When Andrews awoke next morning, his first thought was how long he had to wait that day to see Geneviève. Then he remembered their talk of the day before. Was it worth while going to see her at all, he asked himself. And very gradually he felt cold despair taking hold of him. He felt for a moment that he was the only living thing in a world of dead machines; the toad hopping across the road in front of a steam roller. Suddenly he thought of Jeanne. He remembered her grimy, overworked fingers lying in her lap. He pictured her walking up and down in front of the Café de Rohan one Wednesday night, waiting for him. In the place of Geneviève, what would Jeanne have done? Yet people were always alone, really; however much they loved each other, there could be no real union. Those who rode in the great car could never feel as the others felt; the toads hopping across the road. He felt no rancour against Geneviève.
These thoughts slipped from him while he was drinking the coffee and eating the dry bread that made his breakfast; and afterwards, walking back and forth along the river bank, he felt his mind and body becoming as if fluid, and supple, trembling, bent in the rush of his music like a poplar tree bent in a wind. He sharpened a pencil and went up to his room again.
The sky was cloudless that day. As he sat at his table the square of blue through the window and the hills topped by their windmill and the silver-blue of the river, were constantly in his eyes. Sometimes he wrote notes down fast, thinking nothing, feeling nothing, seeing nothing; other times he sat for long periods staring at the sky and at the windmill, vaguely happy, playing with unexpected thoughts that came and vanished, as now and then a moth fluttered in the window to blunder about the ceiling beams, and, at last, to disappear without his knowing how.
When the clock struck twelve, he found he was very hungry. For two days he had eaten nothing but bread, sausage and cheese. Finding Madame Boncour behind the bar downstairs, polishing glasses, he ordered dinner of her. She brought him a stew and a bottle of wine at once, and stood over him watching him eat it, her arms akimbo and the dimples showing in her huge red cheeks.
“Monsieur eats less than any young man I ever saw,” she said.
“I’m working hard,” said Andrews, flushing.
“But when you work you have to eat a great deal, a great deal.”
“And if the money is short?” asked Andrews with a smile. Something in the steely searching look that passed over her eyes for a minute startled him.
“There are not many people here now, Monsieur, but you should see it on a market day… Monsieur will take some desert?”
“Cheese and coffee.”
“Nothing more? It’s the season of strawberries.”
“Nothing more, thank you.”
When Madame Boncour came back with the cheese, she said:
“I had Americans here once, Monsieur. A pretty time I had with them, too. They were deserters. They went away without paying, with the gendarmes after them. I hope they were caught and sent to the front, those good-for-nothings.”
“There are all sorts of Americans,” said Andrews in a low voice. He was angry with himself because his heart beat so.
“Well, I’m going for a little walk. Au revoir, Madame.”
“Monsieur is going for a little walk. Amusez-vous bien, Monsieur. Au revoir Monsieur,” Madame Boncour’s singsong tones followed him out.
A little before four Andrews knocked at the front door of the Rods’ house. He could hear Santo, the little black and tan, barking inside. Madame Rod opened the door for him herself.
“Oh, here you are,” she said. “Come and have some tea. Did the work go well to-day?”
“And Geneviève?” stammered Andrews.
“She went out motoring with some friends. She left a note for you. It’s on the tea-table.” He found himself talking, making questions and answers, drinking tea, putting cakes into his mouth, all through a white dead mist.
Geneviève’s note said:
“Jean:-I’m thinking of ways and means. You must get away to a neutral country. Why couldn’t you have talked it over with me first, before cutting off every chance of going back. I’ll be in tomorrow at the same time.
“Bien à vous. G. R.”
“Would it disturb you if I played the piano a few minutes, Madame Rod?” Andrews found himself asking all at once.
“No, go ahead. We’ll come in later and listen to you.”
It was only as he left the room that he realized he had been talking to the two cousins as well as to Madame Rod.
At the piano he forgot everything and regained his mood of vague joyousness. He found paper and a pencil in his pocket, and played the theme that had come to him while he had been washing windows at the top of a stepladder at training camp arranging it, modelling it, forgetting everything, absorbed in his rhythms and cadences. When he stopped work it was nearly dark. Geneviève Rod, a veil round her head, stood in the French window that led to the garden.
“I heard you,” she said. “Go on.”
“I’m through. How was your motor ride?”
“I loved it. It’s not often I get a chance to go motoring.”
“Nor is it often I get a chance to talk to you alone,” cried Andrews bitterly.
“You seem to feel you have rights of ownership over me. I resent it. No one has rights over me.” She spoke as if it were not the first time she had thought of the phrase.
He walked over and leaned against the window beside her.
“Has it made such a difference to you, Geneviève, finding out that I am a deserter?”
“No, of course not,” she said hastily.
“I think it has, Geneviève… What do you want me to do? Do you think I should give myself up? A man I knew in Paris has given himself up, but he hadn’t taken his uniform off. It seems that makes a difference. He was a nice fellow. His name was Al, he was from San Francisco. He had nerve, for he amputated his own little finger when his hand was crushed by a freight car.”
“Oh, no, no. Oh, this is so frightful. And you would have been a great composer. I feel sure of it.”
“Why, would have been? The stuff I’m doing now’s better than any of the dribbling things I’ve done before, I know that.”
“Oh, yes, but you’ll need to study, to get yourself known.”
’If I can pull through six months, I’m safe. The army will have gone. I don’t believe they extradite deserters.”
“Yes, but the shame of it, the danger of being found out all the time.”
“I am ashamed of many things in my life, Geneviève. I’m rather proud of this.”
“But can’t you understand that other people haven’t your notions of individual liberty?”
“I must go, Geneviève.”
“You must come in again soon.”
“One of these days.”
And he was out in the road in the windy twilight, with his music papers crumpled in his hand. The sky was full of tempestuous purple clouds; between them were spaces of clear claret-colored light, and here and there a gleam of opal. There were a few drops of rain in the wind that rustled the broad leaves of the lindens and filled the wheat fields with waves likes the sea, and made the river very dark between rosy sand banks. It began to rain. Andrews hurried home so as not to drench his only suit. Once in his room he lit four candles and placed them at the corners of his table. A little cold crimson light still filtered in through the rain from the afterglow, giving the candles a ghostly glimmer. Then he lay on his bed, and staring up at the flickering light on the ceiling, tried to think.
“Well, you’re alone now, John Andrews,” he said aloud, after a half-hour, and jumped jauntily to his feet. He stretched himself and yawned. Outside the rain pattered loudly and steadily. “Let’s have a general accounting,” he said to himself. “It’ll be easily a month before I hear from old Howe in America, and longer before I hear from Henslowe, and already I’ve spent twenty francs on food. Can’t make it this way. Then, in real possessions, I have one volume of Villon, a green book on counterpoint, a map of France torn in two, and a moderately well-stocked mind.”