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The cousin was looking from one to the other enviously, her upper lip lifted away from her teeth in a smile. The old woman munched her bread in a silent preoccupied fashion. "There's somebody in the store," said Fuselli after a long pause. "Je irey." He put his napkin down and went out wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. Eisenstein and a chalky-faced boy were in the shop.
Eisenstein, his French soldier friend, a lanky man with a scraggly black heard and burning black eyes, and Stockton, the chalky-faced boy, were sitting at the table that filled up the room, chatting intimately and gaily with Yvonne, who leaned against the yellow wall beside the Frenchman and showed all her little pearly teeth in a laugh.
Fuselli's hands were icy, and his heart was pumping the blood so fast to his ears that he could hardly hear. "The following privates to private first-class, read the lieutenant in a routine voice: "Grey, Appleton, Williams, Eisenstein, Porter...Eisenstein will be company clerk.... " Fuselli was almost ready to cry. His name was not on the list.
"How are they treatin' you down in your outfit now?" asked Eisenstein of Stockton, after a silence. "Same as ever," said Stockton in his thin voice, stuttering a little.... "Sometimes I wish I was dead." "Hum," said Eisenstein, a curious expression of understanding on his flabby face. "We'll be civilians some day." "I won't" said Stockton. "Hell," said Eisenstein.
"How d'you know?" snapped Eisenstein, who sat on a box away from the rest with his lean face in his hands staring at his mud- covered boots. "Look at this," Bill Grey made a disgusted gesture towards the ceiling. "Gas. Don't even have electric light." "Their trains run faster than ours," said Eisenstein. "The hell they do.
"As much as you are." "You talk like a socialist," said Fuselli. "They tell me they shoot guys in America for talkin' like that." "You see!" said Eisenstein to the Frenchman. "Are they all like that?" "Except a very few. It's hopeless," said Eisenstein, burying his face in his hands. "I often think of shooting myself." "Better shoot someone else," said the Frenchman. "It will be more useful."
He remembered how it felt to rub his nose hard on the gritty red plush carpet of the stairs. Then there were women in open-work skirts standing about, or were those the pictures on the walls? And there was a bed with mirrors round it. He opened his eyes. Eisenstein was talking to him. He must have been talking to him for some time. "I look at it this way," he was saying.
"Don't ye feel sick? Gawd, I do.... Did you get rid o' any of it, Meadville?" "Why don't they fight their ole war somewhere a man can get to on a horse?... Say that's my seat." "The place was empty.... I sat down in it," said Eisenstein, lowering his head sullenly. "You kin have three winks to get out o' my place," said Meadville, squaring his broad shoulders.
"Twice I have thought it was going to happen," said the Frenchman. "When was that?" "A little while ago a division started marching on Paris.... And when I was in Verdun.... O there will be a revolution.... France is the country of revolutions." "We'll always be here to shoot you down," said Eisenstein. "Wait till you've been in the war a little while.
"Ye think it's soft? I worked twelve hours day before yesterday getting out reports," said Eisenstein, indignantly. "But the kid's lost it and they keep ridin' him for some reason or other. It hurts a feller to see that. He ought to be at home at school." "He's got to take his medicine," said Fuselli. "You wait till we get butchered in the trenches.
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