“Jeanne, I think I'm crazily in love with you,” said Andrews in an excited voice.
“Like at the Opera Comique.” She shrugged her shoulders. “The room's nice,” she said. “Oh, but, what a big bed!”
“You're the first woman who's been up here in my time, Jeanne.... Oh, but this uniform is frightful.”
Andrews thought suddenly of all the tingling bodies constrained into the rigid attitudes of automatons in uniforms like this one; of all the hideous farce of making men into machines. Oh, if some gesture of his could only free them all for life and freedom and joy. The thought drowned everything else for the moment.
“But you pulled a button off,” cried Jeanne laughing hysterically. “I'll just have to sew it on again.”
“Never mind. If you knew how I hated them.”
“What white skin you have, like a woman's. I suppose that's because you are blond,” said Jeanne.
The sound of the door being shaken vigorously woke Andrews. He got up and stood in the middle of the floor for a moment without being able to collect his wits. The shaking of the door continued, and he heard Walters's voice crying “Andy, Andy.” Andrews felt shame creeping up through him like nausea. He felt a passionate disgust towards himself and Jeanne and Walters. He had an impulse to move furtively as if he had stolen something. He went to the door and opened it a little.
“Say, Walters, old man,” he said, “I can't let you in.... I've got a girl with me. I'm sorry.... I thought you wouldn't get back till tomorrow.”
“You're kidding, aren't you?” came Walters's voice out of the dark hall.
“No.” Andrews shut the door decisively and bolted it again.
Jeanne was still asleep. Her black hair had come undone and spread over the pillow. Andrews pulled the covers up about her carefully.
Then he got into the other bed, where he lay awake a long time, staring at the ceiling.
People walking along the boulevard looked curiously through the railing at the line of men in olive-drab that straggled round the edge of the courtyard. The line moved slowly, past a table where an officer and two enlisted men sat poring over big lists of names and piles of palely tinted banknotes and silver francs that glittered white. Above the men's heads a thin haze of cigarette smoke rose into the sunlight. There was a sound of voices and of feet shuffling on the gravel. The men who had been paid went off jauntily, the money jingling in their pockets.