One of Ours

Willa Cather

• Publisher: Start Publishing LLC
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781625583710
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Classics
• Index: Literature

Claude, working on the family farm and married to a woman who is more interested in her missionary work than she is in him, tires of his monotonous life. When his wife leaves for China, he decides to enlist in the US Army, which has just begun preparing to enter the First World War. Claude believes that he has finally found his purpose in life, a place where he matters!

Bidding the Eagles of the West Fly on

At noon that day Claude found himself in a street of little shops, hot and perspiring, utterly confused and turned about. Truck drivers and boys on bell less bicycles shouted at him indignantly, furiously. He got under the shade of a young plane tree and stood close to the trunk, as if it might protect him. His greatest care, at any rate, was off his hands. With the help of Victor Morse he had hired a taxi for forty francs, taken Fanning to the base hospital, and seen him into the arms of a big orderly from Texas. He came away from the hospital with no idea where he was going–except that he wanted to get to the heart of the city. It seemed, however, to have no heart; only long, stony arteries, full of heat and noise. He was still standing there, under his plane tree, when a group of uncertain, lost-looking brown figures, headed by Sergeant Hicks, came weaving up the street; nine men in nine different attitudes of dejection, each with a long loaf of bread under his arm. They hailed Claude with joy, straightened up, and looked as if now they had found their way! He saw that he must be a plane tree for somebody else.

Sergeant Hicks explained that they had been trudging about the town, looking for cheese. After sixteen days of heavy, tasteless food, cheese was what they all wanted. There was a grocery store up the street, where there seemed to be everything else. He had tried to make the old woman understand by signs.

“Don’t these French people eat cheese, anyhow? What’s their word for it, Lieutenant? I’m damned if I know, and I’ve lost my phrase book. Suppose you could make her understand?”

“Well, I’ll try. Come along, boys.”

Crowding close together, the ten men entered the shop. The proprietress ran forward with an exclamation of despair. Evidently she had thought she was done with them, and was not pleased to see them coming back. When she paused to take breath, Claude took off his hat respectfully, and performed the bravest act of his life; uttered the first phrase-book sentence he had ever spoken to a French person. His men were at his back; he had to say something or run, there was no other course. Looking the old woman in the eye, he steadily articulated:

“Avez-vous du fromage, Madame?” It was almost inspiration to add the last word, he thought; and when it worked, he was as much startled as if his revolver had gone off in his belt.

“Du fromage?” the shop woman screamed. Calling something to her daughter, who was at the desk, she caught Claude by the sleeve, pulled him out of the shop, and ran down the street with him. She dragged him into a doorway darkened by a long curtain, greeted the proprietress, and then pushed the men after their officer, as if they were stubborn burros.

They stood blinking in the gloom, inhaling a sour, damp, buttery, smear-kase smell, until their eyes penetrated the shadows and they saw that there was nothing but cheese and butter in the place. The shopkeeper was a fat woman, with black eyebrows that met above her nose; her sleeves were rolled up, her cotton dress was open over her white throat and bosom. She began at once to tell them that there was a restriction on milk products; every one must have cards; she could not sell them so much. But soon there was nothing left to dispute about. The boys fell upon her stock like wolves. The little white cheeses that lay on green leaves disappeared into big mouths. Before she could save it, Hicks had split a big round cheese through the middle and was carving it up like a melon. She told them they were dirty pigs and worse than the Boches, but she could not stop them.

“What’s the matter with Mother, Lieutenant? What’s she fussing about? Ain’t she here to sell goods?”

Claude tried to look wiser than he was. “From what I can make out, there’s some sort of restriction; you aren’t allowed to buy all you want. We ought to have thought about that; this is a war country. I guess we’ve about cleaned her out.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Hicks wiping his clasp-knife. “We’ll bring her some sugar tomorrow. One of the fellows who helped us unload at the docks told me you can always quiet ‘em if you give ‘em sugar.”

They surrounded her and held out their money for her to take her pay. “Come on, ma’m, don’t be bashful. What’s the matter, ain’t this good money?”

She was distracted by the noise they made, by their bronzed faces with white teeth and pale eyes, crowding so close to her. Ten large, well-shaped hands with straight fingers, the open palms full of crumpled notes . . . . Holding the men off under the pretence of looking for a pencil, she made rapid calculations. The money that lay in their palms had no relation to these big, coaxing, boisterous fellows; it was a joke to them; they didn’t know what it meant in the world. Behind them were shiploads of money, and behind the ships . . . .

The situation was unfair. Whether she took much or little out of their hands, couldn’t possibly matter to the Americans, couldn’t even dash their good humour. But there was a strain on the cheesewoman, and the standards of a lifetime were in jeopardy. Her mind mechanically fixed upon two-and-a-half ; she would charge them two-and-a-half times the market price of the cheese. With this moral plank to cling to, she made change with conscientious accuracy and did not keep a penny too much from anybody. Telling them what big stupids they were, and that it was necessary to learn to count in this world, she urged them out of her shop. She liked them well enough, but she did not like to do business with them. If she didn’t take their money, the next one would. All the same, fictitious values were distasteful to her, and made everything seem flimsy and unsafe.

Standing in her doorway, she watched the brown band go ambling down the street; as they passed in front of the old church of St. Jacques, the two foremost stumbled on a sunken step that was scarcely above the level of the pavement. She laughed aloud. They looked back and waved to her. She replied with a smile that was both friendly and angry. She liked them, but not the legend of waste and prodigality that ran before them–and followed after. It was superfluous and disintegrating in a world of hard facts. An army in which the men had meat for breakfast, and ate more every day than the French soldiers at the front got in a week! Their moving kitchens and supply trains were the wonder of France. Down below Arles, where her husband’s sister had married, on the desolate plain of the Crau, their tinned provisions were piled like mountain ranges, under sheds and canvas. Nobody had ever seen so much food before; coffee, milk, sugar, bacon, hams; everything the world was famished for. They brought shiploads of useless things, too. And useless people. Shiploads of women who were not nurses; some said they came to dance with the officers, so they would not be ennuyes.

All this was not war,–any more than having money thrust at you by grown men who could not count, was business. It was an invasion, like the other. The first destroyed material possessions, and this threatened everybody’s integrity. Distaste of such methods, deep, recoiling distrust of them, clouded the cheesewoman’s brow as she threw her money into the drawer and turned the key on it.

As for the doughboys, having once stubbed their toes on the sunken step, they examined it with interest, and went in to explore the church. It was in their minds that they must not let a church escape, any more than they would let a Boche escape. Within they came upon a bunch of their shipmates, including the Kansas band, to whom they boasted that their Lieutenant could “speak French like a native.”

The Lieutenant himself thought he was getting on pretty well, but a few hours later his pride was humbled. He was sitting alone in a little triangular park beside another church,, admiring the cropped locust trees and watching some old women who were doing their mending in the shade. A little boy in a black apron, with a close-shaved, bare head, came along, skipping rope. He hopped lightly up to Claude and said in a most persuasive and confiding voice

“Voulez-vous me dire l’heure, s’il vous plaît, M’sieu’ l’ soldat?”

Claude looked down into his admiring eyes with a feeling of panic. He wouldn’t mind being dumb to a man, or even to a pretty girl, but this was terrible. His tongue went dry, and his face grew scarlet. The child’s expectant gaze changed to a look of doubt, and then of fear. He had spoken before to Americans who didn’t understand, but they had not turned red and looked angry like this one; this soldier must be ill, or wrong in his head. The boy turned and ran away.

Many a serious mishap had distressed Claude less. He was disappointed, too. There was something friendly in the boy’s face that he wanted . . . that he needed. As he rose he ground his heel into the gravel. “Unless I can learn to talk to the children of this country,” he muttered, “I’ll go home!”

Claude set off to find the Grand Hotel, where he had promised to dine with Victor Morse. The porter there spoke English. He called a red-headed boy in a dirty uniform and told him to take the American to vingt-quatre. The boy also spoke English. “Plenty money in New York, I guess! In France, no money.” He made their way, through musty corridors and up slippery staircases, as long as possible, shrewdly eyeing the visitor and rubbing his thumb nervously against his fingers all the while.

“Vingt-quatre, twen’y-four,” he announced, rapping at a door with one hand and suggestively opening the other. Claude put something into it–anything to be rid of him.

Victor was standing before the fireplace. “Hello, Wheeler, come in. Our dinner will be served up here. It’s big enough, isn’t it? I could get nothing between a coop, and this at fifteen dollars a day.”

The room was spacious enough for a banquet; with two huge beds, and great windows that swung in on hinges, like doors, and that had certainly not been washed since before the war. The heavy red cotton-brocade hangings and lace curtains were stiff with dust, the thick carpet was strewn with cigarette-ends and matches. Razor blades and “Khaki Comfort” boxes lay about on the dresser, and former occupants had left their autographs in the dust on the table. Officers slept there, and went away, and other officers arrived,–and the room remained the same, like a wood in which travellers camp for the night. The valet de chambre carried away only what he could use; discarded shirts and socks and old shoes. It seemed a rather dismal place to have a party.

When the waiter came, he dusted off the table with his apron and put on a clean cloth, napkins, and glasses. Victor and his guest sat down under an electric light bulb with a broken shade, around which a silent halo of flies moved unceasingly. They did not buzz, or dart aloft, or descend to try the soup, but hung there in the center of the room as if they were a part of the lighting system. The constant attendance of the waiter embarrassed Claude; he felt as if he were being watched.

“By the way,” said Victor while the soup plates were being removed, “what do you think of this wine? It cost me thirty francs the bottle.”

“It tastes very good to me,” Claude replied. “But then, it’s the first champagne I’ve ever drunk.”

“Really?” Victor drank off another glass and sighed. “I envy you. I wish I had it all to do over. Life’s too short, you know.”

“I should say you had made a good beginning. We’re a long way from Crystal Lake.”

“Not far enough.” His host reached across the table and filled Claude’s empty glass. “I sometimes waken up with the feeling I’m back there. Or I have bad dreams, and find myself sitting on that damned stool in the glass cage and can’t make my books balance; I hear the old man coughing in his private room, the way he coughs when he’s going to refuse a loan to some poor devil who needs it. I’ve had a narrow escape, Wheeler; ‘as a brand from the burning’. That’s all the Scripture I remember.”

The bright red spots on Victor’s cheeks, his pale forehead and brilliant eyes and saucy little moustaches seemed to give his quotation a peculiar vividness. Claude envied him. It must be great fun to take up a part and play it to a finish; to believe you were making yourself over, and to admire the kind of fellow you made. He, too, in a way, admired Victor,–though he couldn’t altogether believe in him.

“You’ll never go back,” he said, “I wouldn’t worry about that.”

“Take it from me, there are thousands who will never go back! I’m not speaking of the casualties. Some of you Americans are likely to discover the world this trip . . . and it’ll make the hell of a lot of difference! You boys never had a fair chance. There’s a conspiracy of Church and State to keep you down. I’m going off to play with some girls tonight, will you come along?”

Claude laughed. “I guess not.”

“Why not? You won’t be caught, I guarantee.”

“I guess not.” Claude spoke apologetically. “I’m going out to see Fanning after dinner.”

Victor shrugged. “That ass!” He beckoned the waiter to open another bottle and bring the coffee. “Well, it’s your last chance to go nutting with me.” He looked intently at Claude and lifted his glass. “To the future, and our next meeting!” When he put down his empty goblet he remarked, “I got a wire through today; I’m leaving tomorrow.”

“For London?”

“For Verdun.”

Claude took a quick breath. Verdun . . . the very sound of the name was grim, like the hollow roll of drums. Victor was going there tomorrow. Here one could take a train for Verdun, or thereabouts, as at home one took a train for Omaha. He felt more “over” than he had done before, and a little crackle of excitement went all through him. He tried to be careless:

“Then you won’t get to London soon?”

“God knows,” Victor answered gloomily. He looked up at the ceiling and began to whistle softly an engaging air. “Do you know that? It’s something Maisie often plays; ‘Roses of Picardy.’ You won’t know what a woman can be till you meet her, Wheeler.”

“I hope I’ll have that pleasure. I was wondering if you’d forgotten her for the moment. She doesn’t object to these diversions?”

Victor lifted his eyebrows in the old haughty way. “Women don’t require that sort of fidelity of the air service. Our engagements are too uncertain.”

Half an hour later Victor had gone in quest of amorous adventure, and Claude was wandering alone in a brightly lighted street full of soldiers and sailors of all nations. There were black Senegalese, and Highlanders in kilts, and little lorry-drivers from Siam,–all moving slowly along between rows of cabarets and cinema theatres. The wide-spreading branches of the plane trees met overhead, shutting out the sky and roofing in the orange glare. The sidewalks were crowded with chairs and little tables, at which marines and soldiers sat drinking shops and cognac and coffee. From every doorway music-machines poured out jazz tunes and strident Sousa marches. The noise was stupefying. Out in the middle of the street a band of bareheaded girls, hardy and tough looking; were following a string of awkward Americans, running into them, elbowing them, asking for treats, crying, “You dance me Fausse-trot, Sammie?”

Claude stationed himself before a movie theatre, where the sign in electric lights read, “Amour, quand tu nous tiens!” and stood watching the people. In the stream that passed him, his eye lit upon two walking arm-in-arm, their hands clasped, talking eagerly and unconscious of the crowd,–different, he saw at once, from all the other strolling, affectionate couples.

The man wore the American uniform; his left arm had been amputated at the elbow, and he carried his head awry, as if he had a stiff neck. His dark, lean face wore an expression of intense anxiety, his eyebrows twitched as if he were in constant pain. The girl, too, looked troubled. As they passed him, under the red light of the Amour sign, Claude could see that her eyes were full of tears. They were wide, blue eyes, innocent looking, and she had the prettiest face he had seen since he landed. From her silk shawl, and little bonnet with blue strings and a white frill, he thought she must be a country girl. As she listened to the soldier, with her mouth half-open, he saw a space between her two front teeth, as with children whose second teeth have just come. While they pushed along in the crowd she looked up intently at the man beside her, or off into the blur of light, where she evidently saw nothing. Her face, young and soft, seemed new to emotion, and her bewildered look made one feel that she did not know where to turn.

Without realizing what he did, Claude followed them out of the crowd into a quiet street, and on into another, even more deserted, where the louses looked as if they had been asleep a long while. Here there were no street lamps, not even a light in the windows, but natural darkness; with the moon high overhead throwing sharp shadows across the white cobble paving. The narrow street made a bend, and he came out upon the church he and his comrades had entered that afternoon. It looked larger by night, and but for the sunken step, he might not have been sure it was the same. The dark neighbouring houses seemed to lean toward it, the moonlight shone silver-grey upon its battered front.

The two walking before him ascended the steps and withdrew into the deep doorway, where they clung together in an embrace so long and still that it was like death. At last they drew shuddering apart. The girl sat down on the stone bench beside the door. The soldier threw himself upon the pavement at her feet, and rested his head on her knee, his one arm lying across her lap.

In the shadow of the houses opposite, Claude kept watch like a sentinel, ready to take their part if any alar...