"John_Dos_Passos_-_One_Mans_Initiation_1917" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dos Passos John)

Their round table with its white cloth and its bottles of wine and its piles of ravished artichoke leaves was the centre of a noisy, fantastic world. Ever since the orgy of the hors d'ueuvres things had been evolving to grotesqueness, faces, whites of eyes, twisted red of lips, crow-like forms of waiters, colours of hats and uniforms, all involved and jumbled in the melщe of talk and clink and clatter.

The red hand of the waiter pouring the Chartreuse, green like a stormy sunset, into small glasses before them broke into the vivid imaginings that had been unfolding in their talk through dinner. No, they had been saying, it could not go on; some day amid the rending crash of shells and the whine of shrapnel fragments, people everywhere, in all uniforms, in trenches, packed in camions, in stretchers, in hospitals, crowded behind guns, involved in telephone apparatus, generals at their dinner-tables, colonels sipping liqueurs, majors developing photographs, would jump to their feet and burst out laughing at the solemn inanity, at the stupid, vicious pomposity of what they were doing. Laughter would untune the sky. It would be a new progress of Bacchus. Drunk with laughter at the sudden vision of the silliness of the world, officers and soldiers, prisoners working on the roads, deserters being driven towards the trenches would throw down their guns and their spades and their heavy packs, and start marching, or driving in artillery waggons or in camions, staff cars, private trains, towards their capitals, where they would laugh the deputies, the senators, the congressmen, the M.P.'s out of their chairs, laugh the presidents and the prime ministers, and kaisers and dictators out of their plush-carpeted offices; the sun would wear a broad grin and would whisper the joke to the moon, who would giggle and ripple with it all night long. . . . The red hand of the waiter, with thick nails and work-swollen knuckles, poured Chartreuse into the small glasses before them.

"That," said Tom Randolph, when he had half finished his liqueur, "is the girl for me."

"But, Tom, she's with a French officer."

"They're fighting like cats and dogs. You can see that, can't you?"

"Yes," agreed Howe vaguely.

"Pay the bill. I'll meet you at the corner of the boulevard." Tom Randolph was out of the door. The girl, who had a little of the aspect of a pierrot, with dark skin and bright lips and gold-yellow hat and dress, and the sour-looking officer who was with her, were getting up to go.

At the corner of the boulevard Howe heard a woman's voice joining with Randolph's rich laugh.

"What did I tell you? They split at the door and here we are, Howe. . . . Mademoiselle Montreil, let me introduce a friend. Look, before it's too late, we must have a drink."

At the cafщ table next to them an Englishman was seated with his head sunk on his chest.

"Oh, I say, you woke me up."

"Sorry."

"No harm. Jolly good thing."

They invited him over to their table. There was a moist look about his eyes and a thickness to his voice that denoted alcohol.

"You mustn't mind me. I'm forgetting. . . . I've been doing it for a week. This is the first leave I've had in eighteen months. You Canadians?"

"No. Ambulance service; Americans."

"New at the game then. You're lucky. . . . Before I left the front I saw a man tuck a hand-grenade under the pillow of a poor devil of a German prisoner. The prisoner said, 'Thank you.' The grenade blew him to hell! God! Know anywhere you can get whisky in this bloody town?"

"We'll have to hurry; it's near closing-time."

"Right-o."

They started off, Randolph and the girl talking intimately, their heads close together, Martin supporting the Englishman.

"I need a bit o' whisky to put me on my pins."

They tumbled into the seats round a table at an American bar.

The Englishman felt in his pocket.

"Oh, I say," he cried, "I've got a ticket to the theatre. It's a box. . . . We can all get in. Come along; let's hurry."

They walked a long while, blundering through the dark streets, and at last stopped at a blue-lighted door.