Soldiers -- Fiction; War stories; World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction
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.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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