with the Americans. Andrews caught the girl’s eye and they both started laughing convulsively again. Andrews noticed how erect and supple she walked as his eyes followed her to the door.
Andrews’s party followed soon after.
“We’ve got to hurry if we want to get to the Lapin Agile before closing … and I’ve got to have a drink,” said Heineman, still talking in his stagey Shakespearean voice.
“Have you ever been on the stage?” asked Andrews.
“What stage, sir? I’m in the last stages now, sir. … I am an artistic photographer and none other. … Moki and I are going into the movies together when they decide to have peace.”
“Who’s Moki?”
“Moki Hadj is the lady in the salmon-colored dress,” said Henslowe, in a loud stage whisper in Andrews’s ear. “They have a lion cub named Bubu.”
“Our first born,” said Heineman with a wave of the hand.
The streets were deserted. A thin ray of moonlight, bursting now and then through the heavy clouds, lit up low houses and roughly-cobbled streets and the flights of steps with rare dim lamps bracketed in house walls that led up to the Butte.
There was a gendarme in front of the door of the Lapin Agile. The street was still full of groups that had just come out, American officers and Y.M.C.A. women with a sprinkling of the inhabitants of the region.
“Now look, we’re late,” groaned Heineman in a tearful voice.
“Never mind, Heinz,” said Henslowe, “le Guy’ll take us to see de Clocheville like he did last time, n’est pas, le Guy?” Then Andrews heard him add, talking to a man he had not seen before, “Come along Aubrey, I’ll introduce you later.”
They climbed further up the hill. There was a scent of wet gardens in the air, entirely silent except for the clatter of their feet on the cobbles. Heineman was dancing a sort of a jig at the head of the procession. They stopped before a tall cadaverous house and started climbing a rickety wooden stairway.
“Talk about inside dope. … I got this from a man who’s actually in the room when the Peace Conference meets.” Andrews heard Aubrey’s voice with a Chicago burr in the r’s behind him in the stairs.
“Fine, let’s hear it,” said Henslowe.
“Did you say the Peace Conference took dope?” shouted Heineman, whose puffing could be heard as he climbed the dark stairs ahead of them.
“Shut up, Heinz.”
They stumbled over a raised doorstep into a large garret room with a tile floor, where a tall lean man in a monastic-looking dressing gown of some brown material received them. The only candle made all their shadows dance fantastically on the slanting white walls as they moved about. One side of the room had three big windows, with an occasional cracked pane mended with newspaper, stretching from floor to ceiling. In front of them were two couches with rugs piled on them. On the opposite wall was a confused mass of canvases piled one against the other, leaning helter skelter against the slanting wall of the room.
“C’est le bon vin, le bon vin,
C’est la chanson du vin,”
chanted Heineman. Everybody settled themselves on couches. The lanky man in the brown dressing gown brought a table out of the shadow, put some black bottles and heavy glasses on it, and drew up a camp stool for himself.
“He lives that way. … They say he never goes out. Stays here and paints, and when friends come in, he feeds them wine and charges them double,” said Henslowe. “That’s how he lives.”
The lanky man began taking bits of candle ou
t of a drawer of the table and lighting them. Andrews saw that his feet and legs were bare below the frayed edge of the dressing gown. The candle light lit up the men’s flushed faces and the crude banana yellows and arsenic greens of the canvases along the walls, against which jars full of paint brushes cast blurred shadows.
“I was going to tell you, Henny,” said Aubrey, “the dope is that the President’s going to leave the conference, going to call them all damn blackguards to their faces and walk out, with the band playing the ‘Internationale.’”
“God, that’s news,” cried Andrews.
“If he does that he’ll recognize the Soviets,” said Henslowe. “Me for the first Red Cross Mission that goes to save starving Russia. … Gee, that’s great.—I’ll write you a postal from Moscow, Andy, if they haven’t been abolished as delusions of the bourgeoisie.”
“Hell, no. … I’ve got five hundred dollars’ worth of Russian bonds that girl Vera gave me. … But worth five million, ten million, fifty million if the Czar gets back. … I’m backing the little white father,” cried Heineman. “Anyway Moki says he’s alive; that Savaroff ’s got him locked up in a suite in the Ritz. … And Moki knows.”
“Moki knows a damn lot, I’ll admit that,” said Henslowe.
“But just think of it,” said Aubrey, “that means world revolution with the United States at the head of it. What do you think of that?”
“Moki doesn’t think so,” said Heineman. “And Moki knows.”
“She just knows what a lot of reactionary warlords tell her,” said Aubrey. “This man I was talking with at the Crillon—I wish I could tell you his name—heard it directly from … Well, you know who.” He turned to Henslowe, who smiled knowingly. “There’s a mission in Russia at this minute making peace with Lenin.”
“A goddam outrage!” cried Heineman, knocking a bottle off the table. The lanky man picked up the pieces patiently, without comment.
“The new era is opening, men, I swear it is …” began Aubrey. “The old order is dissolving. It is going down under a weight of misery and crime. … This will be the first great gesture towards a newer and better world. There is no alternative. The chance will never come back. It is either for us to step courageously forward, or sink into unbelievable horrors of anarchy and civil war. … Peace or the dark ages again.”
Andrews had felt for some time an uncontrollable sleepiness coming over him. He rolled himself on a rug and stretched out on the empty couch. The voices arguing, wrangling, enunciating emphatic phrases, dinned for a minute in his ears. He went to sleep.
When Andrews woke up he found himself staring at the cracked plaster of an unfamiliar ceiling. For some moments he could not guess where he was. Henslowe was sleeping, wrapped in another rug, on the couch beside him. Except for Henslowe’s breathing, there was complete silence. Floods of silvery-grey light poured in through the wide windows, behind which Andrews could see a sky full of bright dove-colored clouds. He sat up carefully. Some time in the night he must have taken off his tunic and boots and puttees, which were on the floor beside the couch. The tables with the bottles had gone and the lanky man was nowhere to be seen.
Andrews went to the window in his stockinged feet. Paris was a slate-grey and dove-color lay spread out like a Turkish carpet, with a silvery band of mist where the river was, out of which the Eiffel Tower stood up like a man wading. Here and there blue smoke and brown spiralled up to lose itself in the faint canopy of brown fog that hung high above the houses. Andrews stood a long while leaning against the window frame, until he heard Henslowe’s voice behind him:
“Depuis le jour où je me suis donnée.”
“You look like ‘Louise.’”
Andrews turned round.
Henslowe was sitting on the edge of the bed with his hair in disorder, combing his little silky mustache with a pocket comb.
“Gee, I have a head,” he said. “My tongue feels like a nutmeg grater. … Doesn’t yours?”
“No. I feel like a fighting cock.”
“What do you say we go down to the Seine and have a bath in Benny Franklin’s bathtub?”
“Where’s that? It sounds grand.”
“Then we’ll have the biggest breakfast ever.”
“That’s the right spirit. … Where’s everybody gone to?”
“Old Heinz has gone to his Moki, I guess, and Aubrey’s gone to collect more dope at the Crillon. He says four in the morning when the drunks come home is the prime time for a newspaper man.”
“And the Monkish man?”
“Search me.”
The streets were full of men and girls hurrying to work. Everything sparkled, had an air of being just scrubbed. They passed bakeries from which came a rich smell of fresh-baked bread. From cafés came whiffs of roasting coffee. They crossed through the markets that were full of heavy carts lumbering to and fro, and women with net bags full of vegetables. There was a pungent scent of crushed cabbage leaves and carrots and wet clay. The mist was raw and biting along the quais, and made the blood come into their cheeks and their hands stiff with cold.
The bathhouse was a huge barge with a house built on it in a lozenge shape. They crossed to it by a little gangplank on which were a few geraniums in pots. The attendant gave them two rooms side by side on the lower deck, painted grey, with steamed over windows, through which Andrews caught glimpses of hurrying green water. He stripped his clothes off quickly. The tub was of copper varnished with some white metal inside. The water flowed in through two copper swans’ necks. When Andrews stepped into the hot green water, a little window in the partition flew open and Henslowe shouted in to him:
“Talk about modern conveniences. You can converse while you bathe!”
Andrews scrubbed himself jauntily with a square piece of pink soap, splashing the water about like a small boy. He stood up and lathered himself all over and then let himself slide into the water, which splashed out over the floor.
“Do you think you’re a performing seal?” shouted Henslowe.
“It’s all so preposterous,” cried Andrews, going off into convulsions of laughter. “She has a lion cub named Bubu and Nicolas Romanoff lives in the Ritz, and the Revolution is scheduled for day after tomorrow at twelve noon.”
“I’d put it about the first of May,” answered Henslowe, amid a sound of splashing. “Gee, it’ld be great to be a people’s Commissary. … You could go and revolute the grand Llama of Thibet.”
“O, it’s too deliciously preposterous,” cried Andrews, letting himself slide a second time into the bathtub.
II
Two M.P.’s passed outside the window. Andrews watched the yellow pigskin revolver cases until they were out of sight. He felt joyfully secure from them. The waiter, standing by the door with a napkin on his arm, gave him a sense of security so intense it made him laugh. On the marble table before him were a small glass of beer, a notebook full of ruled sheets of paper and a couple of yellow pencils. The beer, the color of topaz in the clear grey light that streamed in through the window, threw a pale yellow glow with a bright center on the table. Outside was the boulevard with a few people walking hurriedly. An empty market wagon passed now and then, rumbling loud. On a bench a woman in a black knitted shawl, with a bundle of newspapers in her knees, was counting sous with loving concentration.
Andrews looked at his watch. He had an hour before going to the Schola Cantorum.
He got to his feet, paid the waiter and strolled down the center of the boulevard, thinking smilingly of pages he had written, of pages he was going to write, filled with a sense of leisurely well-being. It was a grey morning with a little yellowish fog in the air. The pavements were damp, reflected women’s dresses and men’s legs and the angular outlines of taxi- cabs. From a flower stand with violets and red and pink carnations irregular blotches of color ran down into the brownish grey of the pavement. Andrews caught a faint smell of violets in the smell of the fog as he passed the flower stand and remembered suddenly that spring was coming. He
would not miss a moment of this spring, he told himself; he would follow it step by step, from the first violets. Oh, how fully he must live now to make up for all the years he had wasted in his life.
He kept on walking along the boulevard. He was remembering how he and the girl the soldier had called Jeanne had both kindled with uncontrollable laughter when their eyes had met that night in the restaurant. He wished he could go down the boulevard with a girl like that, laughing through the foggy morning.
He wondered vaguely what part of Paris he was getting to, but was too happy to care. How beautifully long the hours were in the early morning!
At a concert at the Salle Gaveau the day before he had heard Debussy’s Nocturnes and Les Sirènes. Rhythms from them were the warp of all his thoughts. Against the background of the grey street and the brownish fog that hung a veil at the end of every vista he began to imagine rhythms of his own, modulations and phrases that grew brilliant and faded, that flapped for a while like gaudy banners above his head through the clatter of the street.
He noticed that he was passing a long building with blank rows of windows, at the central door of which stood groups of American soldiers smoking. Unconsciously he hastened his steps, for fear of meeting an officer he would have to salute. He passed the men without looking at them.
A voice detained him.
“Say, Andrews.”
When he turned he saw that a short man with curly hair, whose face, though familiar, he could not place, had left the group at the door and was coming towards him.
“Hello, Andrews. … Your name’s Andrews, ain’t it?”
“Yes.” Andrews shook his hand, trying to remember.
“I’m Fuselli. … Remember? Last time I saw you you was goin’ up to the lines on a train with Chrisfield. … Chris we used to call him. . . . At Cosne, don’t you remember?”
Three Soldiers Page 29
