John Passos - Three Soldiers

“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 shelter skelter against the slanting wall of the room.

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 dam 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 Savaroff’s 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 où je me suis donnée.”

“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 cafés 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 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.”