John Passos - One Man's Initiation, 1917

People had gone back for the last act. The two Australians, the Englishman, and the two Americans still stood talking.

“Mind you, I’m not what you’d call susceptible. I’m not soft. I got over all that long ago.” The Englishman was addressing the company in general. “But the poor beggar said ’Thank you.’”

“What’s he saying?” asked a woman, plucking at Martin’s arm.

“He’s telling about a German atrocity.”

“Oh, the dirty Germans! What things they’ve done!” the woman answered mechanically.

Somehow, during the entr’acte, the Australians had collected another woman; and a strange fat woman with lips painted very small, and very large bulging eyes, had attached herself to Martin. He suffered her because every time he looked at her she burst out laughing.

The bar was closing. They had a drink of champagne all round that made the fat woman give little shrieks of delight. They drifted towards the door, and stood, a formless, irresolute group, in the dark street in front of the theatre.

Randolph came up to Martin.

“Look. We’re goin’. I wonder if I ought to leave my money with you ...”

“I doubt if I’m a safe person to-night ...”

“All right. I’ll take it along. Look ... let’s meet for breakfast.”

“At the Café de la Paix .”

“All right. If she is nice I’ll bring her.”

“She looks charming.”

Tom Randolph pressed Martin’s hand and was off. There was a sound of a kiss in the darkness.

“I say, I’ve got to have something to eat,” said the Englishman. “I didn’t have a bit of dinner. I say-mangai, mangai.” He made gestures of putting things into his mouth in the direction of the fat woman.

The three women put their heads together. One of them knew a place, but it was a dreadful place. Really, they mustn’t think that ... She only knew it because when she was very young a man had taken her there who wanted to seduce her.

At that everyone laughed and the voices of the women rose shrill.

“All right, don’t talk; let’s go there,” said one of the Australians. “We’ll attend to the seducing.”

A thick woman, a tall comb in the back of her high-piled black hair, and an immovable face with jaw muscled like a prize-fighter’s, served them with cold chicken and ham and champagne in a room with mouldering greenish wall-paper lighted by a red-shaded lamp.

The Australians ate and sang and made love to their women. The Englishman went to sleep with his head on the table.

Martin leaned back out of the circle of light, keeping up a desultory conversation with the woman beside him, listening to the sounds of the men’s voices down corridors, of the front door being opened and slammed again and again, and of forced, shrill giggles of women.

“Unfortunately, I have an engagement to-night,” said Martin to the woman beside him, whose large spherical breasts heaved as she talked, and who rolled herself nearer to him invitingly, seeming with her round pop-eyes and her round cheeks to be made up entirely of small spheres and large soft ones.

“Oh, but it is too late. You can break it.”

“It’s at four o’clock.”

“Then we have time, ducky.”

“It’s something really romantic, you see.”

“The young are always lucky.” She rolled her eyes in sympathetic admiration. “This will be the fourth night this week that I have not made a sou... I’ll chuck myself into the river soon.”

Martin felt himself softening towards her. He slipped a twenty-franc note in her hand.

“Oh, you are too good. You are really galant homme, you.”

Martin buried his face in his hands, dreaming of the woman he would like to love to-night. She should be very dark, with red lips and stained cheeks, like Randolph’s girl; she should have small breasts and slender, dark, dancer’s thighs, and in her arms he could forget everything but the madness and the mystery and the intricate life of Paris about them. He thought of Montmartre, and Louise in the opera standing at her window singing the madness of Paris...

One of the Australians had gone away with a little woman in a pink negligée. The other Australian and the Englishman were standing unsteadily near the table, each supported by a sleepy-looking girl. Leaving the fat woman sadly finishing the remains of the chicken, large tears rolling from her eyes, they left the house and walked for a long time down dark streets, three men and two women, the Englishman being supported in the middle, singing in a desultory fashion.

They stopped under a broken sign of black letters on greyish glass, within which one feeble electric light bulb made a red glow. The pavement was wet, and glimmered where it slanted up to the lamp-post at the next corner.

“Here we are. Come along, Janey,” cried the Australian in a brisk voice.

The door opened and slammed again. Martin and the other girl stood on the pavement facing each other. The Englishman collapsed on the doorstep, and began to snore.

“Well, there’s only you and me,” she said.

“Oh, if you were only a person, instead of being a member of a profession—” said Martin softly.

“Come,” she said.

“No, dearie. I must go,” said Martin.

“As you will. I’ll take care of your friend.” She yawned.

He kissed her and strode down the dark street, his nostrils full of the smell of the rouge on her lips.

He walked a long while with his hat off, breathing deep of the sharp night air. The streets were black and silent. Intemperate desires prowled like cats in the darkness.

He woke up and stretched himself stiffly, smelling grass and damp earth. A pearly lavender mist was all about him, through which loomed the square towers of Notre Dame and the row of kings across the façade and the sculpture about the darkness of the doorways. He had lain down on his back on the little grass plot of the Parvis Notre Dame to look at the stars, and had fallen asleep.

It must be nearly dawn. Words were droning importunately in his head. “The poor beggar said ’Thank you’ with a funny German accent and the grenade blew him to hell.” He remembered the man he had once helped to pick up in whose pocket a grenade had exploded. Before that he had not realised that torn flesh was such a black-red, like sausage meat.

“Get up, you can’t lie there,” cried a gendarme.

“Notre Dame is beautiful in the morning,” said Martin, stepping across the low rail on to the pavement.

“Ah, yes; it is beautiful.”

Martin Howe sat on the rail of the bridge and looked. Before him, with nothing distinct yet to be seen, were two square towers and the tracery between them and the row of kings on the façade, and the long series of flying buttresses of the flank, gleaming through the mist, and, barely visible, the dark, slender spire soaring above the crossing. So had the abbey in the forest gleamed tall in the misty moonlight; like mist, only drab and dense, the dust had risen above the tall apse as the shells tore it to pieces.

Amid a smell of new-roasted coffee he sat at a table and watched people pass briskly through the ruddy sunlight. Waiters in shirt-sleeves were rubbing off the other tables and putting out the chairs. He sat sipping coffee, feeling languid and nerveless. After a while Tom Randolph, looking very young and brown with his hat a little on one side, came along. With him, plainly dressed in blue serge, was the girl. They sat down and she dropped her head on his shoulder, covering her eyes with her dark lashes.

“Oh, I am so tired.”

“Poor child! You must go home and go back to bed.”

“But I’ve got to go to work.”

“Poor thing.” They kissed each other tenderly and languidly.