Andrews, and six other men from his division, sat at a table outside the
cafe opposite the Gare de l'Est. He leaned back in his chair with a
cup of coffee lifted, looking across it at the stone houses with many
balconies. Steam, scented of milk and coffee, rose from the cup as he
sipped from it. His ears were full of a rumble of traffic and a clacking
of heels as people walked briskly by along the damp pavements. For a
while he did not hear what the men he was sitting with were saying. They
talked and laughed, but he looked beyond their khaki uniforms and their
boat-shaped caps unconsciously. He was taken up with the smell of the
coffee and of the mist. A little rusty sunshine shone on the table of
the cafe and on the thin varnish of wet mud that covered the asphalt
pavement. Looking down the Avenue, away from the station, the houses,
dark grey tending to greenish in the shadow and to violet in the sun,
faded into a soft haze of distance. Dull gilt lettering glittered along
black balconies. In the foreground were men and women walking briskly,
their cheeks whipped a little into color by the rawness of the morning.
The sky was a faintly roseate grey.
Walters was speaking:
“The first thing I want to see is the Eiffel Tower.”
“Why d'you want to see that?” said the small sergeant with a black
mustache and rings round his eyes like a monkey.
“Why, man, don't you know that everything begins from the Eiffel
Tower? If it weren't for the Eiffel Tower, there wouldn't be any
sky-scrapers....”
“How about the Flatiron Building and Brooklyn Bridge? They were built
before the Eiffel Tower, weren't they?” interrupted the man from New
York.
“The Eiffel Tower's the first piece of complete girder construction in
the whole world,” reiterated Walters dogmatically.
“First thing I'm going to do's go to the Folies Berd-jairs; me for the
w.w.'s.”
“Better lay off the wild women, Bill,” said Walters.
“I ain't goin' to look at a woman,” said the sergeant with the black
mustache. “I guess I seen enough women in my time, anyway.... The war's
over, anyway.”
“You just wait, kid, till you fasten your lamps on a real Parizianne,”
said a burly, unshaven man with a corporal's stripes on his arm, roaring
with laughter.
Andrews lost track of the talk again, staring dreamily through
half-closed eyes down the long straight street, where greens and violets
and browns merged into a bluish grey monochrome at a little distance.
He wanted to be alone, to wander at random through the city, to stare
dreamily at people and things, to talk by chance to men and women, to
sink his life into the misty sparkling life of the streets. The smell
of the mist brought a memory to his mind. For a long while he groped for
it, until suddenly he remembered his dinner with Henslowe and the faces
of the boy and girl he had talked to on the Butte. He must find Henslowe
at once. A second's fierce resentment went through him against all these
people about him. Christ! He must get away from them all; his freedom
had been hard enough won; he must enjoy it to the uttermost.
“Say, I'm going to stick to you, Andy.” Walters's voice broke into his
reverie. “I'm going to appoint you the corps of interpreters.”
Andrews laughed.
“D'you know the way to the School Headquarters?”
“The R. T. O. said take the subway.”
“I'm going to walk,” said Andrews.
“You'll get lost, won't you?”
“No danger, worse luck,” said Andrews, getting to his feet. “I'll see
you fellows at the School Headquarters, whatever those are.... So long.”
“Say, Andy, I'll wait for you there,” Walters called after him.
Andrews darted down a side street. He could hardly keep from shouting
aloud when he found himself alone, free, with days and days ahead of him
to work and think, gradually to rid his limbs of the stiff attitudes
of the automaton. The smell of the streets, and the mist, indefinably
poignant, rose like incense smoke in fantastic spirals through his
brain, making him hungry and dazzled, making his arms and legs feel
lithe and as ready for delight as a crouching cat for a spring. His
heavy shoes beat out a dance as they clattered on the wet pavements
under his springy steps. He was walking very fast, stopping suddenly now
and then to look at the greens and oranges and crimsons of vegetables in
a push cart, to catch a vista down intricate streets, to look into the
rich brown obscurity of a small wine shop where workmen stood at the
counter sipping white wine. Oval, delicate faces, bearded faces of men,
slightly gaunt faces of young women, red cheeks of boys, wrinkled faces
of old women, whose ugliness seemed to have hidden in it, stirringly,
all the beauty of youth and the tragedy of lives that had been
lived; the faces of the people he passed moved him like rhythms of an
orchestra. After much walking, turning always down the street which
looked pleasantest, he came to an oval with a statue of a pompous
personage on a ramping horse. “Place des Victoires,” he read the name,
which gave him a faint tinge of amusement. He looked quizzically at the
heroic features of the sun king and walked off laughing. “I suppose they
did it better in those days, the grand manner,” he muttered. And his
delight redoubled in rubbing shoulders with the people whose effigies
would never appear astride ramping-eared horses in squares built to
commemorate victories. He came out on a broad straight avenue, where
there were many American officers he had to salute, and M. P.'s and
shops with wide plate-glass windows, full of objects that had a shiny,
expensive look. “Another case of victories,” he thought, as he went off
into a side street, taking with him a glimpse of the bluish-grey pile of
the Opera, with its pompous windows and its naked bronze ladies holding
lamps.
He was in a narrow street full of hotels and fashionable barber shops,
from which came an odor of cosmopolitan perfumery, of casinos and
ballrooms and diplomatic receptions, when he noticed an American officer
coming towards him, reeling a little,--a tall, elderly man with a red
face and a bottle nose. He saluted.
The officer stopped still, swaying from side to side, and said in a
whining voice:
“Shonny, d'you know where Henry'sh Bar is?”
“No, I don't, Major,” said Andrews, who felt himself enveloped in an
odor of cocktails.
“You'll help me to find it, shonny, won't you?... It's dreadful not to
be able to find it.... I've got to meet Lootenant Trevors in Henry'sh
Bar.” The major steadied himself by putting a hand on Andrews' shoulder.
A civilian passed them.
“Dee-donc,” shouted the major after him, “Dee-donc, Monshier, ou ay
Henry'sh Bar?”
The man walked on without answering.
“Now isn't that like a frog, not to understand his own language?” said
the major.
“But there's Henry's Bar, right across the street,” said Andrews
suddenly.
“Bon, bon,” said the major.
They crossed the street and went in. At the bar the major, still
clinging to Andrews' shoulder, whispered in his ear: “I'm A. W. O. L.,
shee?... Shee?.... Whole damn Air Service is A. W. O. L. Have a
drink with me.... You enlisted man? Nobody cares here.... Warsh over,
Sonny.... Democracy is shafe for the world.”
Andrews was just raising a champagne cocktail to his lips, looking with
amusement at the crowd of American officers and civilians who crowded
into the small mahogany barroom, when a voice behind him drawled out:
“I'll be damned!”
Andrews turned and saw Henslowe's brown face and small silky mustache.
He abandoned his major to his fate.
“God, I'm glad to see you.... I was afraid you hadn't been able to work
it.”...Said Henslowe slowly, stuttering a little.
“I'm about crazy, Henny, with delight. I just got in a couple of hours
ago....” Laughing, interrupting each other, they chattered in broken
sentences.
“But how in the name of everything did you get here?”
“With the major?” said Andrews, laughing.
“What the devil?”
“Yes; that major,” whispered Andrews in his friend's ear, “rather the
worse for wear, asked me to lead him to Henry's Bar and just fed me a
cocktail in the memory of Democracy, late defunct.... But what are you
doing here? It's not exactly... exotic.”
“I came to see a man who was going to tell me how I could get to Rumania
with the Red Cross.... But that can wait.... Let's get out of here. God,
I was afraid you hadn't made it.”
“I had to crawl on my belly and lick people's boots to do it.... God, it
was low!... But here I am.”
They were out in the street again, walking and gesticulating.
“But 'Libertad, Libertad, allons, ma femme!' as Walt Whitman would have
said,” shouted Andrews.
“It's one grand and glorious feeling.... I've been here three days. My
section's gone home; God bless them.”
“But what do you have to do?”
“Do? Nothing,” cried Henslowe. “Not a blooming bloody goddam thing! In
fact, it's no use trying... the whole thing is such a mess you couldn't
do anything if you wanted to.”
“I want to go and talk to people at the Schola Cantorum.”
“There'll be time for that. You'll never make anything out of music if
you get serious-minded about it.”
“Then, last but not least, I've got to get some money from somewhere.”
“Now you're talking!” Henslowe pulled a burnt leather pocket book out
of the inside of his tunic. “Monaco,” he said, tapping the pocket book,
which was engraved with a pattern of dull red flowers. He pursed up
his lips and pulled out some hundred franc notes, which he pushed into
Andrews's hand.
“Give me one of them,” said Andrews.
“All or none.... They last about five minutes each.”
“But it's so damn much to pay back.”
“Pay it back--heavens!... Here take it and stop your talking. I probably
won't have it again, so you'd better make hay this time. I warn you
it'll be spent by the end of the week.”
“All right. I'm dead with hunger.”
“Let's sit down on the Boulevard and think about where we'll have lunch
to celebrate Miss Libertad.... But let's not call her that, sounds like
Liverpool, Andy, a horrid place.”
“How about Freiheit?” said Andrews, as they sat down in basket chairs in
the reddish yellow sunlight.
“Treasonable... off with your head.”
“But think of it, man,” said Andrews, “the butchery's over, and you and
I and everybody else will soon be human beings again. Human; all too
human!”
“No more than eighteen wars going,” muttered Henslowe.
“I haven't seen any papers for an age.... How do you mean?”
“People are fighting to beat the cats everywhere except on the' western
front,” said Henslowe. “But that's where I come in. The Red Cross sends
supply trains to keep them at it.... I'm going to Russia if I can work
it.”
“But what about the Sorbonne?”
“The Sorbonne can go to Ballyhack.”
“But, Henny, I'm going to croak on your hands if you don't take me
somewhere to get some food.”
“Do you want a solemn place with red plush or with salmon pink brocade?”
“Why have a solemn place at all?”
“Because solemnity and good food go together. It's only a religious
restaurant that has a proper devotion to the belly. O, I know, we'll go
over to Brooklyn.”
“Where?”
“To the Rive Gauche. I know a man who insists on calling it Brooklyn.
Awfully funny man... never been sober in his life. You must meet him.”
“Oh, I want to.... It's a dog's age since I met anyone new, except you.
I can't live without having a variegated crowd about, can you?”
“You've got that right on this boulevard. Serbs, French, English,
Americans, Australians, Rumanians, Tcheco-Slovaks; God, is there any
uniform that isn't here?... I tell you, Andy, the war's been a great
thing for the people who knew how to take advantage of it. Just look at
their puttees.”
“I guess they'll know how to make a good thing of the Peace too.”
“Oh, that's going to be the best yet.... Come along. Let's be little
devils and take a taxi.”
“This certainly is the main street of Cosmopolis.”
They threaded their way through the crowd, full of uniforms and glitter
and bright colors, that moved in two streams up and down the wide
sidewalk between the cafes and the boles of the bare trees. They climbed
into a taxi, and lurched fast through streets where, in the misty
sunlight, grey-green and grey-violet mingled with blues and pale lights
as the colors mingle in a pigeon's breast feathers. They passed the
leafless gardens of the Tuileries on one side, and the great inner
Courts of the Louvre, with their purple mansard roofs and their high
chimneys on the other, and saw for a second the river, dull jade green,
and the plane trees splotched with brown and cream color along the
quais, before they were lost in the narrow brownish-grey streets of the
old quarters.
“This is Paris; that was Cosmopolis,” said Henslowe.
“I'm not particular, just at present,” cried Andrews gaily.
The square in front of the Odeon was a splash of white and the collonade
a blur of darkness as the cab swerved round the corner and along the
edge of the Luxembourg, where, through the black iron fence, many brown
and reddish colors in the intricate patterns of leafless twigs opened
here and there on statues and balustrades and vistas of misty distances.
The cab stopped with a jerk.
“This is the Place des Medicis,” said Henslowe.
At the end of a slanting street looking very flat, through the haze, was
the dome of the Pantheon. In the middle of the square between the yellow
trams and the green low busses, was a quiet pool, where the shadow of
horizontals of the house fronts was reflected.
They sat beside the window looking out at the square.
Henslowe ordered.
“Remember how sentimental history books used to talk about prisoners who
were let out after years in dungeons, not being able to stand it, and
going back to their cells?”
“D'you like sole meuniere?”
“Anything, or rather everything! But take it from me, that's all
rubbish. Honestly I don't think I've ever been happier in my life....
D'you know, Henslowe, there's something in you that is afraid to be
happy.”
“Don't be morbid.... There's only one real evil in the world: being
somewhere without being able to get away;... I ordered beer. This is the
only place in Paris where it's fit to drink.”
“And I'm going to every blooming concert...Colonne-Lamoureux on Sunday,
I know that.... The only evil in the world is not to be able to hear
music or to make it.... These oysters are fit for Lucullus.”
“Why not say fit for John Andrews and Bob Henslowe, damn it?... Why the
ghosts of poor old dead Romans should be dragged in every time a man
eats an oyster, I don't see. We're as fine specimens as they were. I
swear I shan't let any old turned-toclay Lucullus outlive me, even if
I've never eaten a lamprey.”
“And why should you eat a lamp--chimney, Bob?” came a hoarse voice
beside them.
Andrews looked up into a round, white face with large grey eyes hidden
behind thick steel-rimmed spectacles. Except for the eyes, the face had
a vaguely Chinese air.
“Hello, Heinz! Mr. Andrews, Mr. Heineman,” said Henslowe.
“Glad to meet you,” said Heineman in a jovially hoarse voice. “You guys
seem to be overeating, to reckon by the way things are piled up on the
table.” Through the hoarseness Andrews could detect a faint Yankee tang
in Heineman's voice.
“You'd better sit down and help us,” said Henslowe.
“Sure....D'you know my name for this guy?” He turned to Andrews....
“Sinbad!”
“Sinbad was in bad in Tokio and Rome, In bad in Trinidad
And twice as bad at home.”
He sang the words loudly, waving a bread stick to keep time.
“Shut up, Heinz, or you'll get us run out of here the way you got us run
out of the Olympia that night.”
They both laughed.
“An' d'you remember Monsieur Le Guy with his coat?
“Do I? God!” They laughed till the tears ran down their cheeks. Heineman
took off his glasses and wiped them. He turned to Andrews.
“Oh, Paris is the best yet. First absurdity: the Peace Conference and
its nine hundred and ninety-nine branches. Second absurdity: spies.
Third: American officers A.W.O.L. Fourth: The seven sisters sworn to
slay.” He broke out laughing again, his chunky body rolling about on the
chair.
“What are they?”
“Three of them have sworn to slay Sinbad, and four of them have sworn to
slay me.... But that's too complicated to tell at lunch time....
Eighth: there are the lady relievers, Sinbad's specialty. Ninth: there's
Sinbad....”
“Shut up, Heinz, you're getting me maudlin,” spluttered Henslowe.
“O Sinbad was in bad all around,” chanted Heineman. “But no one's given
me anything to drink,” he said suddenly in a petulant voice. “Garcon,
une bouteille de Macon, pour un Cadet de Gascogne.... What's the next?
It ends with vergogne. You've seen the play, haven't you? Greatest play
going.... Seen it twice sober and seven other times.”
“Cyrano de Bergerac?”
“That's it. Nous sommes les Cadets de Gasgogne, rhymes with ivrogne and
sans vergogne.... You see I work in the Red Cross.... You know Sinbad,
old Peterson's a brick.... I'm supposed to be taking photographs of
tubercular children at this minute.... The noblest of my professions
is that of artistic photographer.... Borrowed the photographs from the
rickets man. So I have nothing to do for three months and five hundred
francs travelling expenses. Oh, children, my only prayer is 'give us
this day our red worker's permit' and the Red Cross does the rest.”
Heineman laughed till the glasses rang on the table. He took off his
glasses and wiped them with a rueful air.
“So now I call the Red Cross the Cadets!” cried Heineman, his voice a
thin shriek from laughter.
Andrews was drinking his coffee in little sips, looking out of the
window at the people that passed. An old woman with a stand of flowers
sat on a small cane chair at the corner. The pink and yellow and
blue-violet shades of the flowers seemed to intensify the misty straw
color and azured grey of the wintry sun and shadow of the streets. A
girl in a tight-fitting black dress and black hat stopped at the stand
to buy a bunch of pale yellow daisies, and then walked slowly past the
window of the restaurant in the direction of the gardens. Her ivory
face and slender body and her very dark eyes sent a sudden flush through
Andrews's whole frame as he looked at her. The black erect figure
disappeared in the gate of the gardens.
Andrews got to his feet suddenly.
“I've got to go,” he said in a strange voice.... “I just remember a man
was waiting for me at the School Headquarters.”
“Let him wait.”
“Why, you haven't had a liqueur yet,” cried Heineman.
“No... but where can I meet you people later?”
“Cafe de Rohan at five... opposite the Palais Royal.”
“You'll never find it.”
“Yes I will,” said Andrews.
“Palais Royal metro station,” they shouted after him as he dashed out of
the door.
He hurried into the gardens. Many people sat on benches in the frail
sunlight. Children in bright-colored clothes ran about chasing hoops. A
woman paraded a bunch of toy balloons in carmine and green and purple,
like a huge bunch of parti-colored grapes inverted above her head.
Andrews walked up and down the alleys, scanning faces. The girl had
disappeared. He leaned against a grey balustrade and looked down
into the empty pond where traces of the explosion of a Bertha still
subsisted. He was telling himself that he was a fool. That even if he
had found her he could not have spoken to her; just because he was free
for a day or two from the army he needn't think the age of gold had come
back to earth. Smiling at the thought, he walked across the gardens,
wandered through some streets of old houses in grey and white stucco
with slate mansard roofs and fantastic complications of chimney-pots
till he came out in front of a church with a new classic facade of huge
columns that seemed toppling by their own weight.
He asked a woman selling newspapers what the church's name was. “Mais,
Monsieur, c'est Saint Sulpice,” said the woman in a surprised tone.
Saint Sulpice. Manon's songs came to his head, and the sentimental
melancholy of eighteenth century Paris with its gambling houses in the
Palais Royal where people dishonored themselves in the presence of their
stern Catonian fathers, and its billets doux written at little gilt
tables, and its coaches lumbering in covered with mud from the provinces
through the Porte d'Orleans and the Porte de Versailles; the Paris of
Diderot and Voltaire and Jean-Jacques, with its muddy streets and its
ordinaries where one ate bisques and larded pullets and souffles; a
Paris full of mouldy gilt magnificence, full of pompous ennui of the
past and insane hope of the future.
He walked down a narrow, smoky street full of antique shops and old
bookshops and came out unexpectedly on the river opposite the statue of
Voltaire. The name on the corner was quai Malaquais. Andrews crossed and
looked down for a long time at the river. Opposite, behind a lace-work
of leafless trees, were the purplish roofs of the Louvre with their high
peaks and their ranks and ranks of chimneys; behind him the old houses
of the quai and the wing, topped by a balustrade with great grey stone
urns of a domed building of which he did not know the name. Barges were
coming upstream, the dense green water spuming under their blunt bows,
towed by a little black tugboat with its chimney bent back to pass under
the bridges. The tug gave a thin shrill whistle. Andrews started walking
downstream. He crossed by the bridge at the corner of the Louvre, turned
his back on the arch Napoleon built to receive the famous horses from
St. Marc's,--a pinkish pastry-like affair--and walked through the
Tuileries which were full of people strolling about or sitting in the
sun, of doll-like children and nursemaids with elaborate white caps, of
fluffy little dogs straining at the ends of leashes. Suddenly a peaceful
sleepiness came over him. He sat down in the sun on a bench, watching,
hardly seeing them, the people who passed to and fro casting long
shadows. Voices and laughter came very softly to his ears above the
distant stridency of traffic. From far away he heard for a few moments
notes of a military band playing a march. The shadows of the trees
were faint blue-grey in the ruddy yellow gravel. Shadows of people kept
passing and repassing across them. He felt very languid and happy.
Suddenly he started up; he had been dozing. He asked an old man with a
beautifully pointed white beard the way to rue du Faubourg St. Honore.
After losing his way a couple of times, he walked listlessly up some
marble steps where a great many men in khaki were talking. Leaning
against the doorpost was Walters. As he drew near Andrews heard him
saying to the man next to him:
“Why, the Eiffel tower was the first piece of complete girder
construction ever built.... That's the first thing a feller who's wide
awake ought to see.”
“Tell me the Opery's the grandest thing to look at,” said the man next
it.
“If there's wine an' women there, me for it.”
“An' don't forget the song.”
“But that isn't interesting like the Eiffel tower is,” persisted
Walters.
“Say, Walters, I hope you haven't been waiting for me,” stammered
Andrews.
“No, I've been waiting in line to see the guy about courses.... I want
to start this thing right.”
“I guess I'll see them tomorrow,” said Andrews.
“Say have you done anything about a room, Andy? Let's you and me be
bunkies.”
“All right.... But maybe you won't want to room where I do, Walters.”
“Where's that? In the Latin Quarter?... You bet. I want to see some
French life while I am about it.”
“Well, it's too late to get a room to-day.”
“I'm going to the 'Y' tonight anyway.”
“I'll get a fellow I know to put me up.... Then tomorrow, we'll see.
Well, so long,” said Andrews, moving away.
“Wait. I'm coming with you.... We'll walk around town together.”
“All right,” said Andrews.
The rabbit was rather formless, very fluffy and had a glance of madness
in its pink eye with a black center. It hopped like a sparrow along the
pavement, emitting a rubber tube from its back, which went up to a bulb
in a man's hand which the man pressed to make the rabbit hop. Yet the
rabbit had an air of organic completeness. Andrews laughed inordinately
when he first saw it. The vendor, who had a basket full of other such
rabbits on his arm, saw Andrews laughing and drew timidly near to the
table; he had a pink face with little, sensitive lips rather like a real
rabbit's, and large frightened eyes of a wan brown.
“Do you make them yourself?” asked Andrews, smiling.
The man dropped his rabbit on the table with a negligent air.
“Oh, oui, Monsieur, d'apres la nature.”
He made the rabbit turn a somersault by suddenly pressing the bulb hard.
Andrews laughed and the rabbit man laughed.
“Think of a big strong man making his living that way,” said Walters,
disgusted.
“I do it all... de matiere premiere au profit de l'accapareur,” said the
rabbit man.
“Hello, Andy... late as hell.... I'm sorry,” said Henslowe, dropping down
into a chair beside them. Andrews introduced Walters, the rabbit man
took off his hat, bowed to the company and went off, making the rabbit
hop before him along the edge of the curbstone.
“What's happened to Heineman?”
“Here he comes now,” said Henslowe.
An open cab had driven up to the curb in front of the cafe. In it sat
Heineman with a broad grin on his face and beside him a woman in a
salmon-colored dress, ermine furs and an emerald-green hat. The cab
drove off and Heineman, still grinning, walked up to the table.
“Where's the lion cub?” asked Henslowe.
“They say it's got pneumonia.”
“Mr. Heineman. Mr. Walters.”
The grin left Heineman's face; he said: “How do you do?” curtly, cast a
furious glance at Andrews and settled himself in a chair.
The sun had set. The sky was full of lilac and bright purple
and carmine. Among the deep blue shadows lights were coming on,
primrose-colored street lamps, violet arc lights, ruddy sheets of light
poured out of shop windows.
“Let's go inside. I'm cold as hell,” said Heineman crossly, and they
filed in through the revolving door, followed by a waiter with their
drinks.
“I've been in the Red Cross all afternoon, Andy.... I think I am going
to work that Roumania business.... Want to come?” said Henslowe in
Andrews' ear.
“If I can get hold of a piano and some lessons and the concerts keep up
you won't be able to get me away from Paris with wild horses. No, sir,
I want to see what Paris is like.... It's going to my head so it'll be
weeks before I know what I think about it.”
“Don't think about it.... Drink,” growled Heineman, scowling savagely.
“That's two things I'm going to keep away from in Paris; drink and
women.... And you can't have one without the other,” said Walters.
“True enough.... You sure do need them both,” said Heineman.
Andrews was not listening to their talk; twirling the stem of his
glass of vermouth in his fingers, he was thinking of the Queen of
Sheba slipping down from off the shoulders of her elephant, glistening
fantastically with jewels in the light of crackling, resinous torches.
Music was seeping up through his mind as the water seeps into a hole
dug in the sand of the seashore. He could feel all through his body the
tension of rhythms and phrases taking form, not quite to be seized as
yet, still hovering on the borderland of consciousness. “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
imaginings of your desire....” He thought of the girl with skin like old
ivory he had seen in the Place de Medicis. The Queen of Sheba's face
was like that now in his imaginings, quiet and inscrutable. A sudden
cymbal-clanging of joy made his heart thump hard. He was free now of the
imaginings of his desire, to loll all day at cafe tables watching the
tables move in changing patterns before him, to fill his mind and body
with a reverberation of all the rhythms of men and women moving in the
frieze of life before his eyes; no more like wooden automatons knowing
only the motions of the drill manual, but supple and varied, full of
force and tragedy.
“For Heaven's sake let's beat it from here.... Gives me a pain this
place does.” Heineman beat his fist on the table.
“All right,” said Andrews, getting up with a yawn.
Henslowe and Andrews walked off, leaving Walters to follow them with
Heineman.
“We're going to dine at Le Rat qui Danse,” said Henslowe, “an awfully
funny place.... We just have time to walk there comfortably with an
appetite.”
They followed the long dimly-lighted Rue de Richelieu to the Boulevards,
where they drifted a little while with the crowd. The glaring lights
seemed to powder the air with gold. Cafes and the tables outside were
crowded. There was an odor of vermouth and coffee and perfume and
cigarette smoke mixed with the fumes of burnt gasoline from taxicabs.
“Isn't this mad?” said Andrews.
“It's always carnival at seven on the Grands Boulevards.”
They started climbing the steep streets to Montmartre. At a corner
they passed a hard-faced girl with rouge-smeared lips and overpowdered
cheeks, laughing on the arm of an American soldier, who had a sallow
face and dull-green eyes that glittered in the slanting light of a
street-lamp.
“Hello, Stein,” said Andrews.
“Who's that?”
“A fellow from our division, got here with me this morning.”
“He's got curious lips for a Jew,” said Henslowe.
At the fork of two slanting streets, they went into a restaurant that
had small windows pasted over with red paper, through which the light
came dimly. Inside were crowded oak tables and oak wainscoting with
a shelf round the top, on which were shell-cans, a couple of skulls,
several cracked majolica plates and a number of stuffed rats. The only
people there were a fat woman and a man with long grey hair and beard
who sat talking earnestly over two small glasses in the center of the
room. A husky-looking waitress with a Dutch cap and apron hovered near
the inner door from which came a great smell of fish frying in olive
oil.
“The cook here's from Marseilles,” said Henslowe, as they settled
themselves at a table for four.
“I wonder if the rest of them lost the way,” said Andrews.
“More likely old Heinz stopped to have a drink,” said Henslowe. “Let's
have some hors d'oeuvre while we are waiting.”
The waitress brought a collection of boat-shaped plates of red salads
and yellow salads and green salads and two little wooden tubs with
herrings and anchovies.
Henslowe stopped her as she was going, saying: “Rien de plus?”
The waitress contemplated the array with a tragic air, her arms folded
over her ample bosom. “Que voulez-vous, Monsieur, c'est l'armistice.”
“The greatest fake about all this war business is the peace. I tell you,
not till the hors d'oeuvre has been restored to its proper abundance and
variety will I admit that the war's over.”
The waitress tittered.
“Things aren't what they used to be,” she said, going back to the
kitchen.
Heineman burst into the restaurant at that moment, slamming the door
behind him so that the glass rang, and the fat woman and the hairy man
started violently in their chairs. He tumbled into a place, grinning
broadly.
“And what have you done to Walters?”
Heineman wiped his glasses meticulously.
“Oh, he died of drinking raspberry shrub,” he said.... “Dee-dong peteet
du ving de Bourgogne,” he shouted towards the waitress in his nasal
French. Then he added: “Le Guy is coming in a minute, I just met him.”
The restaurant was gradually filling up with men and women of very
various costumes, with a good sprinkling of Americans in uniform and
out.
“God I hate people who don't drink,” cried Heineman, pouring out wine.
“A man who don't drink just cumbers the earth.”
“How are you going to take it in America when they have prohibition?”
“Don't talk about it; here's le Guy. I wouldn't have him know I belong
to a nation that prohibits good liquor.... Monsieur le Guy, Monsieur
Henslowe et Monsieur Andrews,” he continued getting up ceremoniously. A
little man with twirled mustaches and a small vandyke beard sat down at
the fourth place. He had a faintly red nose and little twinkling eyes.
“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 cafe and asked him to wait while I telephoned. I guess he's still
waiting. One of the whoreiest cafes 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 drole, celui-la.... O qu'il est drole.”
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 ten 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 out 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 Savaroffs 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 way 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 ou je me suis donnee.”
“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 cafes 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'd 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.