Three Soldiers by John Dos Passos (best e book reader android .txt) 📖

Chrisfield’s voice rose, suddenly shrill.

“Look, Chris, we can’t stand talking out here in the street like this. It isn’t safe.”

“But mebbe you’ll be able to tell me what to do. You think, Andy. Mebbe, tomorrow, you’ll have thought up somethin’ we can do…So long.”

Chrisfield walked away hurriedly. Andrews looked after him a moment, and then went in through the court to the house where his room was.

At the foot of the stairs an old woman’s voice startled him.

“Mais, Monsieur Andre, que vous avez l’air etrange; how funny you look dressed like that.”

The concierge was smiling at him from her cubbyhole beside the stairs. She sat knitting with a black shawl round her head, a tiny old woman with a hooked bird-like nose and eyes sunk in depressions full of little wrinkles, like a monkey’s eyes.

“Yes, at the town where I was demobilized, I couldn’t get anything else,” stammered Andrews.

“Oh, you’re demobilized, are you? That’s why you’ve been away so long. Monsieur Valters said he didn’t know where you were…. It’s better that way, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Andrews, starting up the stairs.

“Monsieur Valters is in now,” went on the old woman, talking after him. “And you’ve got in just in time for the first of May.”

“Oh, yes, the strike,” said Andrews, stopping half-way up the flight.

“It’ll be dreadful,” said the old woman. “I hope you won’t go out. Young folks are so likely to get into trouble…Oh, but all your friends have been worried about your being away so long.”

“Have they?’” said Andrews. He continued up the stairs.

“Au revoir, Monsieur.”

“Au revoir, Madame.”

“No, nothing can make me go back now. It’s no use talking about it.”

“But you’re crazy, man. You’re crazy. One man alone can’t buck the system like that, can he, Henslowe?”

Walters was talking earnestly, leaning across the table beside the lamp. Henslowe, who sat very stiff on the edge of a chair, nodded with compressed lips. Andrews lay at full length on the bed, out of the circle of light.

“Honestly, Andy,” said Henslowe with tears in his voice, “I think you’d better do what Walters says. It’s no use being heroic about it.”

“I’m not being heroic, Henny,” cried Andrews, sitting up on the bed. He drew his feet under him, tailor fashion, and went on talking very quietly. “Look.. It’s a purely personal matter. I’ve got to a point where I don’t give a damn what happens to me. I don’t care if I’m shot, or if I live to be eighty…I’m sick of being ordered round. One more order shouted at my head is not worth living to be eighty…to me. That’s all. For God’s sake let’s talk about something else.”

“But how many orders have you had shouted at your head since you got in this School Detachment? Not one. You can put through your discharge application probably….” Walters got to his feet, letting the chair crash to the floor behind him. He stopped to pick it up. “Look here; here’s my proposition,” he went on. “I don’t think you are marked A.W.O.L. in the School office. Things are so damn badly run there. You can turn up and say you’ve been sick and draw your back pay. And nobody’ll say a thing. Or else I’ll put it right up to the guy who’s top sergeant. He’s a good friend of mine. We can fix it up on the records some way. But for God’s sake don’t ruin your whole life on account of a little stubbornness, and some damn fool anarchistic ideas or other a feller like you ought to have had more sense than to pick up….”

“He’s right, Andy,” said Henslowe in a low voice.

“Please don’t talk any more about it. You’ve told me all that before,” said Andrews sharply. He threw himself back on the bed and rolled over towards the wall.

They were silent a long time. A sound of voices and footsteps drifted up from the courtyard.

“But, look here, Andy,” said Henslowe nervously stroking his moustache. “You care much more about your work than any abstract idea of asserting your right of individual liberty. Even if you don’t get caught…. I think the chances of getting caught are mighty slim if you use your head…. But even if you don’t, you haven’t enough money to live for long over here, you haven’t….”

“Don’t you think I’ve thought of all that? I’m not crazy, you know. I’ve figured up the balance perfectly sanely. The only thing is, you fellows can’t understand. Have you ever been in a labor battalion? Have you ever had a man you’d been chatting with five minutes before deliberately knock you down? Good God, you don’t know what you are talking about, you two…. I’ve got to be free, now. I don’t care at what cost. Being free’s the only thing that matters.”

Andrews lay on his back talking towards the ceiling.

Henslowe was on his feet, striding nervously about the room.

“As if anyone was ever free,” he muttered.

“All right, quibble, quibble. You can argue anything away if you want to. Of course, cowardice is the best policy, necessary for survival. The man who’s got most will to live is the most cowardly…go on.” Andrews’s voice was shrill and excited, breaking occasionally like a half-grown boy’s voice.

“Andy, what on earth’s got hold of you?… God, I hate to go away this way,” added Henslowe after a pause.

“I’ll pull through all right, Henny. I’ll probably come to see you in Syria, disguised as an Arab sheik.” Andrews laughed excitedly.

“If I thought I’d do any good, I’d stay…. But there’s nothing I can do. Everybody’s got to settle their own affairs, in their own damn fool way. So long, Walters.”

Walters and Henslowe shook hands absently.

Henslowe came over to the bed and held out his hand to Andrews.

“Look, old man, you will be as careful as you can, won’t you? And write me care American Red Cross, Jerusalem. I’ll be damned anxious, honestly.”

“Don’t you worry, we’ll go travelling together yet,” said Andrews, sitting up and taking Henslowe’s hand.

They heard Henslowe’s steps fade down the stairs and then ring for a moment on the pavings of the courtyard.

Walters moved his chair over beside Andrews’s bed.

“Now, look, let’s have a man-to-man talk, Andrews. Even if you want to ruin your life, you haven’t a right to. There’s your family, and haven’t you any patriotism?… Remember, there is such a thing as duty in the world.”

Andrews sat up and said in a low, furious voice, pausing between each word:

“I can’t explain it…. But I shall never put a uniform on again…. So for Christ’s sake shut up.”

“All right, do what you goddam please; I’m through with you.”

Walters suddenly flashed into a rage. He began undressing silently. Andrews lay a long while flat on his back in the bed, staring at the ceiling, then he too undressed, put the light out, and got into bed.

The rue des Petits-Jardins was a short street in a district of warehouses. A grey, windowless wall shut out the light along all of one side. Opposite was a cluster of three old houses leaning together as if the outer ones were trying to support the beetling mansard roof of the center house. Behind them rose a huge building with rows and rows of black windows. When Andrews stopped to look about him, he found the street completely deserted. The ominous stillness that had brooded over the city during all the walk from his room near the Pantheon seemed here to culminate in sheer desolation. In the silence he could hear the light padding noise made by the feet of a dog that trotted across the end of the street. The house with the mansard roof was number eight. The front of the lower storey had once been painted in chocolate-color, across the top of which was still decipherable the sign: “Charbon, Bois. Lhomond.” On the grimed window beside the door, was painted in white: “Debit de Boissons.”

Andrews pushed on the door, which opened easily. Somewhere in the interior a bell jangled, startlingly loud after the silence of the street. On the wall opposite the door was a speckled mirror with a crack in it, the shape of a star, and under it a bench with three marble-top tables. The zinc bar filled up the third wall. In the fourth was a glass door pasted up with newspapers. Andrews walked over to the bar. The jangling of the bell faded to silence. He waited, a curious uneasiness gradually taking possession of him. Anyways, he thought, he was wasting his time; he ought to be doing something to arrange his future. He walked over to the street door. The bell jangled again when he opened it. At the same moment a man came out through the door the newspapers were pasted over. He was a stout man in a dirty white shirt stained to a brownish color round the armpits and caught in very tightly at the waist by the broad elastic belt that held up his yellow corduroy trousers. His face was flabby, of a greenish color; black eyes looked at Andrews fixedly through barely open lids, so that they seemed long slits above the cheekbones.

“That’s the Chink,” thought Andrews.

“Well,” said the man, taking his place behind the bar with his legs far apart.

“A beer, please,” said Andrews.

“There isn’t any.”

“A glass of wine then.”

The man nodded his head, and keeping his eyes fastened on Andrews all the while, strode out of the door again.

A moment later, Chrisfield came out, with rumpled hair, yawning, rubbing an eye with the knuckles of one fist.

“Lawsie, Ah juss woke up, Andy. Come along in back.”

Andrews followed him through a small room with tables and benches, down a corridor where the reek of ammonia bit into his eyes, and up a staircase littered with dirt and garbage. Chrisfield opened a door directly on the stairs, and they stumbled into a large room with a window that gave on the court. Chrisfield closed the door carefully, and turned to Andrews with a smile.

“Ah was right smart ‘askeered ye wouldn’t find it, Andy.”

“So this is where you live?”

“Um hum, a bunch of us lives here.”

A wide bed without coverings, where a man in olive-drab slept rolled in a blanket, was the only furniture of the room.

“Three of us sleeps in that bed,” said Chrisfield.

“Who’s that?” cried the man in the bed, sitting up suddenly.

“All right, Al, he’s a buddy o’ mine,” said Chrisfield. “He’s taken off his uniform.”

“Jesus, you got guts,” said the man in the bed.

Andrews looked at him sharply. A piece of towelling, splotched here and there with dried blood, was wrapped round his head, and a hand, swathed in bandages, was drawn up to his body. The man’s mouth took on a twisted expression of pain as he let his head gradually down to the bed again.

“Gosh, what did you do to yourself?” cried Andrews.

“I tried to hop a freight at Marseilles.”

“Needs practice to do that sort o’ thing,” said Chrisfield, who sat on the bed, pulling his shoes off. “Ah’m go-in’ to git back to bed, Andy. Ah’m juss dead tired. Ah chucked cabbages all night at the market. They give ye a job there without askin’ no questions.”

“Have a cigarette.” Andrews sat down on the foot of the bed and threw a cigarette towards Chrisfield. “Have one?” he asked Al.

“No. I couldn’t smoke. I’m almost crazy with this hand. One of the wheels went over it…. I cut what was left of the little finger off with a razor.” Andrews could see the sweat rolling down his