The Beautiful and Damned
South Carolina, or else a strolling darky with sullen and
bewildered eyes.
Then the woods moved off and they rolled into a broad space like the
baked top of a gigantic cake, sugared with an infinity of tents arranged
in geometric figures over its surface. The train came to an uncertain
stop, and the sun and the poles and the trees faded, and his universe
rocked itself slowly back to its old usualness, with Anthony Patch in
the centre. As the men, weary and perspiring, crowded out of the car, he
smelt that unforgetable aroma that impregnates all permanent camps--the
odor of garbage.
Camp Hooker was an astonishing and spectacular growth, suggesting "A
Mining Town in 1870--The Second Week." It was a thing of wooden shacks
and whitish-gray tents, connected by a pattern of roads, with hard tan
drill-grounds fringed with trees. Here and there stood green Y.M.C.A.
houses, unpromising oases, with their muggy odor of wet flannels and
closed telephone-booths--and across from each of them there was usually
a canteen, swarming with life, presided over indolently by an officer
who, with the aid of a side-car, usually managed to make his detail a
pleasant and chatty sinecure.
Up and down the dusty roads sped the soldiers of the quartermaster
corps, also in side-cars. Up and down drove the generals in their
government automobiles, stopping now and then to bring unalert details
to attention, to frown heavily upon captains marching at the heads of
companies, to set the pompous pace in that gorgeous game of showing off
which was taking place triumphantly over the entire area.
The first week after the arrival of Anthony's draft was filled with a
series of interminable inoculations and physical examinations, and with
the preliminary drilling. The days left him desperately tired. He had
been issued the wrong size shoes by a popular, easy-going
supply-sergeant, and in consequence his feet were so swollen that the
last hours of the afternoon were an acute torture. For the first time in
his life he could throw himself down on his cot between dinner and
afternoon drill-call, and seeming to sink with each moment deeper into a
bottomless bed, drop off immediately to sleep, while the noise and
laughter around him faded to a pleasant drone of drowsy summer sound. In
the morning he awoke stiff and aching, hollow as a ghost, and hurried
forth to meet the other ghostly figures who swarmed in the wan company
streets, while a harsh bugle shrieked and spluttered at the
gray heavens.
He was in a skeleton infantry company of about a hundred men. After the
invariable breakfast of fatty bacon, cold toast, and cereal, the entire
hundred would rush for the latrines, which, however well-policed, seemed
always intolerable, like the lavatories in cheap hotels. Out on the
field, then, in ragged order--the lame man on his left grotesquely
marring Anthony's listless efforts to keep in step, the platoon
sergeants either showing off violently to impress the officers and
recruits, or else quietly lurking in close to the line of march,
avoiding both labor and unnecessary visibility.
When they reached the field, work began immediately--they peeled off
their shirts for calisthenics. This was the only part of the day that
Anthony enjoyed. Lieutenant Kretching, who presided at the antics, was
sinewy and muscular, and Anthony, followed his movements faithfully,
with a feeling that he was doing something of positive value to himself.
The other officers and sergeants walked about among the men with the
malice of schoolboys, grouping here and there around some unfortunate
who lacked muscular control, giving him confused instructions and
commands. When they discovered a particularly forlorn, ill-nourished
specimen, they would linger the full half-hour making cutting remarks
and snickering among themselves.
One little officer named Hopkins, who had been a sergeant in the regular
army, was particularly annoying. He took the war as a gift of revenge
from the high gods to himself, and the constant burden of his harangues
was that these rookies did not appreciate the full gravity and
responsibility of "the service." He considered that by a combination of
foresight and dauntless efficiency he had raised himself to his current
magnificence. He aped the particular tyrannies of every officer under
whom he had served in times gone by. His frown was frozen on his
brow--before giving a private a pass to go to town he would ponderously
weigh the effect of such an absence upon the company, the army, and the
welfare of the military profession the world over.
Lieutenant Kretching, blond, dull and phlegmatic, introduced Anthony
ponderously to the problems of attention, right face, about face, and at
ease. His principal defect was his forgetfulness. He often kept the
company straining and aching at attention for five minutes while he
stood out in front and explained a new movement--as a result only the men
in the centre knew what it was all about--those on both flanks had been
too emphatically impressed with the necessity of staring straight ahead.
The drill continued until noon. It consisted of stressing a succession
of infinitely remote details, and though Anthony perceived that this was
consistent with the logic of war, it none the less irritated him. That
the same faulty blood-pressure which would have been indecent in an
officer did not interfere with the duties of a private was a
preposterous incongruity. Sometimes, after listening to a sustained
invective concerned with a dull and, on the face of it, absurd subject
known as military "courtesy," he suspected that the dim purpose of the
war was to let the regular army officers--men with the mentality and
aspirations of schoolboys--have their fling with some real slaughter. He
was being grotesquely sacrificed to the twenty-year patience of
a Hopkins!
Of his three tent-mates--a flat-faced, conscientious objector from
Tennessee, a big, scared Pole, and the disdainful Celt whom he had sat
beside on the train--the two former spent the evenings in writing
eternal letters home, while the Irishman sat in the tent door whistling
over and over to himself half a dozen shrill and monotonous bird-calls.
It was rather to avoid an hour of their company than with any hope of
diversion that, when the quarantine was lifted at the end of the week,
he went into town. He caught one of the swarm of jitneys that overran
the camp each evening, and in half an hour was set down in front of the
Stonewall Hotel on the hot and drowsy main street.
Under the gathering twilight the town was unexpectedly attractive. The
sidewalks were peopled by vividly dressed, overpainted girls, who
chattered volubly in low, lazy voices, by dozens of taxi-drivers who
assailed passing officers with "Take y' anywheh, _Lieu_tenant," and by
an intermittent procession of ragged, shuffling, subservient negroes.
Anthony, loitering along through the warm dusk, felt for the first time
in years the slow, erotic breath of the South, imminent in the hot
softness of the air, in the pervasive lull, of thought and time.
He had gone about a block when he was arrested suddenly by a harsh
command at his elbow.
"Haven't you been taught to salute officers?"
He looked dumbly at the man who addressed him, a stout, black-haired
captain, who fixed him menacingly with brown pop-eyes.
"_Come to attention!_" The words were literally thundered. A few
pedestrians near by stopped and stared. A soft-eyed girl in a lilac
dress tittered to her companion.
Anthony came to attention.
"What's your regiment and company?"
Anthony told him.
"After this when you pass an officer on the street you straighten up and
salute!"
"All right!"
"Say 'Yes, sir!'"
"Yes, sir."
The stout officer grunted, turned sharply, and marched down the street.
After a moment Anthony moved on; the town was no longer indolent and
exotic; the magic was suddenly gone out of the dusk. His eyes were
turned precipitately inward upon the indignity of his position. He hated
that officer, every officer--life was unendurable.
After he had gone half a block he realized that the girl in the lilac
dress who had giggled at his discomfiture was walking with her friend
about ten paces ahead of him. Several times she had turned and stared at
Anthony, with cheerful laughter in the large eyes that seemed the same
color as her gown.
At the corner she and her companion visibly slackened their pace--he
must make his choice between joining them and passing obliviously by. He
passed, hesitated, then slowed down. In a moment the pair were abreast
of him again, dissolved in laughter now--not such strident mirth as he
would have expected in the North from actresses in this familiar comedy,
but a soft, low rippling, like the overflow from some subtle joke, into
which he had inadvertently blundered.
"How do you do?" he said.
Her eyes were soft as shadows. Were they violet, or was it their blue
darkness mingling with the gray hues of dusk?
"Pleasant evening," ventured Anthony uncertainly.
"Sure is," said the second girl.
"Hasn't been a very pleasant evening for you," sighed the girl in lilac.
Her voice seemed as much a part of the night as the drowsy breeze
stirring the wide brim of her hat.
"He had to have a chance to show off," said Anthony with a scornful
laugh.
"Reckon so," she agreed.
They turned the corner and moved lackadaisically up a side street, as if
following a drifting cable to which they were attached. In this town it
seemed entirely natural to turn corners like that, it seemed natural to
be bound nowhere in particular, to be thinking nothing.... The side
street was dark, a sudden offshoot into a district of wild rose hedges
and little quiet houses set far back from the street.
"Where're you going?" he inquired politely.
"Just goin'." The answer was an apology, a question, an explanation.
"Can I stroll along with you?"
"Reckon so."
It was an advantage that her accent was different. He could not have
determined the social status of a Southerner from her talk--in New York
a girl of a lower class would have been raucous, unendurable--except
through the rosy spectacles of intoxication.
Dark was creeping down. Talking little--Anthony in careless, casual
questions, the other two with provincial economy of phrase and
burden--they sauntered past another corner, and another. In the middle
of a block they stopped beneath a lamp-post.
"I live near here," explained the other girl.
"I live around the block," said the girl in lilac.
"Can I see you home?"
"To the corner, if you want to."
The other girl took a few steps backward. Anthony removed his hat.
"You're supposed to salute," said the girl in lilac with a laugh. "All
the soldiers salute."
"I'll learn," he responded soberly.
The other girl said, "Well--" hesitated, then added, "call me up
to-morrow, Dot," and retreated from the yellow circle of the
street-lamp. Then, in silence, Anthony and the girl in lilac walked the
three blocks to the small rickety house which was her home. Outside the
wooden gate she hesitated.
"Well--thanks."
"Must you go in so soon?"
"I ought to."
"Can't you stroll around a little longer?" She regarded him
dispassionately.
"I don't even know you."
Anthony laughed.
"It's not too late."
"I reckon I better go in."
"I thought we might walk down and see a movie."
"I'd like to."
"Then I could bring you home. I'd have just enough time. I've got to be
in camp by eleven."
It was so dark that he could scarcely see her now. She was a dress
swayed infinitesimally by the wind, two limpid, reckless eyes ...
"Why don't you come--Dot? Don't you like movies? Better come."
She shook her head.
"I oughtn't to."