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, Lieutenant,” 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 lamppost.
“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 tomorrow, 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