Three Soldiers | Page 6

just beginning to speak again when the man, balancing thoughtfully on top of his ladder, drawled out:
"Four o'clock."
"We won't finish today then?"
The man shook his head and wrinkled his face into a strange spasm as he spat.
"Been here long?"
"Not so long."
"How long?"
"Three months.... Ain't so long." The man spat again, and climbing down from his ladder waited, leaning against the wall, until Andrews should finish soaping his window.
"I'll go crazy if I stay here three months.... I've been here a week," muttered Andrews between his teeth as he climbed down and moved his ladder to the next window.
They both climbed their ladders again in silence.
"How's it you're in Casuals?" asked Andrews again.
"Ain't got no lungs."
"Why don't they discharge you?"
"Reckon they're going to, soon."
They worked on in silence for a long time. Andrews stared at the upper right-hand corner and smeared with soap each pane of the window in turn. Then he climbed down, moved his ladder, and started on the next window. At times he would start in the middle of the window for variety. As he worked a rhythm began pushing its way through the hard core of his mind, leavening it, making it fluid. It expressed the vast dusty dullness, the men waiting in rows on drill fields, standing at attention, the monotony of feet tramping in unison, of the dust rising from the battalions going back and forth over the dusty drill fields. He felt the rhythm filling his whole body, from his sore hands to his legs, tired from marching back and forth from making themselves the same length as millions of other legs. His mind began unconsciously, from habit, working on it, orchestrating it. He could imagine a vast orchestra swaying with it. His heart was beating faster. He must make it into music; he must fix it in himself, so that he could make it into music and write it down, so that orchestras could play it and make the ears of multitudes feel it, make their flesh tingle with it.
He went on working through the endless afternoon, climbing up and down his ladder, smearing the barrack windows with a soapy rag. A silly phrase took the place of the welling of music in his mind: "Arbeit und Rhythmus." He kept saying it over and over to himself: "Arbeit und Rhythmus." He tried to drive the phrase out of his mind, to bury his mind in the music of the rhythm that had come to him, that expressed the dusty boredom, the harsh constriction of warm bodies full of gestures and attitudes and aspirations into moulds, like the moulds toy soldiers are cast in. The phrase became someone shouting raucously in his ears: "Arbeit und Rhythmus,"--drowning everything else, beating his mind hard again, parching it.
But suddenly he laughed aloud. Why, it was in German. He was being got ready to kill men who said that. If anyone said that, he was going to kill him. They were going to kill everybody who spoke that language, he and all the men whose feet he could hear tramping on the drill field, whose legs were all being made the same length on the drill field.

III
It was Saturday morning. Directed by the corporal, a bandy-legged Italian who even on the army diet managed to keep a faint odour of garlic about him, three soldiers in blue denims were sweeping up the leaves in the street between the rows of barracks.
"You fellers are slow as molasses.... Inspection in twenty-five minutes," he kept saying.
The soldiers raked on doggedly, paying no attention. "You don't give a damn. If we don't pass inspection, I get hell--not you. Please queeck. Here, you, pick up all those goddam cigarette butts."
Andrews made a grimace and began collecting the little grey sordid ends of burnt-out cigarettes. As he leant over he found himself looking into the dark-brown eyes of the soldier who was working beside him. The eyes were contracted with anger and there was a flush under the tan of the boyish face.
"Ah didn't git in this here army to be ordered around by a goddam wop," he muttered.
"Doesn't matter much who you're ordered around by, you're ordered around just the same," said Andrews. "Where d'ye come from, buddy?"
"Oh, I come from New York. My folks are from Virginia," said Andrews.
"Indiana's ma state. The tornado country.... Git to work; here's that bastard wop comin' around the buildin'."
"Don't pick 'em up that-a-way; sweep 'em up," shouted the corporal.
Andrews and the Indiana boy went round with a broom and a shovel collecting chewed-out quids of tobacco and cigar butts and stained bits of paper.
"What's your name? Mahn's Chrisfield. Folks all call me Chris."
"Mine's Andrews, John Andrews."
"Ma dad uster have a hired man named Andy. Took sick an' died last summer. How long d'ye reckon it'll be