Three Soldiers Part 54

"That's nothing; one of our sergeants had to have a new nose grafted on...."

The village street was dark and deeply rutted with mud. Andrews wandered up and down aimlessly. There was only one other cafe. That would be just like this one. He couldn't go back to the desolate barn where he slept.

It would be too early to go to sleep. A cold wind blew down the street and the sky was full of vague movement of dark clouds. The partly-frozen mud clotted about his feet as he walked along; he could feel the water penetrating his shoes. Opposite the Y. M. C. A. hut at the end of the street he stopped. After a moment's indecision he gave a little laugh, and walked round to the back where the door of the "Y" man's room was.

He knocked twice, half hoping there would be no reply.

Sheffield's whining high-pitched voice said: "Who is it?"

"Andrews."

"Come right in.... You're just the man I wanted to see." Andrews stood with his hand on the k.n.o.b.

"Do sit down and make yourself right at home."

Spencer Sheffield was sitting at a little desk in a room with walls of unplaned boards and one small window. Behind the desk were piles of cracker boxes and cardboard cases of cigarettes and in the midst of them a little opening, like that of a railway ticket office, in the wall through which the "Y" man sold his commodities to the long lines of men who would stand for hours waiting meekly in the room beyond.

Andrews was looking round for a chair.

"Oh, I just forgot. I'm sitting in the only chair," said Spencer Sheffield, laughing, twisting his small mouth into a shape like a camel's mouth and rolling about his large protruding eyes.

"Oh, that's all right. What I wanted to ask you was: do you know anything about...?"

"Look, do come with me to my room," interrupted Sheffield. "I've got such a nice sitting-room with an open fire, just next to Lieutenant Bleezer.... An' there we'll talk... about everything. I'm just dying to talk to somebody about the things of the spirit."

"Do you know anything about a scheme for sending enlisted men to French universities? Men who have not finished their courses."

"Oh, wouldn't that be just fine. I tell you, boy, there's nothing like the U. S. government to think of things like that."

"But have you heard anything about it?"

"No; but I surely shall.... D'you mind switching the light off?...

That's it. Now just follow me. Oh, I do need a rest. I've been working dreadfully hard since that Knights of Columbus man came down here. Isn't it hateful the way they try to run down the 'Y'?... Now we can have a nice long talk. You must tell me all about yourself."

"But don't you really know anything about that university scheme? They say it begins February fifteenth," Andrews said in a low voice.

"I'll ask Lieutenant Bleezer if he knows anything about it," said Sheffield soothingly, throwing an arm around Andrews's shoulder and pushing him in the door ahead of him.

They went through a dark hall to a little room where a fire burned brilliantly in the hearth, lighting up with tongues of red and yellow a square black walnut table and two heavy armchairs with leather backs and bottoms that shone like lacquer.

"This is wonderful," said Andrews involuntarily.

"Romantic I call it. Makes you think of d.i.c.kens, doesn't it, and Locksley Hall."

"Yes," said Andrews vaguely.

"Have you been in France long?" asked Andrews settling himself in one of the chairs and looking into the dancing flames of the log fire. "Will you smoke?" He handed Sheffield a crumpled cigarette.

"No, thanks, I only smoke special kinds. I have a weak heart. That's why I was rejected from the army.... Oh, but I think it was superb of you to join as a private; It was my dream to do that, to be one of the nameless marching throng."

"I think it was d.a.m.n foolish, not to say criminal," said Andrews sullenly, still staring into the fire.

"You can't mean that. Or do you mean that you think you had abilities which would have been worth more to your country in another position?...

I have many friends who felt that."

"No.... I don't think it's right of a man to go back on himself.... I don't think butchering people ever does any good ...I have acted as if I did think it did good... out of carelessness or cowardice, one or the other; that I think bad."

"You mustn't talk that way" said Sheffield hurriedly. "So you are a musician, are you?" He asked the question with a jaunty confidential air.

"I used to play the piano a little, if that's what you mean," said Andrews.

"Music has never been the art I had most interest in. But many things have moved me intensely.... Debussy and those beautiful little things of Nevin's. You must know them.... Poetry has been more my field. When I was young, younger than you are, quite a lad...Oh, if we could only stay young; I am thirty-two."

"I don't see that youth by itself is worth much. It's the most superb medium there is, though, for other things," said Andrews. "Well, I must go," he said. "If you do hear anything about that university scheme, you will let me know, won't you?"

"Indeed I shall, dear boy, indeed I shall."

They shook hands in jerky dramatic fashion and Andrews stumbled down the dark hall to the door. When he stood out in the raw night air again he drew a deep breath. By the light that streamed out from a window he looked at his watch. There was time to go to the regimental sergeant-major's office before tattoo.

At the opposite end of the village street from the Y. M. C. A. hut was a cube-shaped house set a little apart from the rest in the middle of a broad lawn which the constant crossing and recrossing of a staff of cars and trains of motor trucks had turned into a muddy mora.s.s in which the wheel tracks crisscrossed in every direction. A narrow board walk led from the main road to the door. In the middle of this walk Andrews met a captain and automatically got off into the mud and saluted.

The regimental office was a large room that had once been decorated by wan and ill-drawn mural paintings in the manner of Puvis de Chavannes, but the walls had been so chipped and soiled by five years of military occupation that they were barely recognisable. Only a few bits of bare flesh and floating drapery showed here and there above the maps and notices that were tacked on the walls. At the end of the room a group of nymphs in Nile green and pastel blue could be seen emerging from under a French War Loan poster. The ceiling was adorned with an oval of flowers and little plaster cupids in low relief which had also suffered and in places showed the laths. The office was nearly empty. The littered desks and silent typewriters gave a strange air of desolation to the gutted drawing-room. Andrews walked boldly to the furthest desk, where a little red card leaning against the typewriter said "Regimental Sergeant-Major."

Behind the desk, crouched over a heap of typewritten reports, sat a little man with scanty sandy hair, who screwed up his eyes and smiled when Andrews approached the desk.

"Well, did you fix it up for me?" he asked.

"Fix what?" said Andrews.

"Oh, I thought you were someone else." The smile left the regimental sergeant-major's thin lips. "What do you want?"

"Why, Regimental Sergeant-Major, can you tell me anything about a scheme to send enlisted men to colleges over here? Can you tell me who to apply to?"

"According to what general orders? And who told you to come and see me about it, anyway?"

"Have you heard anything about it?"

"No, nothing definite. I'm busy now anyway. Ask one of your own non-coms to find out about it." He crouched once more over the papers.

Andrews was walking towards the door, flushing with annoyance, when he saw that the man at the desk by the window was jerking his head in a peculiar manner, just in the direction of the regimental sergeant-major and then towards the door. Andrews smiled at him and nodded. Outside the door, where an orderly sat on a short bench reading a torn Sat.u.r.day Evening Post, Andrews waited. The hall was part of what must have been a ballroom, for it had a much-scarred hardwood floor and big s.p.a.ces of bare plaster framed by gilt-and lavender-colored mouldings, which had probably held tapestries. The part.i.tion of unplaned boards that formed other offices cut off the major part of a highly decorated ceiling where cupids with crimson-daubed bottoms swam in all att.i.tudes in a sea of pink-and blue-and lavender-colored clouds, wreathing themselves coyly in heavy garlands of waxy hothouse flowers, while cornucopias spilling out squashy fruits gave Andrews a feeling of distinct insecurity as he looked up from below.

"Say are you a Kappa Mu?"

Andrews looked down suddenly and saw in front of him the man who had signalled to him in the regimental sergeant-major's office.

"Are you a Kappa Mu?" he asked again.

"No, not that I know of," stammered Andrews puzzled.

"What school did you go to?"