“All right. You’ll have to walk from
here, sergeant.”
Anthony saluted, quickly paid his taxi-driver, and
set off for a run toward the regiment he had named.
When he was out of sight he changed his course, and
with his heart beating wildly, hurried to his company,
feeling that he had made a fatal error of judgment.
Two days later the officer who had been in command
of the guard recognized him in a barber shop down-town.
In charge of a military policeman he was taken back
to the camp, where he was reduced to the ranks without
trial, and confined for a month to the limits of his
company street.
With this blow a spell of utter depression overtook
him, and within a week he was again caught down-town,
wandering around in a drunken daze, with a pint of
bootleg whiskey in his hip pocket. It was because
of a sort of craziness in his behavior at the trial
that his sentence to the guard-house was for only
three weeks.
Early in his confinement the conviction took root
in him that he was going mad. It was as though
there were a quantity of dark yet vivid personalities
in his mind, some of them familiar, some of them strange
and terrible, held in check by a little monitor, who
sat aloft somewhere and looked on. The thing
that worried him was that the monitor was sick, and
holding out with difficulty. Should he give up,
should he falter for a moment, out would rush these
intolerable things—only Anthony could know
what a state of blackness there would be if the worst
of him could roam his consciousness unchecked.
The heat of the day had changed, somehow, until it
was a burnished darkness crushing down upon a devastated
land. Over his head the blue circles of ominous
uncharted suns, of unnumbered centres of fire, revolved
interminably before his eyes as though he were lying
constantly exposed to the hot light and in a state
of feverish coma. At seven in the morning something
phantasmal, something almost absurdly unreal that
he knew was his mortal body, went out with seven other
prisoners and two guards to work on the camp roads.
One day they loaded and unloaded quantities of gravel,
spread it, raked it—the next day they worked
with huge barrels of red-hot tar, flooding the gravel
with black, shining pools of molten heat. At
night, locked up in the guard-house, he would lie
without thought, without courage to compass thought,
staring at the irregular beams of the ceiling overhead
until about three o’clock, when he would slip
into a broken, troubled sleep.
