Part 50 (1/2)
The train pulled out of the station.
III
Henslowe poured wine from a brown earthen crock into the gla.s.ses, where it s.h.i.+mmered a bright thin red, the color of currants. Andrews leaned back in his chair and looked through half-closed eyes at the table with its white cloth and little burnt umber loaves of bread, and out of the window at the square dimly lit by lemon-yellow gas lamps and at the dark gables of the little houses that huddled round it.
At a table against the wall opposite a lame boy, with white beardless face and gentle violet-colored eyes, sat very close to the bareheaded girl who was with him and who never took her eyes off his face, leaning on his crutch all the while. A stove hummed faintly in the middle of the room, and from the half-open kitchen door came ruddy light and the sound of something frying. On the wall, in brownish colors that seemed to have taken warmth from all the rich scents of food they had absorbed since the day of their painting, were scenes of the b.u.t.te as it was fancied to have once been, with windmills and wide fields.
”I want to travel,” Henslowe was saying, dragging out his words drowsily. ”Abyssinia, Patagonia, Turkestan, the Caucasus, anywhere and everywhere. What do you say you and I go out to New Zealand and raise sheep?”
”But why not stay here? There can't be anywhere as wonderful as this.”
”Then I'll put off starting for New Guinea for a week. But h.e.l.l, I'd go crazy staying anywhere after this. It's got into my blood... all this murder. It's made a wanderer of me, that's what it's done. I'm an adventurer.”
”G.o.d, I wish it had made me into anything so interesting.”
”Tie a rock on to your scruples and throw 'em off the Pont Neuf and set out.... O boy, this is the golden age for living by your wits.”
”You're not out of the army yet.”
”I should worry.... I'll join the Red Cross.”
”How?”
”I've got a tip about it.”
A girl with oval face and faint black down on her upper lip brought them soup, a thick greenish colored soup, that steamed richly into their faces.
”If you tell me how I can get out of the army you'll probably save my life,” said Andrews seriously.
”There are two ways...Oh, but let me tell you later. Let's talk about something worth while...So you write music do you?”
Andrews nodded.
An omelet lay between them, pale golden-yellow with flecks of green; a few amber bubbles of burnt b.u.t.ter still cl.u.s.tered round the edges.
”Talk about tone-poems,” said Henslowe.
”But, if you are an adventurer and have no scruples, how is it you are still a private?”
Henslowe took a gulp of wine and laughed uproariously.
”That's the joke.”
They ate in silence for a little while. They could hear the couple opposite them talking in low soft voices. The stove purred, and from the kitchen came a sound of something being beaten in a bowl. Andrews leaned back in his chair.
”This is so wonderfully quiet and mellow,” he said.... ”It is so easy to forget that there's any joy at all in life.”
”Rot...It's a circus parade.”