“Squads right!” came an order. Crunch, crunch, crunch in the gravel. The companies were going back to their barracks. He wanted to smile but he didn't dare. He wanted to smile because he had a pass till midnight, because in ten minutes he'd be outside the gates, outside the green fence and the sentries and the strands of barbed wire. Crunch, crunch, crunch; oh, they were so slow in getting back to the barracks and he was losing time, precious free minutes. “Hep, hep, hep,” cried the sergeant, glaring down the ranks, with his aggressive bulldog expression, to where someone had fallen out of step.
The company stood at attention in the dusk. Fuselli was biting the inside of his lips with impatience. Minutes at last, as if reluctantly, the sergeant sang out:
“Dis...missed.”
Fuselli hurried towards the gate, brandishing his pass with an important swagger.
Once out on the asphalt of the street, he looked down the long row of lawns and porches where violet arc lamps already contested the faint afterglow, drooping from their iron stalks far above the recently planted saplings of the avenue. He stood at the corner slouched against a telegraph pole, with the camp fence, surmounted by three strands of barbed wire, behind him, wondering which way he would go. This was a hell of a town anyway. And he used to think he wanted to travel round and see places.—“Home'll be good enough for me after this,” he muttered. Walking down the long street towards the centre of town, where was the moving-picture show, he thought of his home, of the dark apartment on the ground floor of a seven-storey house where his aunt lived. “Gee, she used to cook swell,” he murmured regretfully.
On a warm evening like this he would have stood round at the corner where the drugstore was, talking to fellows he knew, giggling when the girls who lived in the street, walking arm and arm, twined in couples or trios, passed by affecting ignorance of the glances that followed them. Or perhaps he would have gone walking with Al, who worked in the same optical-goods store, down through the glaring streets of the theatre and restaurant quarter, or along the wharves and ferry slips, where they would have sat smoking and looking out over the dark purple harbor, with its winking lights and its moving ferries spilling swaying reflections in the water out of their square reddish-glowing windows. If they had been lucky, they would have seen a liner come in through the Golden Gate, growing from a blur of light to a huge moving brilliance, like the front of a high-class theatre, that towered above the ferry boats. You could often hear the thump of the screw and the swish of the bow cutting the calm baywater, and the sound of a band playing, that came alternately faint and loud. “When I git rich,” Fuselli had liked to say to Al, “I'm going to take a trip on one of them liners.”
“Yer dad come over from the old country in one, didn't he?” Al would ask.
“Oh, he came steerage. I'd stay at home if I had to do that. Man, first class for me, a cabin de lux, when I git rich.”
But here he was in this town in the East, where he didn't know anybody and where there was no place to go but the movies.
“'Lo, buddy,” came a voice beside him. The tall youth who had sat opposite at mess was just catching up to him. “Goin' to the movies?”