Henslowe poured wine from a brown earthen crock into the glasses, where
it shimmered a bright thin red, the color of currants. Andrews leaned
back in his chair and looked through half-closed eyes at the table with
its white cloth and little burnt umber loaves of bread, and out of the
window at the square dimly lit by lemon-yellow gas lamps and at the dark
gables of the little houses that huddled round it.
At a table against the wall opposite a lame boy, with white beardless
face and gentle violet-colored eyes, sat very close to the bareheaded
girl who was with him and who never took her eyes off his face, leaning
on his crutch all the while. A stove hummed faintly in the middle of the
room, and from the half-open kitchen door came ruddy light and the sound
of something frying. On the wall, in brownish colors that seemed to have
taken warmth from all the rich scents of food they had absorbed since
the day of their painting, were scenes of the Butte as it was fancied to
have once been, with windmills and wide fields.
“I want to travel,” Henslowe was saying, dragging out his words
drowsily. “Abyssinia, Patagonia, Turkestan, the Caucasus, anywhere and
everywhere. What do you say you and I go out to New Zealand and raise
sheep?”
“But why not stay here? There can't be anywhere as wonderful as this.”
“Then I'll put off starting for New Guinea for a week. But hell, I'd
go crazy staying anywhere after this. It's got into my blood... all
this murder. It's made a wanderer of me, that's what it's done. I'm an
adventurer.”
“God, I wish it had made me into anything so interesting.”
“Tie a rock on to your scruples and throw 'em off the Pont Neuf and set
out.... O boy, this is the golden age for living by your wits.”
“You're not out of the army yet.”
“I should worry.... I'll join the Red Cross.”
“How?”
“I've got a tip about it.”
A girl with oval face and faint black down on her upper lip brought
them soup, a thick greenish colored soup, that steamed richly into their
faces.
“If you tell me how I can get out of the army you'll probably save my
life,” said Andrews seriously.
“There are two ways...Oh, but let me tell you later. Let's talk about
something worth while...So you write music do you?”
Andrews nodded.
An omelet lay between them, pale golden-yellow with flecks of green; a
few amber bubbles of burnt butter still clustered round the edges.
“Talk about tone-poems,” said Henslowe.
“But, if you are an adventurer and have no scruples, how is it you are
still a private?”
Henslowe took a gulp of wine and laughed uproariously.
“That's the joke.”
They ate in silence for a little while. They could hear the couple
opposite them talking in low soft voices. The stove purred, and from the
kitchen came a sound of something being beaten in a bowl. Andrews leaned
back in his chair.
“This is so wonderfully quiet and mellow,” he said.... “It is so easy to
forget that there's any joy at all in life.”
“Rot...It's a circus parade.”
“Have you ever seen anything drearier than a circus parade? One of those
jokes that aren't funny.”
“Justine, encore du vin,” called Henslowe.
“So you know her name?”
“I live here.... The Butte is the boss on the middle of the shield. It's
the axle of the wheel. That's why it's so quiet, like the centre of a
cyclone, of a vast whirling rotary circus parade!”
Justine, with her red hands that had washed so many dishes off which
other people had dined well, put down between them a scarlet langouste,
of which claws and feelers sprawled over the tablecloth that already had
a few purplish stains of wine. The sauce was yellow and fluffy like the
breast of a canary bird.
“D'you know,” said Andrews suddenly talking fast and excitedly while
he brushed the straggling yellow hair off his forehead, “I'd almost be
willing to be shot at the end of a year if I could live up here all
that time with a piano and a million sheets of music paper...It would be
worth it.”
“But this is a place to come back to. Imagine coming back here after the
highlands of Thibet, where you'd nearly got drowned and scalped and had
made love to the daughter of an Afghan chief... who had red lips smeared
with loukoumi so that the sweet taste stayed in your mouth.” Henslowe
stroked softly his little brown mustache.
“But what's the use of just seeing and feeling things if you can't
express them?”
“What's the use of living at all? For the fun of it, man; damn ends.”
“But the only profound fun I ever have is that...” Andrews's voice
broke. “O God, I would give up every joy in the world if I could turn
out one page that I felt was adequate.... D'you know it's years since
I've talked to anybody?”
They both stared silently out of the window at the fog that was packed
tightly against it like cotton wool, only softer, and a greenish-gold
color.
“The M.P.'s sure won't get us tonight,” said Henslowe, banging his fist
jauntily on the table. “I've a great mind to go to Rue St. Anne and
leave my card on the Provost Marshal.... God damn! D'you remember that
man who took the bite out of our wine-bottle...He didn't give a hoot in
hell, did he? Talk about expression. Why don't you express that? I think
that's the turning point of your career. That's what made you come to
Paris; you can't deny it.”
They both laughed loudly rolling about on their chairs.
Andrews caught glints of contagion in the pale violet eyes of the lame
boy and in the dark eyes of the girl.
“Let's tell them about it,” he said still laughing, with his face,
bloodless after the months in hospital, suddenly flushed.
“Salut,” said Henslowe turning round and elevating his glass. “Nous
rions parceque nous sommes gris de vin gris.” Then he told them about
the man who ate glass. He got to his feet and recounted slowly in his
drawling voice, with gestures. Justine stood by with a dish full of
stuffed tomatoes of which the red skins showed vaguely through a mantle
of dark brown sauce. When she smiled her cheeks puffed out and gave her
face a little of the look of a white cat's.
“And you live here?” asked Andrews after they had all laughed.
“Always. It is not often that I go down to town.... It's so
difficult.... I have a withered leg.” He smiled brilliantly like a child
telling about a new toy.
“And you?”
“How could I be anywhere else?” answered the girl. “It's a misfortune,
but there it is.” She tapped with the crutch on the floor, making a
sound like someone walking with it. The boy laughed and tightened his
arm round her shoulder.
“I should like to live here,” said Andrews simply.
“Why don't you?”
“But don't you see he's a soldier,” whispered the girl hurriedly.
A frown wrinkled the boy's forehead.
“Well, it wasn't by choice, I suppose,” he said.
Andrews was silent. Unaccountable shame took possession of him before
these people who had never been soldiers, who would never be soldiers.
“The Greeks used to say,” he said bitterly, using as phrase that had
been a long time on his mind, “that when a man became a slave, on the
first day he lost one-half of his virtue.”
“When a man becomes a slave,” repeated the lame boy softly, “on the
first day he loses one-half of his virtue.”
“What's the use of virtue? It is love you need,” said the girl.
“I've eaten your tomato, friend Andrews,” said Henslowe. “Justine will
get us some more.” He poured out the last of the wine that half filled
each of the glasses with its thin sparkle, the color of red currants.
Outside the fog had blotted everything out in even darkness which grew
vaguely yellow and red near the sparsely scattered street lamps. Andrews
and Henslowe felt their way blindly down the long gleaming flights of
steps that led from the quiet darkness of the Butte towards the confused
lights and noises of more crowded streets. The fog caught in their
throats and tingled in their noses and brushed against their cheeks like
moist hands.
“Why did we go away from that restaurant? I'd like to have talked to
those people some more,” said Andrews.
“We haven't had any coffee either.... But, man, we're in Paris. We're
not going to be here long. We can't afford to stay all the time in one
place.... It's nearly closing time already....”
“The boy was a painter. He said he lived by making toys; he whittles out
wooden elephants and camels for Noah's Arks.... Did you hear that?”
They were walking fast down a straight, sloping street. Below them
already appeared the golden glare of a boulevard.
Andrews went on talking, almost to himself. “What a wonderful life that
would be to live up here in a small room that would overlook the great
rosy grey expanse of the city, to have some absurd work like that
to live on, and to spend all your spare time working and going to
concerts.... A quiet mellow existence.... Think of my life beside it.
Slaving in that iron, metallic, brazen New York to write ineptitudes
about music in the Sunday paper. God! And this.”
They were sitting down at a table in a noisy cafe, full of yellow light
flashing in eyes and on glasses and bottles, of red lips crushed against
the thin hard rims of glasses.
“Wouldn't you like to just rip it off?” Andrews jerked at his tunic with
both hands where it bulged out over his chest. “Oh, I'd like to make the
buttons fly all over the cafe, smashing the liqueur glasses, snapping
in the faces of all those dandified French officers who look so proud of
themselves that they survived long enough to be victorious.”
“The coffee's famous here,” said Henslowe. “The only place I ever had it
better was at a bistro in Nice on this last permission.”
“Somewhere else again!”
“That's it.... For ever and ever, somewhere else! Let's have some
prunelle. Before the war prunelle.”
The waiter was a solemn man, with a beard cut like a prime minister's.
He came with the bottle held out before him, religiously lifted. His
lips pursed with an air of intense application, while he poured the
white glinting liquid into the glasses. When he had finished he held the
bottle upside down with a tragic gesture; not a drop came out.
“It is the end of the good old times,” he said.
“Damnation to the good old times,” said Henslowe. “Here's to the good
old new roughhousy circus parades.”
“I wonder how many people they are good for, those circus parades of
yours,” said Andrews.
“Where are you going to spend the night?” said Henslowe.
“I don't know.... I suppose I can find a hotel or something.”
“Why don't you come with me and see Berthe; she probably has friends.”
“I want to wander about alone, not that I scorn Berthe's friends,” said
Andrews.... “But I am so greedy for solitude.”
John Andrews was walking alone down streets full of drifting fog. Now
and then a taxi dashed past him and clattered off into the obscurity.
Scattered groups of people, their footsteps hollow in the muffling fog,
floated about him. He did not care which way he walked, but went on and
on, crossing large crowded avenues where the lights embroidered patterns
of gold and orange on the fog, rolling in wide deserted squares, diving
into narrow streets where other steps sounded sharply for a second now
and then and faded leaving nothing in his ears when he stopped still
to listen but the city's distant muffled breathing. At last he came
out along the river, where the fog was densest and coldest and where
he could hear faintly the sound of water gurgling past the piers of
bridges. The glow of the lights glared and dimmed, glared and dimmed,
as he walked along, and sometimes he could make out the bare branches
of trees blurred across the halos of the lamps. The fog caressed him
soothingly and shadows kept flicking past him, giving him glimpses of
smooth curves of cheeks and glints of eyes bright from the mist and
darkness. Friendly, familiar people seemed to fill the fog just out of
his sight. The muffled murmur of the city stirred him like the sound of
the voices of friends.
“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 imagining of your desire....”
The murmur of life about him kept forming itself into long modulated
sentences in his ears,--sentences that gave him by their form a sense
of quiet well-being as if he were looking at a low relief of people
dancing, carved out of Parian in some workshop in Attica.
Once he stopped and leaned for a long while against the moisture-beaded
stern of a street-lamp. Two shadows defined, as they strolled towards
him, into the forms of a pale boy and a bareheaded girl, walking tightly
laced in each other's arms. The boy limped a little and his violet eyes
were contracted to wistfulness. John Andrews was suddenly filled with
throbbing expectation, as if those two would come up to him and put
their hands on his arms and make some revelation of vast import to his
life. But when they reached the full glow of the lamp, Andrews saw that
he was mistaken. They were not the boy and girl he had talked to on the
Butte.
He walked off hurriedly and plunged again into tortuous streets, where
he strode over the cobblestone pavements, stopping now and then to peer
through the window of a shop at the light in the rear where a group of
people sat quietly about a table under a light, or into a bar where a
tired little boy with heavy eyelids and sleeves rolled up from thin grey
arms was washing glasses, or an old woman, a shapeless bundle of black
clothes, was swabbing the floor. From doorways he heard talking and soft
laughs. Upper windows sent yellow rays of light across the fog.
In one doorway the vague light from a lamp bracketed in the wall showed
two figures, pressed into one by their close embrace. As Andrews walked
past, his heavy army boots clattering loud on the wet pavement, they
lifted their heads slowly. The boy had violet eyes and pale beardless
cheeks; the girl was bareheaded and kept her brown eyes fixed on the
boy's face. Andrews's heart thumped within him. At last he had found
them. He made a step towards them, and then strode on losing himself
fast in the cool effacing fog. Again he had been mistaken. The fog
swirled about him, hiding wistful friendly faces, hands ready to meet
his hands, eyes ready to take fire with his glance, lips cold with the
mist, to be crushed under his lips. “From the girl at the singing under
her street-lamp...”
And he walked on alone through the drifting fog.