“O God, I feel sick,” said Bill Grey, taking the cigarette out of his mouth and looking at it revengefully.
“I’d be all right if everything didn’t stink so. An’ that mess hall. Nearly makes a guy puke to think of it.” Fuselli spoke in a whining voice, watching the top of the mast move, like a pencil scrawling on paper, back and forth across the mottled clouds.
“You belly-achin’ again?” A brown moon-shaped face with thick black eyebrows and hair curling crisply about a forehead with many horizontal wrinkles rose from the deck on the other side of Fuselli.
“Get the hell out of here.”
“Feel sick, sonny?” came the deep voice again, and the dark eyebrows contracted in an expression of sympathy. “Funny, I’d have my six-shooter out if I was home and you told me to get the hell out, sonny.”
“Well, who wouldn’t be sore when they have to go on K. P.?” said Fuselli peevishly.
“I ain’t been down to mess in three days. A feller who lives on the plains like I do ought to take to the sea like a duck, but it don’t seem to suit me.”
“God, they’re a sick lookin’ bunch I have to sling the hash to,” said Fuselli more cheerfully. “I don’t know how they get that way. The fellers in our company ain’t that way. They look like they was askeered somebody was going to hit ’em. Ever noticed that, Meadville?”
“Well, what d’ye expect of you guys who live in the city all your lives and don’t know the butt from the barrel of a gun an’ never straddled anything more like a horse than a broomstick. Ye’re juss made to be sheep. No wonder they have to herd you round like calves.” Meadville got to his feet and went unsteadily to the rail, keeping, as he threaded his way through the groups that covered the transport’s after deck, a little of his cowboy’s bow-legged stride.
“I know what it is that makes men’s eyes blink when they go down to that putrid mess,” came a nasal voice.
Fuselli turned round.
Eisenstein was sitting in the place Meadville had just left.
“You do, do you?”
“It’s part of the system. You’ve got to turn men into beasts before ye can get ’em to act that way. Ever read Tolstoi?”
“No. Say, you want to be careful how you go talkin’ around the way you do.” Fuselli lowered his voice confidentially. “I heard of a feller bein’ shot at Camp Merritt for talkin’ around.”
“I don’t care… I’m a desperate man,” said Eisenstein.
“Don’t ye feel sick? Gawd, I do… Did you get rid o’ any of it, Meadville?”
“Why don’t they fight their ole war somewhere a man can get to on a horse?… Say that’s my seat.”
“The place was empty… I sat down in it,” said Eisenstein, lowering his head sullenly.
“You kin have three winks to get out o’ my place,” said Meadville, squaring his broad shoulders.
“You are stronger than me,” said Eisenstein, moving off.
“God, it’s hell not to have a gun,” muttered Meadville as he settled himself on the deck again. “D’ye know, sonny, I nearly cried when I found I was going to be in this damn medical corps? I enlisted for the tanks. This is the first time in my life I haven’t had a gun. I even think I had one in my cradle.”
“That’s funny,” said Fuselli.
The sergeant appeared suddenly in the middle of the group, his face red.
“Say, fellers,” he said in a low voice, “go down an’ straighten out the bunks as fast as you goddam can. They’re having an inspection. It’s a hell of a note.”
They all filed down the gang planks into the foul-smelling hold, where there was no light but the invariable reddish glow of electric bulbs. They had hardly reached their bunks when someone called, “Attention!”
Three officers stalked by, their firm important tread a little disturbed by the rolling. Their heads were stuck forward and they peered from side to side among the bunks with the cruel, searching glance of hens looking for worms.
“Fuselli,” said the first sergeant, “bring up the record book to my stateroom; 213 on the lower deck.”
“All right, Sarge,” said Fuselli with alacrity. He admired the first sergeant and wished he could imitate his jovial, domineering manner.
It was the first time he had been in the upper part of the ship. It seemed a different world. The long corridors with red carpets, the white paint and the gilt mouldings on the partitions, the officers strolling about at their ease-it all made him think of the big liners he used to watch come in through the Golden Gate, the liners he was going to Europe on some day, when he got rich. Oh, if he could only get to be a sergeant first-class, all this comfort and magnificence would be his. He found the number and knocked on the door. Laughter and loud talking came from inside the stateroom.
“Wait a sec!” came an unfamiliar voice.
“Sergeant Olster here?”
“Oh, it’s one o’ my gang,” came the sergeant’s voice. “Let him in. He won’t peach on us.”
The door opened and he saw Sergeant Olster and two other young men sitting with their feet dangling over the red varnished boards that enclosed the bunks. They were talking gaily, and had glasses in their hands.
“Paris is some town, I can tell you,” one was saying. “They say the girls come up an’ put their arms round you right in the main street.”
“Here’s the records, sergeant,” said Fuselli stiffly in his best military manner.
“Oh thanks… There’s nothing else I want,” said the sergeant, his voice more jovial than ever. “Don’t fall overboard like the guy in Company C.”
Fuselli laughed as he closed the door, growing serious suddenly on noticing that one of the young men wore in his shirt the gold bar of a second lieutenant.
“Gee,” he said to himself. “I ought to have saluted.”
He waited a moment outside the closed door of the stateroom, listening to the talk and the laughter, wishing he were one of that merry group talking about women in Paris. He began thinking. Sure he’d get private first-class as soon as they got overseas. Then in a couple of months he might be corporal. If they saw much service, he’d move along all right, once he got to be a non-com.
“Oh, I mustn’t get in wrong. Oh, I mustn’t get in wrong,” he kept saying to himself as he went down the ladder into the hold. But he forgot everything in the seasickness that came on again as he breathed in the fetid air.
The deck now slanted down in front of him, now rose so that he was walking up an incline. Dirty water slushed about from one side of the passage to the other with every lurch of the ship. When he reached the door the whistling howl of the wind through the hinges and cracks made Fuselli hesitate a long time with his hand on the knob. The moment he turned the knob the door flew open and he was in the full sweep of the wind. The deck was deserted. The wet ropes strung along it shivered dismally in the wind. Every other moment came the rattle of spray, that rose up in white fringy trees to windward and smashed against him like hail. Without closing the door he crept forward along the deck, clinging as hard as he could to the icy rope. Beyond the spray he could see huge marbled green waves rise in constant succession out of the mist. The roar of the wind in his ears confused him and terrified him. It seemed ages before he reached the door of the forward house that opened on a passage that smelt of drugs and breathed out air, where men waited in a packed line, thrown one against the other by the lurching of the boat, to get into the dispensary. The roar of the wind came to them faintly, and only now and then the hollow thump of a wave against the bow.
“You sick?” a man asked Fuselli.