Given neither to he-man esthetics, like Hemingway, nor to the romance of self-destruction, like Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, their friend and contemporary — he was born in 1896—was a modest self-effacing person, an inveterate wanderer who liked to hike through foreign places and sit down for a drink with strangers and listen to their stories. He saw literature as reportage. He admired the plain style of Defoe, and he read Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, subtitled A Novel Without a Hero, all his life.

Dos Passos was born wandering, living out his lonely childhood with his unmarried mother, Lucy Madison, as she toured the European capitals to avoid scandal while, in the United States, his father, John R. Dos Passos, an eminent corporate lawyer and lobbyist, waited for his invalided first wife to die. When that event came about, in 1910, the mother, the father, and the boy, a strongly loving triad, were able finally to constitute themselves as a family. But the isolation of his early life left Dos Passos psychologically detached, with the feelings of a perpetual outsider.

The outside, of course, is a position of advantage for a writer. Reportage from the outside, and slightly above, is the working viewpoint of Dos Passos’s masterpiece, U.S.A. It is a nice irony that not the era’s big literary personalities, but this quiet inhibited young man, would produce the most vaultingly ambitious novel of all — a twelve-hundred-page chronicle of the historic and spiritual life of an entire country in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Not for him the portrait of a gangster, however metaphorically shimmering, or even the group portrait of a lost generation: Dos Passos goes wide — from the American incursion in the Philippines to the beginning of the talkies, from coast to coast and class to class. U.S.A. is the novel as mural, with society’s heroes standing out from the flames of history while the small-figured masses toil at their feet.

In fact, the peripatetic Dos Passos landed one day in Mexico City and was much taken with the murals of Diego Rivera colorfully spreading, story after story, up the courtyard walls of the Secretariat of Education. In later years he indicated also his love of thirteenth-and fourteenth-century European tableaux — those with the saints painted big and the ordinary people painted small, filling up the background.

He published the first installment of U.S.A., The 42nd Parallel, in 1929, having realized early on that what he was doing could not be contained in one volume. 1919 followed two years later, and the final volume, The Big Money, was published in 1936. He could have gone on — he had endless resources for the thing, having picked up its rhythm and much of the material from his own ambulating life. He’d gone up from Baltimore to Harvard, where he read and was impressed by the Imagist poets — Pound, Amy Lowell, Carl Sandburg. He also made his acquaintance with the work on James Joyce, the twentieth-century writer who, though hardly given to English plain speech, would have the most enduring influence on him. After Harvard he went back to his wandering, spending a year in Spain and studying architecture. But World War I was just over the border, and in 1916 he volunteered to drive for the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Service, the same organization for which Hemingway and E. E. Cummings drove. He served in France and Italy, and then with the entry of America into the conflict he enlisted in AEF and, all told, got as much of a dose of modern war as he would need for the inspiration to portray its soldier-victims in his first novel, Three Soldiers (1921).

The reticent writer was always disposed to the action. In the postwar twenties, he managed time and again to place himself in history’s hotspots — whether the literary scene in New York and Paris, revolutionary Mexico after the death of Emiliano Zapata, the newly Communist Soviet Union, or the nativist city of Boston, where he marched for the two imprisoned and condemned immigrant anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti.

He was writing all the time, of course. He published Rosinante to the Road Again (1922), a book of essays about Spain, Manhattan Transfer (1925), a dark impressionist portrait of New York and technical precursor of the U.S.A. novels, and pieces in the New Masses, The Dial, The Nation, and The New Republic attesting to his leftist sensibility. He was a diarist and kept up an active correspondence with a variety of colleagues including Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald — all of them worried in the world, all of them news junkies arguing politics and entangling themselves in the crises of civilization.

Not until the Spanish civil war would the profound difference between Dos Passos’s humanist ideals and the doctrinaire idealism of many of his contemporaries become clear: the visible moment of separation seems to have occurred with the execution in Valencia of his friend José Robles, a Republican, by a Communist firing squad.

In his later life Dos Passos was as archly conservative as he had been radical. What remained constant, like a moral compass course that never veered, was his despair of the fate of the single human being bent into service of the institutions of modern industrial society, whatever those institutions might be.

In fact, the pervading vision of U.S.A. is of people dominated by institutions, which is to say trapped in history. The novel is without a hero. We are given narratives of the lives of a dozen men and women — Joe Williams, a seaman; Mac, a typesetter; J. Ward Moorehouse, a public relations man; Eleanor Stoddard, a stage designer; Dick Savage, a Harvard graduate and World War I ambulance driver; Charley Anderson, a wartime air ace and inventor; Margo Dowling, an actress; Ben Compton, a union organizer; and so on — and watch three decades pass through them as they reach their prime and then age and flounder, either to die or to simply disappear or, with one or two exceptions, to end in moral defeat. Living below the headlines, they’re presented as ordinaries: their lives can intersect, they can sometimes be charming or sympathetic, but they are always seen from above, as in satire, and all their irresolution, self-deceit, and haplessness, and their failure to find empowerment in love or social rebellion, is unconsoled by the moral structure of a plot. U.S.A. has no plot, only the movement forward of its multiple narratives under the presiding circumstances of history.

The circumstances themselves are occasionally flashed to us by means of the so-called “Newsreels” that interrupt the text with actual headlines from newspapers of the time, fragments of news stories, advertising slogans, and popular song lyrics, all popping up in rat-a-tat fashion, like momentary garish illuminations, as from fireworks, of the American landscape.

Early readers were dazzled, as they should have been, by these collages. But Dos Passos does not stop there. A third mode is the minute biography, the periodic insertion into the text of highly editorialized brief lives of some of the paramount figures of each of the decades he covers, including Eugene Debs and William Jennings Bryan, Carnegie, Edison, John Reed and J. P. Morgan, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, the Wright Brothers, Henry Ford, Isadora Duncan, and William Randolph Hearst — the secular saints of the Dos Passos tableau, often mocked, sometimes mourned, but in any event drawn big. Unlike the lives of his fictional characters, which flow incessantly, the breathless author saying and then this happened and then that happened, the biographies stand as firm in his annunciation as historical markers.

Through the fourth major mode of address of the book, those Joycean passages under the heading “The Camera Eye,” Dos Passos records his own nameless life of sensations beginning with his early boyhood. These are perhaps the most enigmatic interludes. Like the Newsreels and brief biographies they give a topographical dimension to the text, as if points in the main narrative were being held under a higher lens magnification. They also implicate the narrator in the narrative, serving to underscore his moral commitment to the act of writing. But with his characteristic self-denigration, Dos Passos once justified these sections to an interviewer as planned lapses into “the subjective,” a way of keeping this terrible contaminant out of the rest of the manuscript.

Here we should remember D. H. Lawrence’s warning not to trust the writer but the book. As with Dos Passos’s self-effacement, his objectivity, which is the literary form of self-effacement, masks an imperial intelligence, an acerbic wit, a great anger, and, above all, the audacity to write a novel that breathes in the excitements of all the revolutionary art of the early twentieth century — whether Joyce’s compound word streams or Rivera’s proletarian murals or D. W. Griffith’s and Sergei Eisenstein’s film montages.

The stature of U.S.A. was immediately recognized by the critics of the day. By the time of its publication as a completed one-volume trilogy in 1938, the novel was generally regarded as a major achievement, although displaying the characteristics of a highly controlled vision. Malcolm Cowley thought of it as a “collectivist novel” perversely lacking the celebrations of common humanity that would be expected from a collectivist novel. Edmund Wilson wondered why every one of the ordinary characters of the book went down to fail ure, why nobody took root, raised a family, established a worthwhile career, or found any of the satisfactions that were undeniably visible in actual middle-class American life. Others objected to the characters’ lack of ideas, Dos Passos’s refusal to give them any consequential thought or reflection not connected with their appetites. And it is true these are beings occupied almost entirely with their sensations and plagued by their longings, given mightily to drinking and fornication while their flimsy thought provides no anchor against the drift of their lives.

But for Jean-Paul Sartre, writing in 1938, it was exactly in the novel’s refusal to redeem its characters that he found its greatness. Their lives are reported, their feelings and utterances put forth, says Sartre, in the style of a “statement to the Press.” And we the readers accumulate endless catalogues of individual sensory adventures, from the outside, right up to the moment the character disappears or dies — and is dissolved in the collective consciousness. And to what purpose all those feelings, all that adventure? What is the individual life against history? “The pressure exerted by a gas on the walls of its container does not depend upon the individual histories of the molecules composing it,” says the French existentialist philosopher.

But U.S.A. is an American novel after all, and we recognize the Americanness of the characters. They really do have a national specificity. In fact, the reader now, half a century further along, cannot help remark how current Dos Passos’s characters are — how we could run into Margo Dowling or Ward Moorehouse or Charley Anderson today and recognize any one of them, and how they would fit right in without any trouble. How they do. U.S.A. is a useful book to us because it is far-seeing. It seems angrier and at the same time more hopeful than it might have seemed in 1938. A moral demand is implicit in its pages. Dos Passos says in his prologue that above all, “U.S.A. is the speech of the people.” He heard our voice and recorded it, and we play it now for our solemn contemplation.

— E. L. Doctorow

Oh the infantree the infantree

With the dirt behind their ears

Joe Williams put on the secondhand suit and dropped his uniform, with a cobblestone wrapped up in it, off the edge of the dock into the muddy water of the basin. It was noon. There was nobody around. He felt bad when he found he didn’t have the cigarbox with him. Back in the shed he found it where he’d left it. It was a box that had once held Flor de Mayo cigars he’d bought when he was drunk in Guantanamo. In the box under the goldpaper lace were Janey’s high school graduation picture, a snapshot of Alec with his motorcycle, a picture with the signatures of the coach and all the players of the whole highschool junior team that he was captain of all in baseball clothes, an old pink almost faded snapshot of his Dad’s tug, the Mary B. Sullivan, taken off the Virginia Capes with a fullrigged ship in tow, an undressed postcard picture of a girl named Antoinette he’d been with in Villefranche, some safetyrazor blades, a postcard photo of himself and two other guys, all gobs in white suits, taken against the background of a moorish arch in Malaga, a bunch of foreign stamps, a package of Merry Widows, and ten little pink and red shells he’d picked up on the beach at Santiago. With the box tucked right under his arm, feeling crummy in the baggy civies, he walked slowly out to the beacon and watched the fleet in formation steaming down the River Plate. The day was overcast; the lean cruisers soon blurred into their trailing smokesmudges.

Joe stopped looking at them and watched a rusty tramp come in. She had a heavy list to port and you could see the hull below the waterline green and slimy with weed. There was a blue and white Greek flag on the stern and a dingy yellow quarantine flag halfway up the fore.

A man who had come up behind him said something to Joe in Spanish. He was a smiling ruddy man in blue denims and was smoking a cigar, but for some reason he made Joe feel panicky. “No savvy,” Joe said and walked away and out between the warehouses into the streets back of the waterfront.

He had trouble finding Maria’s place, all the blocks looked so much alike. It was by the mechanical violin in the window that he recognized it. Once he got inside the stuffy anise-smelling dump he stood a long time at the bar with one hand round a sticky beerglass looking out at the street he could see in bright streaks through the beadcurtain that hung in the door. Any minute he expected the white uniform and yellow holster of a marine to go past.

Behind the bar a yellow youth with a crooked nose leaned against the wall looking at nothing. When Joe made up his mind he jerked his chin up. The youth came over and craned confidentially across the bar, leaning on one hand and swabbing at the oilcloth with the rag he held in the other. The flies that had been grouped on the rings left by beerglasses on the oilcloth flew up to join the buzzing mass on the ceiling. “Say, bo, tell Maria I want to see her,” Joe said out of the corner of his mouth. The youth behind the bar held up two fingers. “Dos pesos,” he said. “Hell, no, I only want to talk to her.”

Maria beckoned to him from the door in back. She was a sallow woman with big eyes set far apart in bluish sacks. Through the crumpled pink dress tight over the bulge of her breasts Joe could make out the rings of crinkled flesh round the nipples. They sat down at a table in the back room. “Gimme two beers,” Joe yelled through the door.

“Watta you wan’, iho de mi alma?” asked Maria. “You savvy Doc Sidner?” “Sure me savvy all yanki. Watta you wan’ you no go wid beeg sheep?” “No go wid beeg sheep… Fight wid beeg sonofabeech, see?”

“Ché!” Maria breasts shook like jelly when she laughed. She put a fat hand at the back of his neck and drew his face towards hers. “Poor baby… black eye.” “Sure he gave me a black eye.” Joe pulled away from her. “Petty officer. I knocked him cold, see… Navy’s no place for me after that… I’m through. Say, Doc said you knew a guy could fake A.B. certificates… able seaman savvy? Me for the Merchant Marine from now on, Maria.”

Joe drank down his beer.

She sat shaking her head saying, “Ché… pobrecito… Ché.” Then she said in a tearful voice, “’Ow much dollars you got?” “Twenty,” said Joe. “Heem want fiftee.” “I guess I’m f — d for fair then.”

Maria walked round to the back of his chair and put a fat arm around his neck, leaning over him with little clucking noises. “Wait a minute, we tink… sabes?” Her big breast pressing against his neck and shoulder made him feel itchy; he didn’t like her touching him in the morning when he was sober like this. But he sat there until she suddenly let out a parrot screech. “Paquito… ven acá.”

A dirty pearshaped man with a red face and neck came in from the back. They talked Spanish over Joe’s head. At last she patted his cheek and said, “Awright Paquito sabe where heem live… maybe heem take twenty, sabes?”

Joe got to his feet. Paquito took off the smudged cook’s apron and lit a cigarette. “You savvy A.B. papers?” said Joe walking up and facing him. He nodded, “Awright,” Joe gave Maria a hug and a little pinch. “You’re a good girl, Maria.” She followed them grinning to the door of the bar.

Outside Joe looked sharply up and down the street. Not a uniform. At the end of the street a crane tilted black above the cement warehouse buildings. They got on a streetcar and rode a long time without saying anything. Joe sat staring at the floor with his hands dangling between his knees until Paquito poked him. They got out in a cheaplooking suburban section of new cement houses already dingy. Paquito rang at a door like all the other doors and after a while a man with redrimmed eyes and big teeth like a horse came and opened it. He and Paquito talked Spanish a long while through the halfopen door. Joe stood first on one foot and then on the other. He could tell that they were sizing up how much they could get out of him by the way they looked at him sideways as they talked.

He was just about to break in when the man in the door spoke to him in cracked cockney. “You give the blighter five pesos for his trouble, mytey, an’ we’ll settle this hup between wahte men.” Joe shelled out what silver he had in his pocket and Paquito went.

Joe followed the limey into the front hall that smelt of cabbage and frying grease and wash day. When he got inside he put his hand on Joe’s shoulder and said, blowing stale whiskybreath in his face, “Well, mytey, ’ow much can you afford?” Joe drew away. “Twenty American dollars’s all I got,” he said through his teeth. The limey shook his head, “Only four quid… well, there’s no ’arm in seein’ what we can do, is there, mytey? Let’s see it.” While the limey stood looking at him Joe took off his belt, picked out a couple of stitches with the small blade of his jackknife and pulled out two orangebacked American bills folded long. He unfolded them carefully and was about to hand them over when he thought better of it and put them in his pocket. “Now let’s take a look at the paper,” he said grinning.

The limey’s redrimmed eyes looked tearful; he said we ought to be ’elpful one to another and gryteful when a bloke risked a forger’s hend to ’elp ’is fellow creatures. Then he asked Joe his name, age and birthplace, how long he’d been to sea and all that and went into an inside room, carefully locking the door after him.

Joe stood in the hall. There was a clock ticking somewhere. The ticks dragged slower and slower. At last Joe heard the key turn in the lock and the limey came out with two papers in his hand. “You oughter realize what I’m doin’ for yez, mytey….” Joe took the paper. He wrinkled his forehead and studied it; looked all right to him. The other paper was a note authorizing Titterton’s Marine Agency to garnishee Joe’s pay monthly until the sum of ten pounds had been collected. “But look here you,” he said, “that makes seventy dollars I’m shelling out.” The limey said think of the risk he was tyking and ’ow times was ’ard and that arfter all he could tyke it or leave it. Joe followed him into the paperlittered inside room and leaned over the desk and signed with a fountain pen.

They went downtown on the streetcar and got off at Rivadavia Street. Joe followed the limey into a small office back of a warehouse. “’Ere’s a smart young ’and for you, Mr. McGregor,” the limey said to a biliouslooking Scotchman who was walking up and down chewing his nails.

Joe and Mr. McGregor looked at each other. “American?” “Yes.” “You’re not expectin’ American pay I’m supposin’?”

The limey went up to him and whispered something; McGregor looked at the certificate and seemed satisfied. “All right, sign in the book…. Sign under the last name.” Joe signed and handed the limey the twenty dollars. That left him flat. “Well, cheeryoh, mytey.” Joe hesitated a moment before he took the limey’s hand. “So long,” he said.

“Go get your dunnage and be back here in an hour,” said McGregor in a rasping voice. “Haven’t got any dunnage. I’ve been on the beach,” said Joe, weighing the cigarbox in his hand. “Wait outside then and I’ll take you aboard the Argyle by and by.” Joe stood for a while in the warehouse door looking out into the street. Hell, he’d seen enough of B.A. He sat on a packingcase marked Tibbett & Tibbett, Enameled Ware, Blackpool, to wait for Mr. McGregor, wondering if he was the skipper or the mate. Time sure would drag all right till he got out of B.A.

when the telegram came that she was dying (the streetcarwheels screeched round the bellglass like all the pencils on all the slates in all the schools) walking around Fresh Pond the smell of puddlewater willowbuds in the raw wind shrieking streecarwheels rattling on loose trucks through the Boston suburbs grief isnt a uniform and go shock the Booch and drink wine for supper at the Lenox before catching the Federal

Jack Reed

was the son of a United States Marshal, a prominent citizen of Portland Oregon.

He was a likely boy

so his folks sent him east to school

and to Harvard.

Twentyfive days at sea on the steamer Argyle, Glasgow, Captain Thompson, loaded with hides, chipping rust, daubing red lead on steel plates that were sizzling hot griddles in the sun, painting the stack from dawn to dark, pitching and rolling in the heavy dirty swell; bedbugs in the bunks in the stinking focastle, slumgullion for grub, with potatoes full of eyes and mouldy beans, cockroaches mashed on the messtable, but a tot of limejuice every day in accordance with the regulations; then sickening rainy heat and Trinidad blue in the mist across the ruddy water.

Going through the Boca it started to rain and the islands heaped with ferny parisgreen foliage went grey under the downpour. By the time they got her warped into the wharf at Port of Spain, everybody was soaked to the skin with rain and sweat. Mr. McGregor, striding up and down in a souwester purple in the face, lost his voice from the heat and had to hiss out his orders in a mean whisper. Then the curtain of the rain lifted, the sun came out and everything steamed. Apart from the heat everybody was sore because there was talk that they were going up to the Pitch Lake to load asphaltum.

Next day nothing happened. The hides in the forward hold stank when they unbattened the hatches. Clothes and bedding, hung out to dry in the torrid glare of sun between showers, was always getting soaked again before they could get it in. While it was raining there was nowhere you could keep dry; the awning over the deck dripped continually.

In the afternoon, Joe’s watch got off, though it wasn’t much use going ashore because nobody had gotten any pay. Joe found himself sitting under a palm tree on a bench in a sort of a park near the waterfront staring at his feet. It began to rain and he ducked under an awning in front of a bar. There were electric fans in the bar; a cool whiff of limes and rum and whiskey in iced drinks wafted out through the open door. Joe was thirsty for a beer but he didn’t have a red cent. The rain hung like a bead curtain at the edge of the awning.

Standing beside him was a youngish man in a white suit and a panama hat, who looked like an American. He glanced at Joe several times, then he caught his eye and smiled, “Are you an Am-m-merican,” he said. He stuttered a little when he talked. “I am that,” said Joe.

There was a pause. Then the man held out his hand. “Welcome to our city,” he said. Joe noticed that he had a slight edge on. The man’s palm was soft when he shook his hand. Joe didn’t like the way his handshake felt. “You live here?” he asked. The man laughed. He had blue eyes and a round poutlipped face that looked friendly. “Hell no… I’m only here for a couple of days on this West India cruise. Much b-b-better have saved my money and stayed home. I wanted to go to Europe but you c-c-can’t on account of the war.” “Yare, that’s all they talk about on the bloody limejuicer I’m on, the war.”

“Why they brought us to this hole I can’t imagine and now there’s something the matter with the boat and we can’t leave for two days.”

“That must be the Monterey.”

“Yes. It’s a terrible boat, nothing on board but women. I’m glad to run into a fellow I can talk to. Seems to be nothing but niggers down here.”

“Looks like they had ’em all colors in Trinidad.”

“Say, this rain isn’t going to stop for a hell of a time. Come in and have a drink with me.”

Joe looked at him suspiciously. “All right,” he said finally, “but I might as well tell you right now I can’t treat you back… I’m flat and those goddam Scotchmen won’t advance us any pay.” “You’re a sailor, aren’t you?” asked the man when they got to the bar. “I work on a boat, if that’s what you mean.”

“What’ll you have… They make a fine Planter’s punch here. Ever tried that?” “I’ll drink a beer… I usually drink beer.” The barkeeper was a broadfaced chink with a heartbroken smile like a very old monkey’s. He put the drinks down before them very gently as if afraid of breaking the glasses. The beer was cold and good in its dripping glass. Joe drank it off. “Say, you don’t know any baseball scores, do you? Last time I saw a paper looked like the Senators had a chance for the pennant.”

The man took off his panama hat and mopped his brow with a handkerchief. He had curly black hair. He kept looking at Joe as if he was making up his mind about something. Finally he said, “Say my name’s… Wa-wa-wa-… Warner Jones.” “They call me Yank on the Argyle… In the navy they called me Slim.”

“So you were in the navy, were you? I thought you looked more like a jackie than a merchant seaman, Slim.”

“That so?”

The man who said his name was Jones ordered two more of the same. Joe was worried. But what the hell, they can’t arrest a guy for a deserter on British soil. “Say, did you say you knew anything about the baseball scores? The leagues must be pretty well underway by now.”

“I got the papers up at the hotel… like to look at them?”

“I sure would.”

The rain stopped. The pavement was already dry when they came out of the bar.

“Say, I’m going to take a ride around this island. Tell me you can see wild monkeys and all sorts of things. Why don’t you come along? I’m bored to death of sightseeing by myself.”

Joe thought a minute. “These clothes ain’t fit….”

“What the hell, this isn’t Fifth Avenue. Come ahead.” The man who said his name was Jones signalled a nicely polished Ford driven by a young chinaman. The chinaman wore glasses and a dark blue suit and looked like a college student; he talked with an English accent. He said he’d drive them round the town and out to the Blue Pool. As they were setting off the man who said his name was Jones said, “Wait a minute,” and ran in the bar and got a flask of Planter’s punch.

He talked a blue streak all the time they were driving out past the British bungalows and brick institution buildings and after that out along the road through rubbery blue woods so dense and steamy it seemed to Joe there must be a glass roof overhead somewhere. He said how he liked adventure and travel and wished he was free to ship on boats and bum around and see the world and that it must be wonderful to depend only on your own sweat and muscle the way Joe was doing. Joe said, “Yare?” But the man who said his name was Jones paid no attention and went right on and said how he had to take care of his mother and that was a great responsibility and sometimes he thought he’d go mad and he’d been to a doctor about it and the doctor had advised him to take a trip, but that the food wasn’t any good on the boat and gave him indigestion and it was all full of old women with daughters they wanted to marry off and it made him nervous having women run after him like that. The worst of it was not having a friend to talk to about whatever he had on his mind when he got lonely. He wished he had a nice good looking fellow who’d been around and wasn’t a softy and knew what life was and could appreciate beauty for a friend, a fellow like Joe in fact. His mother was awfully jealous and didn’t like the idea of his having any intimate friends and would always get sick or try to hold out on his allowance when she found out about his having any friends, because she wanted him to be always tied to her apron strings but he was sick and tired of that and from now on he was going to do what he damn pleased, and she didn’t have to know about everything he did anyway.

He kept giving Joe cigarettes and offering them to the chinaman who said each time, “Thank you very much, sir. I have forgone smoking.” Between them they had finished the flask of punch and the man who said his name was Jones was beginning to edge over towards Joe in the seat, when the chinaman stopped the car at the end of a little path and said, “If you wish to view the Blue Pool you must walk up there almost seven minutes, sir. It is the principal attraction of the island of Trinidad.”

Joe hopped out of the car and went to make water beside a big tree with shaggy red bark. The man who said his name was Jones came up beside him. “Two minds with but a single thought,” he said. Joe said, “Yare,” and went and asked the chinaman where they could see some monkeys.

“The Blue Pool,” said the chinaman, “is one of their favorite re sorts.” He got out of the car and walked around it looking intently with his black beads of eyes into the foliage over their heads. Suddenly he pointed. Something black was behind a shaking bunch of foliage. A screechy giggle came from behind it and three monkeys went off flying from branch to branch with long swinging leaps. In a second they were gone and all you could see was the branches stirring at intervals through the woods where they jumped. One of them had a pinkish baby monkey hanging on in front. Joe was tickled. He’d never seen monkeys really wild like that before. He went off up the path, walking fast so that the man who said his name was Jones had trouble keeping up to him. Joe wanted to see some more monkeys.

After a few minutes’ walk up hill he began to hear a waterfall. Something made him think of Great Falls and Rock Creek and he went all soft inside. There was a pool under a waterfall hemmed in by giant trees. “Dod gast it, I’ve a mind to take me a dip,” he said. “Wouldn’t there be snakes, Slim?” “Snakes won’t bother you, ’less you bother ’em first.”

But when they got right up to the pool they saw that there were people picnicking there, girls in light pink and blue dresses, two or three men in white ducks, grouped under striped umbrellas. Two Hindoo servants were waiting on them, bringing dishes out of a hamper. Across the pool came the chirp-chirp of cultivated English voices. “Shoot, we can’t go swimmin’ here and they won’t be any monkeys either.”

“Suppose we joined them… I might introduce myself and you would be my kid brother. I’ve got a letter to a Colonel Somebody but I felt too blue to present it.”

“What the hell do they want to be fartin’ around here for?” said Joe and started back down the path again. He didn’t see any more monkeys and by the time he’d got back to the car big drops had started to fall.

“That’ll spoil their goddam picnic,” he said, grinning to the man who said his name was Jones when he came up, the sweat running in streams down his face. “My, you’re a fast walker, Slim.” He puffed and patted him on the back. Joe got into the car. “I guess we’re goin’ to get it.” “Sirs,” said the chinaman, “I will return to the city for I perceive that a downpour is imminent.”

By the time they’d gone a half a mile it was raining so hard the chinaman couldn’t see to drive. He ran the car into a small shed on the side of the road. The rain pounding on the tin roof overhead sounded loud as a steamboat letting off steam. The man who said his name was Jones started talking; he had to yell to make himself heard above the rain. “I guess you see some funny sights, Slim, leading the life you lead.”

Joe got out of the car and stood facing the sudden curtain of rain; the spray in his face felt almost cool. The man who said his name was Jones sidled up to him holding out a cigarette. “How did you like it in the navy?”

Joe took the cigarette, lit it and said, “Not so good.”

“I’ve been friends with lots of navy boys… I suppose you liked raising cain on shore leave, didn’t you?” Joe said he didn’t usually have much pay to raise cain with, used to play ball sometimes, that wasn’t so bad. “But, Slim, I thought sailors didn’t care what they did when they got in port.” “I guess some of the boys try to paint the town red, but they don’t usually have enough jack to get very far.” “Maybe you and I can paint the town red in Port of Spain, Slim.” Joe shook his head. “No, I gotta go back on board ship.”

The rain increased till the tin roof roared so Joe couldn’t hear what the man who said his name was Jones was trying to say, then slackened and stopped entirely. “Well, at least you come up to my room in the hotel, Slim, and we’ll have a couple of drinks. Nobody knows me here. I can do anything I like.” “I’d like to see the sports page of that paper from home if you don’t mind.”

They got into the car and rode back to town along roads brimmed with water like canals. The sun came out hot and everything was in a blue steam. It was late afternoon. The streets of the town were crowded; hindoos with turbans, chinks in natty Hart Schaffner and Marx clothes, redfaced white men dressed in white, raggedy shines of all colors.

Joe felt uncomfortable going through the lobby of the hotel in his dungarees, pretty wet at that, and he needed a shave. The man who said his name was Jones put his arm over his shoulders going up the stairs. His room was big with tall narrow shuttered windows and smelt of bay rum. “My, but I’m hot and wet,” he said. “I’m going to take a shower… but first we’d better ring for a couple of gin fizzes…. Don’t you want to take your clothes off and take it easy? His skin’s about as much clothes as a fellow can stand in this weather.” Joe shook his head, “They stink too much,” he said. “Say, have you got them papers?”

The hindoo servant came with the drinks while the man who said his name was Jones was in the bathroom. Joe took the tray. There was something about the expression of the hindoo’s thin mouth and black eyes looking at something behind you in the room that made Joe sore. He wanted to hit the tobaccocolored bastard. The man who said his name was Jones came back looking cool in a silk bathrobe.

“Sit down, Slim, and we’ll have a drink and a chat.” The man ran his fingers gently over his forehead as if it ached and through his curly black hair and settled in an armchair. Joe sat down in a straight chair across the room. “My, I think this heat would be the end of me if I stayed a week in this place. I don’t see how you stand it, doing manual work and everything. You must be pretty tough!”

Joe wanted to ask about the newspapers but the man who said his name was Jones was talking again, saying how he wished he was tough, seeing the world like that, meeting all kinds of fellows, going to all kinds of joints, must see some funny sights, must be funny all these fellows bunking together all these days at sea, rough and tumble, hey? and then nights ashore, raising cain, painting the town red, several fellows with one girl. “If I was living like that, I wouldn’t care what I did, no reputation to lose, no danger of somebody trying to blackmail you, only have to be careful to keep out of jail, hay? Why, Slim, I’d like to go along with you and lead a life like that.” “Yare?” said Joe.

The man who said his name was Jones rang for another drink. When the hindoo servant had gone Joe asked again about the papers. “Honestly, Slim, I looked everywhere for them. They must have been thrown out.” “Well, I guess I’ll be gettin’ aboard my bloody limejuicer.” Joe had his hand on the door. The man who said his name was Jones came running over and took his hand and said, “No, you’re not going. You said you’d go on a party with me. You’re an awful nice boy. You won’t be sorry. You can’t go away like this, now that you’ve got me feeling all sort of chummy and you know amorous. Don’t you ever feel that way, Slim? I’ll do the handsome thing. I’ll give you fifty dollars.” Joe shook his head and pulled his hand away.

He had to give him a shove to get the door open; he ran down the white marble steps and out into the street.

It was about dark; Joe walked along fast. The sweat was pouring off him. He was cussing under his breath as he walked along. He felt rotten and sore and he’d wanted real bad to see some papers from home.

He loafed up and down in a little in the sort of park place where he’d sat that afternoon, then he started down towards the wharves. Might as well turn in. The smell of frying from eating joints reminded him he was hungry. He turned into one before he remembered he didn’t have a cent in his pocket. He followed the sound of a mechanical piano and found himself in the red light district. Standing in the doorways of the little shacks there were nigger wenches of all colors and shapes, halfbreed Chinese and Indian women, a few faded fat German or French women; one little mulatto girl who reached her hand out and touched his shoulder as he passed was damn pretty. He stopped to talk to her, but when he said he was broke, she laughed and said, “Go long from here, Mister No-Money Man… no room here for a No-Money Man.”

When he got back on board he couldn’t find the cook to try and beg a little grub off him so he took a chaw and let it go at that. The focastle was like an oven. He went up on deck with only a pair of overalls on and walked up and down with the watchman who was a pinkfaced youngster from Dover everybody called Tiny. Tiny said he’d heard the old man and Mr. McGregor talking in the cabin about how they’d be off tomorrow to St. Luce to load limes and then ’ome to blighty and would ’e be glad to see the tight little hile an’ get off this bleedin’ crahft, not ’arf. Joe said a hell of a lot of good it’d do him, his home was in Washington, D.C. “I want to get out of the c — g life and get a job that pays something. This way every bastardly tourist with a little jack thinks he can hire you for his punk.” Joe told Tiny about the man who said his name was Jones and he laughed like he’d split. “Fifty dollars, that’s ten quid. I’d a ’ad ’arf a mind to let the toff ’ave a go at me for ten quid.”

The night was absolutely airless. The mosquitoes were beginning to get at Joe’s bare neck and arms. A sweet hot haze came up from the slack water round the wharves blurring the lights down the waterfront. They took a couple of turns without saying anything.

“My eye what did ’e want ye to do, Yank?” said Tiny giggling. “Aw to hell with him,” said Joe. “I’m goin’ to get out of this life. Whatever happens, wherever you are, the seaman gets the’s — y end of the stick. Ain’t that true, Tiny?”

“Not ’arf… ten quid! Why, the bleedin’ toff ought to be ashaymed of hisself. Corruptin’ morals, that’s what ’e’s after. Ought to go to ’is ’otel with a couple of shipmytes and myke him pay blackmyl. There’s many an old toff in Dover payin’ blackmyl for doin’ less ’n ’e did. They comes down on a vacaytion and goes after the bath’ouse boys…. Blackmyl ’im, that’s what I’d do, Yank.”

Joe didn’t say anything. After a while he said, “Jeez, an’ when I was a kid I thought I wanted to go to the tropics.”

“This ain’t tropics, it’s a bleedin’ ’ell ’ole, that’s what it is.”

They took another couple of turns. Joe went and leaned over the side looking down into the greasy blackness. God damn these mosquitoes. When he spat out his plug of tobacco it made a light plunk in the water. He went down into the focastle again, crawled into his bunk and pulled the blanket over his head and lay there sweating. “Darn it, I wanted to see the baseball scores.”

Goodby Broadway

Hello France

We’re ten million strong

the raindrops fall one by one out of the horsechestnut tree over the arbor onto the table in the abandoned beergarden and the puddly gravel and my clipped skull where my fingers move gently forward and back over the fuzzy knobs and hollows

spring and we’ve just been swimming in the Marne way off somewhere beyond the fat clouds on the horizon they are hammering on a tin roof in the rain in the spring after a swim in the Marne with that hammering to the north pounding the thought of death into our ears

the winey thought of death stings in the spring blood that throbs in the sunburned neck up and down the belly under the tight belt hurries like cognac into the tips of my toes and the lobes of my ears and my fingers stroking the fuzzy closecropped skull

shyly tingling fingers feel out the limits of the hard immortal skull under the flesh a deathshead and skeleton sits wearing glasses in the arbor under the lucid occasional raindrops inside the new khaki uniform inside my twentyoneyearold body that’s been swimming in the Marne in red and whitestriped trunks in Chalons in the spring

The years Dick was little he never heard anything about his Dad, but when he was doing his homework evenings up in his little room in the attic he’d start thinking about him sometimes; he’d throw himself on the bed and lie on his back trying to remember what he had been like and Oak Park and everything before Mother had been so unhappy and they had had to come east to live with Aunt Beatrice. There was the smell of bay rum and cigarsmoke and he was sitting on the back of an upholstered sofa beside a big man in a panama hat who shook the sofa when he laughed; he held on to Dad’s back and punched his arm and the muscle was hard like a chair or a table and when Dad laughed he could feel it rumble in his back, “Dicky, keep your dirty feet off my palm beach suit,” and he was on his hands and knees in the sunlight that poured through the lace curtains of the window trying to pick the big purple roses off the carpet; they were all standing in front of a red automobile and Dad’s face was red and he smelt of armpits and white steam was coming out around, and people were saying Safetyvalve. Downstairs Dad and Mummy were at dinner and there was company and wine and a new butler and it must be awful funny because they laughed so much and the knives and forks went click click all the time; Dad found him in his nightgown peeking through the portières and came out awful funny and excited smelling like wine and whaled him and mother came out and said, “Henry, don’t strike the child,” and they stood hissing at one another in low voices behind the portières on account of company and Mummy had picked Dick up and carried him upstairs crying in her evening dress all lacy and frizzly and with big puffy silk sleeves; touching silk put his teeth on edge, made him shudder all down his spine. He and Henry had had tan overcoats with pockets in them like grownup overcoats and tan caps and he’d lost the button off the top of his. Way back there it was sunny and windy; Dick got tired and sickyfeeling when he tried to remember back like that and it got him so he couldn’t keep his mind on tomorrow’s lessons and would pull out “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” that he had under the mattress because Mother took books away when they weren’t just about the lessons and would read just a little and then he’d forget everything reading and wouldn’t know his lessons the next day.

All the same he got along very well at school and the teachers liked him, particularly Miss Teazle, the English teacher, because he had nice manners and said little things that weren’t fresh but that made them laugh. Miss Teazle said he showed real feeling for English composition. One Christmas he sent her a little rhyme he made up about the Christ Child and the Three Kings and she declared he had a gift.

The better he liked it in school the worse it was at home. Aunt Beatrice was always nag nag nag from morning till night. As if he didn’t know that he and mother were eating her bread and sleeping under her roof; they paid board, didn’t they? even if they didn’t pay as much as Major and Mrs. Glen or Dr. Kern did, and they certainly did enough work to pay for their keep anyway. He’d heard Mrs. Glen saying when Dr. Atwood was calling and Aunt Beatrice was out of the room how it was a shame that poor Mrs. Savage, such a sweet woman, and a good churchwoman too, and the daughter of a general in the army, had to work her fingers to the bone for her sister who was only a fussy old maid and overcharged so, though of course she did keep a very charming house and set an excellent table, not like a boarding house at all, more like a lovely refined private home, such a relief to find in Trenton, that was such a commercial city so full of working people and foreigners; too bad that the daughters of General Ellsworth should be reduced to taking paying guests. Dick felt Mrs. Glen might have said something about his carrying out the ashes and shovelling snow and all that. Anyway he didn’t think a highschool student ought to have to take time from his studies to do the chores.

Dr. Atwood was the rector of the St. Gabriel’s Episcopal Church where Dick had to sing in the choir every Sunday at two services while mother and his brother Henry S., who was three years older than he was and worked in a drafting office in Philadelphia and only came home weekends, sat comfortably in a pew. Mother loved St. Gabriel’s because it was so highchurch and they had processions and even incense. Dick hated it on account of choirpractice and having to keep his surplice clean and because he never had any pocketmoney to shoot craps with behind the bench in the vestry and he was always the one who had to stand at the door and whisper, “Cheeze it,” if anybody was coming.

One Sunday, right after his thirteenth birthday, he’d walked home from church with his mother and Henry feeling hungry and wondering all the way if they were going to have fried chicken for dinner. They were all three stepping up onto the stoop, Mother leaning a little on Dick’s arm and the purple and green poppies on her wide hat jiggling in the October sunlight, when he saw Aunt Beatrice’s thin face looking worriedly out through the glass panel of the front door. “Leona,” she said in an excited reproachful voice, “he’s here.” “Who, Beatrice dear?” “You know well enough… I don’t know what to do… he says he wants to see you. I made him wait in the lower hall on account of… er… our friends.”

“Oh, God, Beatrice, haven’t I borne enough from that man?”

Mother let herself drop onto the bench under the stagshorn coatrack in the hall. Dick and Henry stared at the white faces of the two women. Aunt Beatrice pursed up her lips and said in a spiteful tone, “You boys had better go out and walk round the block. I can’t have two big hulks like you loafing round the house. You be back for Sunday dinner at one thirty sharp… run along now.”

“Why, what’s the matter with Aunt Beatrice?” asked Dick as they walked off down the street. “Got the pip I guess… she gives me a pain in the neck,” Henry said in a superior tone.

Dick walked along kicking at the pavement with his toes.

“Say, we might go around and have a soda… they have awful good sodas at Dryer’s.”

“Got any dough?”

Dick shook his head.

“Well, you needn’t think I’m goin’ to treat you…. Jimminy criskets, Trenton’s a rotten town…. In Philadelphia I seen a drugstore with a sodafountain half a block long.”

“Aw, you.”

“I bet you don’t remember when we lived in Oak Park, Dick…. Now Chicago’s a fine town.” “Sure I do… and you an’ me going to kindergarden and Dad being there and everything.”

“Hell’s bells, I wanta smoke.”

“Mother’ll smell it on you.”

“Don’t give a damn if she does.”

When they got home Aunt Beatrice met them at the front door looking sore as a crab and told them to go down to the basement. Mother wanted to see them. The back stairs smelt of Sunday dinner and sage chickenstuffing. They hobbled down as slowly as possible, it must be about Henry’s smoking. She was in the dark basement hall. By the light of the gasjet against the wall Dick couldn’t make out who the man was. Mother came up to them and they could see that her eyes were red. “Boys, it’s your father,” she said in a weak voice. The tears began running down her face.

The man had a grey shapeless head and his hair was cut very short, the lids of his eyes were red and lashless and his eyes were the same color as his face. Dick was scared. It was somebody he’d known when he was little; it couldn’t be Dad.

“For God’s sake, no more waterworks, Leona,” the man said in a whining voice. As he stood staring into the boys’ faces his body wabbled a little as if he was weak in the knees. “They’re good lookers both of them, Leona… I guess they don’t think much of their poor old Dad.”

They all stood there without saying anything in the dark basement hall in the rich close smell of Sunday dinner from the kitchen. Dick felt he ought to talk but something had stuck in his throat. He found he was stuttering, “Ha-ha-hav-have you been sick?”

The man turned to Mother. “You’d better tell them all about it when I’m gone… don’t spare me… nobody’s ever spared me…. Don’t look at me as if I was a ghost, boys, I won’t hurt you.” A nervous tremor shook the lower part of his face. “All my life I’ve always been the one has gotten hurt…. Well, this is a long way from Oak Park… I just wanted to take a look at you, good-by…. I guess the likes of me had better go out the basement door… I’ll meet you at the bank at eleven sharp, Leona, and that’ll be the last thing you’ll ever have to do for me.”

The gasjet went red when the door opened and flooded the hall with reflected sunlight. Dick was shaking for fear the man was going to kiss him, but all he did was give them each a little trembly pat on the shoulder. His suit hung loose on him and he seemed to have trouble lifting his feet in their soft baggy shoes up the five stone steps to the street.

Mother closed the door sharply.

“He’s going to Cuba,” she said. “That’s the last time we’ll see him. I hope God can forgive him for all this, your poor mother never can… at least he’s out of that horrible place.” “Where was he, Mom?” asked Henry in a business like voice. “Atlanta.”

Dick ran away and up to the top floor and into his own room in the attic and threw himself on the bed sobbing.

They none of them went down to dinner although they were hun gry and the stairs were rich with the smell of roast chicken. When Pearl was washing up Dick tiptoed into the kitchen and coaxed a big heaping plate of chicken and stuffing and sweetpotatoes out of her; she said to run along and eat it in the back yard because it was her day out and she had the dishes to do. He sat on a dusty stepladder in the laundry eating. He could hardly get the chicken down on account of the funny stiffness in his throat. When he’d finished, Pearl made him help her wipe.

COMING YEAR PROMISES REBIRTH OF RAILROADS

remembering the grey crooked fingers the thick drip of blood off the canvas the bubbling when the lungcases try to breathe the muddy scraps of flesh you put in the ambulance alive and haul out dead

three of us sit in the dry cement fountain of the little garden with the pink walls in Récicourt

No there must be some way they taught us Land of the Free conscience Give me liberty or give me Well they give us death

sunny afternoon through the faint aftersick of mustardgas I smell the box the white roses and the white phlox with a crimson eye three brownandwhitestriped snails hang with infinite delicacy from a honeysucklebranch overhead up in the blue a sausageballoon grazes drowsily like a tethered cow there are drunken wasps clinging to the tooripe pears that fall and squash whenever the near guns spew their heavy shells that go off rumbling through the sky

with a whir that makes you remember walking in the woods and starting a woodcock

welltodo country people carefully built the walls and the little backhouse with the cleanscrubbed seat and the quartermoon in the door like the backhouse of an old farm at home carefully planted the garden and savored the fruit and the flowers and carefully planned this war

to hell with ’em Patrick Henry in khaki submits to shortarm inspection and puts all his pennies in a Liberty Loan or give me

arrivés shrapnel twanging its harps out of tiny powderpuff clouds invites us delicately to glory we happy watching the careful movements of the snails in the afternoon sunlight talking in low voices about

La Libre Belgique The Junius papers Areopagitica Milton went blind for freedom of speech If you hit the words Democracy will understand even the bankers and the clergymen I you we must

Randolph Bourne

came as an inhabitant of this earth

without the pleasure of choosing his dwelling or his career.

He was a hunchback, grandson of a congregational minister, born in 1886 in Bloomfield, New Jersey; there he attended grammar-school and highschool.

At the age of seventeen he went to work as secretary to a Morristown businessman.

He worked his way through Columbia working in a pianola record factory in Newark, working as proofreader, pianotuner, accompanist in a vocal studio in Carnegie Hall.

At Columbia he studied with John Dewey,

got a travelling fellowship that took him to England Paris Rome Berlin Copenhagen,

wrote a book on the Gary schools.

In Europe he heard music, a great deal of Wagner and Sciabine

and bought himself a black cape.

If you dont like your Uncle Sammy

If you dont like the red white and blue

Little Eveline and Arget and Lade and Gogo lived on the top floor of a yellowbrick house on the North Shore Drive. Arget and Lade were little Eveline’s sisters. Gogo was her little brother littler than Eveline; he had such nice blue eyes but Miss Mathilda had horrid blue eyes. On the floor below was Dr. Hutchins’ study where Yourfather mustn’t be disturbed, and Dearmother’s room where she stayed all morning painting dressed in a lavender smock. On the groundfloor was the drawingroom and the diningroom, where parishioners came and little children must be seen and not heard, and at dinnertime you could smell good things to eat and hear knives and forks and tinkly companyvoices and Yourfather’s booming scary voice and when Yourfather’s voice was going all the companyvoices were quiet. Yourfather was Dr. Hutchins but Our Father art in heaven. When Yourfather stood beside the bed at night to see that little girls said their prayers Eveline would close her eyes tightscared. It was only when she’d hopped into bed and snuggled way down so that the covers were right across her nose that she felt cosy.

George was a dear although Adelaide and Margaret teased him and said he was their Assistant like Mr. Blessington was Father’s assistant. George always caught things first and then they all had them. It was lovely when they had the measles and the mumps all at once. They stayed in bed and had hyacinths in pots and guinea pigs and Dearmother used to come up and read the Jungle Book and do funny pictures and Yourfather would come up and make funny birdbeaks that opened out of paper and tell stories he made up right out of his head and Dearmother said he had said prayers for you children in church and that made them feel fine and grownup.

When they were all up and playing in the nursery George caught something again and had monia on account of getting cold on his chest and Yourfather was every solemn and said not to grieve if God called little brother away. But God brought little George back to them only he was delicate after that and had to wear glasses, and when Dearmother let Eveline help bathe him because Miss Mathilda was having the measles too Eveline noticed he had something funny there where she didn’t have anything. She asked Dearmother if it was a mump, but Dearmother scolded her and said she was a vulgar little girl to have looked. “Hush, child, don’t ask questions.” Eveline got red all over and cried and Adelaide and Margaret wouldn’t speak to her for days on account of her being a vulgar little girl.

Summers they all went to Maine with Miss Mathilda in a drawingroom. George and Eveline slept in the upper and Adelaide and Margaret slept in the lower; Miss Mathilda was trainsick and didn’t close her eyes all night on the sofa opposite. The train went rumblebump chug chug and the trees and houses ran by, the front ones fast and those way off very slow and at night the engine wailed and the children couldn’t make out why the strong nice tall conductor was so nice to Miss Mathilda who was so hateful and trainsick. Maine smelt all woodsy and mother and father were there to meet them and they all put on khaki jumpers and went camping with Father and the guides. It was Eveline who learned to swim quicker than anybody.

Going back to Chicago it would be autumn and Mother loved the lovely autumn foliage that made Miss Mathilda feel so traurig on account of winter coming on, and the frost on the grass beyond the shadows of the cars out of the trainwindow in the morning. At home Sam would be scrubbing the enamel paint and Phoebe and Miss Mathilda would be putting up curtains and the nursery would smell traurig of mothballs. One fall Father started to read aloud a little of the Ideals of the King every night after they were all tucked into bed. All that winter Adelaide and Margaret were King Arthur and Queen Whenever. Eveline wanted to be Elaine the Fair, but Adelaide said she couldn’t because her hair was mousy and she had a face like a pie, so she had to be the Maiden Evelina.

The Maiden Evelina used to go into Miss Mathilda’s room when she was out and look at herself for a long time in the lookingglass. Her hair wasn’t mousy, it was quite fair if only they would let her have it curly instead of in pigtails and even if her eyes weren’t blue like George’s they had little green specks in them. Her forehead was noble. Miss Mathilda caught her staring like that into the mirror one day.

“Look at yourself too much and you’ll find you’re looking at the devil,” said Miss Mathilda in her nasty stiff German way.

When Eveline was twelve years old they moved to a bigger house over on Drexel Boulevard. Adelaide and Margaret went east to boardingschool at New Hope and Mother had to go spend the winter with friends at Santa Fé on account of her health. It was fun eating breakfast every morning with just Dad and George and Miss Mathilda, who was getting elderly and paid more attention to running the house and to reading Sir Gilbert Parker’s novels than to the children. Eveline didn’t like school but she liked having Dad help her with her Latin evenings and do algebra equations for her. She thought he was wonderful when he preached so kind and good from the pulpit and was proud of being the minister’s daughter at Sunday afternoon bibleclass. She thought a great deal about the fatherhood of God and the woman of Samaria and Joseph of Arimathea and Baldur the beautiful and the Brotherhood of Man and the apostle that Jesus loved. That Christmas she took around a lot of baskets to poor people’s houses. Poverty was dreadful and the poor were so scary and why didn’t God do something about the problems and evils of Chicago, and the conditions, she’d ask her father. He’d smile and say she was too young to worry about those things yet. She called him Dad now and was his Pal.

On her birthday Mother sent her a beautiful illustrated book of the Blessed Damosel by Dante Gabriel Rossetti with colored illustrations from his paintings and those of Burne Jones. She used to say the name Dante Gabriel Rossetti over and over to herself like traurig she loved it so. She started painting and writing little verses about choirs of angels and little poor children at Christmastime. The first picture she did in oils was a portrait of Elaine, the Fair, that she sent her mother for Christmas. Everybody said it showed great talent. When friends of Dad’s came to dinner they’d say when they were introduced to her, “So this is the talented one, is it?”

Adelaide and Margaret were pretty scornful about all that when they came home from school. They said the house looked dowdy and nothing had any style to it in Chicago, and wasn’t it awful being ministers’ daughters, but of course Dad wasn’t like an ordinary minister in a white tie, he was a Unitarian and very broad and more like a prominent author or scientist. George was getting to be a sulky little boy with dirty fingernails who never could keep his necktie straight and was always breaking his glasses. Eveline was working on a portrait of him the way he had been when he was little with blue eyes and gamboge curls. She used to cry over her paints she loved him so and little poor children she saw on the street. Everybody said she ought to study art.

It was Adelaide who first met Sally Emerson. One Easter they were going to put on Aglavaine and Selizette at the church for charity. Miss Rodgers the French teacher at Dr. Grant’s school was going to coach them and said that they ought to ask Mrs. Philip Payne Emerson, who had seen the original production abroad, about the scenery and costumes; and that besides her interest would be invaluable to make it go; everything that Sally Emerson was interested in went. The Hutchins girls were all excited when Dr. Hutchins called up Mrs. Emerson on the telephone and asked if Adelaide might come over some morning and ask her advice about some amateur theatricals. They’d already sat down to lunch when Adelaide came back, her eyes shining. She wouldn’t say much except that Mrs. Philip Payne Emerson knew Matterlink intimately and that she was coming to tea, but kept declaring, “She’s the most stylish woman I ever met.”

Aglavaine and Selizette didn’t turn out quite as the Hutchins girls and Miss Rodgers had hoped, though everybody said the scenery and costumes Eveline designed showed real ability, but the week after the performance, Eveline got a message one morning that Mrs. Emerson had asked her to lunch that day and only her. Adelaide and Margaret were so mad they wouldn’t speak to her. She felt pretty shaky when she set off into the icybright dusty day. At the last minute Adelaide had lent her a hat and Margaret her fur neckpiece, so that she wouldn’t disgrace them they said. By the time she got to the Emersons’ house she was chilled to the bone. She was ushered into a little dressing room with all kinds of brushes and combs and silver jars with powder and even rouge and toiletwaters in purple, green and pink bottles and left to take off her things. When she saw herself in the big mirror she almost screamed she looked so young and piefaced and her dress was so horrid. The only thing that looked any good was the foxfur so she kept that on when she went into the big upstairs lounge with its deep grey carpet soft underfoot and the sunlight pouring in through French windows onto bright colors and the black polished grandpiano. There were big bowls of freezias on every table and yellow and pink French and German books of reproductions of paintings. Even the sootbitten blocks of Chicago houses flattened under the wind and the zero sunlight looked faintly exciting and foreign through the big pattern of the yellow lace curtains. In the rich smell of the freezias there was a little expensive whisp of cigarettesmoke.

Sally Emerson came in smoking a cigarette and said, “Excuse me, my dear,” some wretched woman had had her impaled on the telephone like a butterfly on a pin for the last halfhour. They ate lunch at a little table the elderly colored man brought in all set and Eveline was treated just like a grownup woman and a glass of port poured out for her. She only dared take a sip but it was delicious and the lunch was all crispy and creamy with cheese grated on things and she would have eaten a lot if she hadn’t felt so shy. Sally Emerson talked about how clever Eveline’s costumes had been for the show and said she must keep up her drawing and talked about how there were as many people with artistic ability in Chicago as anywhere in the world and what was lacking was the milieu, the atmosphere my dear, and that the social leaders were all vicious numbskulls and that it was up to the few people who cared about art to stick together and create the rich beautiful milieu they needed, and about Paris, and about Mary Garden, and Debussy. Eveline went home with her head reeling with names and pictures, little snatches out of operas and in her nose the tickling smell of the freezias mixed with toasted cheese and cigarettesmoke. When she got home everything looked so cluttered and bare and ugly she burst out crying and wouldn’t answer any of her sisters’ questions; that made them madder than ever.

That June after school was over, they all went out to Santa Fé to see her mother. She was awfully depressed out at Santa Fé, the sun was so hot and the eroded hills were so dry and dusty and Mother had gotten so washedout looking and was reading theosophy and talking about God and the beauty of soul of the Indians and Mexicans in a way that made the children uncomfortable. Eveline read a great many books that summer and hated going out. She read Scott and Thackeray and W. J. Locke and Dumas and when she found an old copy of Trilby in the house she read it three times running. That started her seeing things in Du Maurier illustrations instead of in knights and ladies.

When she wasn’t reading she was lying flat on her back dreaming out long stories about herself and Sally Emerson. She didn’t feel well most of the time and would drop into long successions of horrid thoughts about people’s bodies that made her feel nauseated. Adelaide and Margaret told her what to do about her trouble every month but she didn’t tell them how horrid it made her feel inside. She read the Bible and looked up uterus and words like that in encyclopaedias and dictionaries. Then one night she decided she wouldn’t stand it any more and went through the medicine chest in the bathroom till she found a bottle marked POISON that had some kind of laudenum compound in it. But she wanted to write a poem before she died, she felt so lovely musically traurig about dying, but she couldn’t seem to get the rhymes right and finally fell asleep with her head on the paper. When she woke up it was dawn and she was hunched up over the table by her window, stiff and chilly in her thin nightgown. She slipped into bed shivering. Anyway she promised herself that she’d keep the bottle and kill herself whenever things seemed too filthy and horrid. That made her feel better.

That fall Margaret and Adelaide went to Vassar. Eveline would have liked to go east too but everybody said she was too young though she’d passed most of her college board exams. She stayed in Chicago and went to artclasses and lectures of one sort or another and did churchwork. It was an unhappy winter. Sally Emerson seemed to have forgotten her. The young people around the church were so stuffy and conventional. Eveline got to hate the evenings at Drexel Boulevard, and all the vague Emerson her father talked in his rich preacher’s boom. What she liked best was the work she did at Hull House. Eric Egstrom gave drawingclasses there in the evenings and she used to see him sometimes smoking a cigarette in the back passage, leaning against the wall, looking very Norse, she thought, in his grey smock full of bright fresh dabs of paint. She’d sometimes smoke a cigarette with him exchanging a few words about Manet or Claude Monet’s innumerable haystacks, all the time feeling uneasy because the conversation wasn’t more interesting and clever and afraid somebody would come and find her smoking.

Miss Mathilda said it was bad for a girl to be so dreamy and wanted her to learn to sew.

All Eveline thought about that winter was going to the Art Institute and trying to paint pictures of the Lake Front that would be colored like Whistlers but be rich and full like Millet drawings. Eric didn’t love her or else he wouldn’t be so friendly and aloof. She’d had her great love; now her life was over and she must devote herself to art. She began to wear her hair screwed up in a knot at the nape of her neck and when her sisters said it was unbecoming she said she wanted it to be unbecoming. It was at the Art Institute that her beautiful friendship with Eleanor Stoddard began. Eveline was wearing her new grey hat that she thought looked like something in a Manet portrait and got to talking with such an interesting girl. When she went home she was so excited she wrote George, who was at boarding school, about it, saying she was the first girl she’d met who really seemed to feel painting, that she could really talk about things with. And then too she was really doing something, and so independent and told things so comically. After all if love was going to be denied her she could build her life on a beautiful friendship.

Eveline was getting to like to so much in Chicago, she was really disappointed when the time came to leave for the year’s trip abroad that Dr. Hutchins had been planning for his family for so many years. But New York and getting on the Baltic and making out the tags for their baggage and the funny smell of the staterooms made her forget all about that. They had a rough trip and the boat rolled a good deal, but they sat at the captain’s table and the captain was a jovial Englishman and kept their spirits up so that they hardly missed a meal. They landed in Liverpool with twentythree pieces of baggage but lost the shawlstrap that had the medicinechest in it on the way down to London and had to spend their first morning getting it from the Lost and Found Office at St. Pancras. In London it was very foggy. George and Eveline went to see the Elgin marbles and the Tower of London and ate their lunches in A B C restaurants and had a fine time riding in the tube. Dr. Hutchins only let them stay ten days in Paris and most of that time they were making side trips to see cathedrals. Notre Dame and Rheims and Beauvais and Chartres with their bright glass and their smell of incense in cold stone and the tall grey longfaced statues nearly made Eveline a Catholic. They had a first class compartment reserved all the way to Florence and a hamper with cold chicken in it and many bottles of Saint Galmier mineral water and they made tea on a little alcohol lamp.

That winter it rained a lot and the villa was chilly and the girls squabbled among themselves a good deal and Florence seemed to be full of nothing but old English ladies; still Eveline drew from life and read Gordon Craig. She didn’t know any young men and she hated the young Italians with names out of Dante that hung around Adelaide and Margaret under the delusion that they were rich heiresses. On the whole she was glad to go home with mother a little earlier than the others who were going to take a trip to Greece. They sailed from Antwerp on the Kroonland. Eveline thought it was the happiest moment of her life when she felt the deck tremble under her feet as the steamer left the dock and the long rumble of the whistle in her ears.

Her mother didn’t go down to the diningsaloon the first night out so that Eveline was a little embarrassed going in to table all alone and had sat down and started eating her soup before she noticed that the young man opposite her was an American and goodlooking. He had blue eyes and crisp untidy tow hair. It was too wonderful when he turned out to be from Chicago. His name was Dirk McArthur. He’d been studying a year at Munich, but said he was getting out before they threw him out. He and Eveline got to be friends right away; they owned the boat after that. It was a balmy crossing for April. They played shuffleboard and decktennis and spent a lot of time in the bow watching the sleek Atlantic waves curl and break under the lunge of the ship.

One moonlight night when the moon was plunging westward through scudding spindrift the way the Kroonland was plunging through the uneasy swell, they climbed up to the crowsnest. This was an adventure; Eveline didn’t want to show she was scared. There was no watch and they were alone a little giddy in the snug canvas socket that smelt a little of sailors’ pipes. When Dirk put his arm around her shoulders Eveline’s head began to reel. She oughtn’t to let him. “Gee, you’re a good sport, Eveline,” he said in a breathless voice. “I never knew a nice girl who was a good sport before.” Without quite meaning to she turned her face towards his. Their cheeks touched and his mouth slid around and kissed her hard on the mouth. She pushed him away with a jerk.

“Hey, you’re not trying to throw me overboard, are you?” he said, laughing. “Look, Eveline, won’t you give me a little tiny kiss to show there’s no hard feeling. There’s just you and me tonight on the whole broad Atlantic.”

She kissed him scaredly on the chin. “Say, Eveline, I like you so much. You’re the swellest girl.” She smiled at him and suddenly he was hugging her tight, his legs hard and strong against her legs, his hands spread over her back, his lips trying to open her lips. She got her mouth away from him. “No, no, please don’t,” she could hear her little creaky voice saying.

“All right, I’m sorry…. No more caveman stuff, honest injun, Eveline. But you mustn’t forget that you’re the most attractive girl on the boat…. I mean in the world, you know how a feller feels.”

He started down first. Letting herself down through the opening in the bottom of the crowsnest she began to get dizzy. She was falling. His arms tightened around her.

“That’s all right, girly, your foot slipped,” he said gruffly in her ear. “I’ve got you.”

Her head was swimming, she couldn’t seem to make her arms and legs work; she could hear her little moaning voice, “Don’t drop me, Dirk, don’t drop me.”

When they finally got down the ladder to the deck Dirk leaned against the mast and let out a long breath, “Whee… you certainly give me a scare, young lady.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “It was silly of me to suddenly get girlish like that…. I must have fainted for a minute.”

“Gosh, I oughtn’t to have taken you up there.”

“I’m glad you did,” Eveline said; then she found herself blushing and hurried off down the main deck to the first class entrance and the stateroom, where she had made up a story to explain to mother how she’d torn her stocking.

She couldn’t sleep that night but lay awake in her bunk listening to the distant rhythm of the engines and the creaking of the ship and the seethe of churned seas that came in through the open porthole. She could still feel the soft brush of his cheek and the sudden tightening muscles of his arms around her shoulder. She knew now she was terribly in love with Dirk and wished he’d propose to her. But next morning she was really flattered when Judge Ganch, a tall whitehaired lawyer from Salt Lake City with a young red face and a breezy manner sat on the end of her deckchair and talked to her by the hour about his early life in the west and his unhappy marriage and politics and Teddy Roosevelt and the progressive party. She’d rather have been with Dirk, but it made her feel pretty and excited to see Dirk walk past with his nose out of joint while she listened to Judge Ganch’s stories. She wished the trip would never end.

Back in Chicago she saw a lot of Dirk McArthur. He always kissed her when he brought her home and he held her very tight when he danced with her and sometimes used to hold her hand and tell her what a nice girl she was, but he never would say anything about getting married. Once she met Sally Emerson at a dance she’d gone to with Dirk she had to admit that she wasn’t doing any painting, and Sally Emerson looked so disappointed that Eveline felt quite ashamed and started talking fast about Gordon Craig and an exhibition of Matisse she’d seen in Paris. Sally Emerson was just leaving. A young man was waiting to dance with Eveline. Sally Emerson took her hand and said: “But, Eveline, you mustn’t forget that we have high hopes of you.” And while she was dancing everything that Sally Emerson stood for and how wonderful she used to think her came sweeping through Eveline’s head; but driving home with Dirk all these thoughts were dazzled out of her in the glare of his headlights, the strong leap forward of the car on the pickup, the purr of the motor, his arm around her, the great force pressing her against him when they went around curves.

It was a hot night, he drove west through endless identical suburbs out into the prairie. Eveline knew that they ought to go home, everybody was back from Europe now and they’d notice how late she got in, but she didn’t say anything. It was only when he stopped the car that she noticed that he was very drunk. He took out a flask and offered her a drink. She shook her head. They’d stopped in front of a white barn. In the reflection of the headlights his shirtfront and his face and his mussed up hair all looked chalky white. “You don’t love me, Dirk,” she said. “Sure I do, love you better’n anybody… except myself… that’s a trouble with me… love myself best.” She rubbed her knuckles through his hair, “You’re pretty silly, do you know it?” “Ouch,” he said. It was starting to rain so he turned the car around and made for Chicago.

Eveline never knew exactly where it was they smashed up, only that she was crawling out from under the seat and that her dress was ruined and she wasn’t hurt only the rain was streaking the headlights of the cars that stopped along the road on either side of them. Dirk was sitting on the mudguard of the first car that had stopped. “Are you all right, Eveline?” he called shakily. “It’s only my dress,” she said. He was bleeding from a gash in his forehead and he was holding his arm against his body as if he were cold. Then it was all nightmare, telephoning Dad, getting Dirk to the hospital, dodging the reporters, calling up Mr. McArthur to get him to set to work to keep it out of the morning papers. It was eight o’clock of a hot spring morning when she got home wearing a raincoat one of the nurses had lent her over her ruined evening dress.

The family was all at breakfast. Nobody said anything. Then Dad got to his feet and came forward, with his napkin in his hand, “My dear, I shan’t speak of your behavior now, to say nothing of the pain and mortification you have caused all of us…. I can only say it would have served you right if you had sustained serious injuries in such an escapade. Go up and rest if you can.” Eveline went upstairs, doublelocked her door and threw herself sobbing on the bed.

As soon as they could, her mother and sisters hurried her off to Santa Fé. It was hot and dusty there and she hated it. She couldn’t stop thinking of Dirk. She began telling people she believed in free love and lay for hours on the bed in her room reading Swinburne and Laurence Hope and dreaming Dirk was there. She got so she could almost feel the insistent fingers of his hands spread over the small of her back and his mouth like that night in the crowsnest on the Kroonland. It was a kind of relief when she came down with scarlet fever and had to lie in bed for eight weeks in the isolation wing of the hospital. Everybody sent her flowers and she read a lot of books on design and interior decorating and did watercolors.

When she went up to Chicago for Adelaide’s wedding in October she had a pale mature look. Eleanor cried out when she kissed her, “My dear, you’ve grown stunningly handsome.” She had one thing on her mind, to see Dirk and get it over with. It was several days before they could arrange to meet because Dad had called him up and forbidden him to come to the house and they had a scene over the telephone. They met in the lobby of The Drake. She could see at a glance that Dirk had been hitting it up since she’d seem him. He was a little drunk now. He had a sheepish boyish look that made her feel like crying. “Well, how’s Barney Oldfield?” she said, laughing. “Rotten, gee you look stunning, Eveline…. Say The Follies of 1914 are in town, a big New York hit…. I got tickets, do you mind if we go?” “No, it’ll be bully.”

He ordered everything most expensive he could find on the bill of fare, and champagne. She had something in her throat that kept her from swallowing. She had to say it before he got too drunk.

“Dirk… this doesn’t sound very ladylike, but like this it’s too tiresome…. The way you acted last spring I thought you liked me… well, how much do you? I want to know?”

Dirk put his glass down and turned red. Then he took a deep breath and said, “Eveline, you know I’m not the marrying kind… love ’em and leave ’em’s more like it. I can’t help how I am.”

“I don’t mean I want you to marry me,” her voice rose shrilly out of control. She began to giggle. “I don’t mean I want to be made an honest woman. Anyway, there’s no reason.” She was able to laugh more naturally. “Let’s forget it…. I won’t tease you anymore.”

“You’re a good sport, Eveline. I always knew you were a good sport.”

Going down the aisle of the theatre he was so drunk she had to put her hand under his elbow to keep him from staggering. The music and cheap colors and jiggling bodies of the chorus girls all seemed to hit on some raw place inside her, so that everything she saw hurt like sweet on a jumpy tooth. Dirk kept talking all through, “See that girl… second from the left on the back row, that’s Queenie Frothingham…. You understand, Eveline. But I’ll tell you one thing, I never made a girl take the first misstep…. I haven’t got that to reproach myself with.” The usher came down and asked him to quit talking so loud, he was spoiling others’ enjoyment of the show. He gave her a dollar and said he’d be quiet as a mouse, as a little dumb mouse and suddenly went to sleep.

At the end of the first act Eveline said she had to go home, said the doctor had told her she’d have to have plenty of sleep. He insisted on taking her to her door in a taxicab and then went off to go back to the show and to Queenie. Eveline lay awake all night staring at her window. Next morning she was the first one down to breakfast. When Dad came down she told him she’d have to go to work and asked him to lend her a thousand dollars to start an interior decorating business.

a matrass covered with something from Vantine’s makes a divan in the ladyphotographer’s studio we sit on the divan and on cushions on the floor and the longnecked English actor reads the Song of Songs in rhythms

and the ladyphotographer in breastplates and silk bloomers dances the Song of Songs in rhythms

the little girl in pink is a classical dancer with panpipes but the hennahaired ladyphotographer dances the Song of Songs in rhythms with winking bellybutton and clash of breastplates in more oriental style

stay muh with flahgons comfort muh with ahpples

for I am sick of loeuve

his left hand is under muh head and his rahght hand doth embrace muh

the semiretired actress who lived upstairs let out a yell and then another Burglars secondstory men Good god she’s being attacked we men run up the stairs poor woman she’s in hysterics Its the wrong flat the stairs are full of dicks outside they’re backing up the waggon All right men on one side girls on the other what the hell kind of place is this anyway? Dicks coming in all the windows dicks coming out of the kitchenette

the hennahaired ladyphotographer holds them at bay draped in a portière waving the telephone Is this Mr. Wickersham’s office? District Attorney trying experience a few friends a little dance recital in the most brutal manner prominent actress upstairs in hysterics allright officer talk to the District Attorney he’ll tell you who I am who our friends are

Dicks slink away waggon jangles to another street the English actor is speaking Only by the greatest control I kept muh temper the swine I’m terrible when I’m aroused terrible

and the Turkish consul and his friend who were there incog belligerent nation Department of Justice Espionage hunting radicals proGermans slipped quietly out and the two of us ran down the stairs and walked fast downtown and crossed to Weehawken on the ferry

it was a night of enormous fog through which moved blunderingly the great blind shapes of steamboat sirens from the lower bay

in the bow of the ferry we breathed the rancid riverbreeze talking loud in a shouting laugh

out of the quiet streets of Weehawken incredible slanting viaducts lead up into the fog

She felt half crazy until she got on the train to go back east. Mother and Dad didn’t want her to go, but she showed them a telegram she’d wired Eleanor to send her offering her a high salary in her decorating business. She said it was an opening that wouldn’t come again and she had to take it, and anyway, as George was coming home for a vacation, they wouldn’t be entirely alone. The night she left she lay awake in her lower berth tremendously happy in the roar of the air and the swift pound of the wheels on the rails. But after St. Louis she began to worry: she’d decided she was pregnant.

She was terribly frightened. The Grand Central Station seemed so immense, so full of blank faces staring at her as she passed following the redcap who carried her bag. She was afraid she’d faint before she got to the taxicab. All the way downtown the jolting of the cab and the jangling throb of the traffic in her ears made her head swim with nausea. At the Brevoort she had some coffee. Ruddy sunlight was coming in the tall windows, the place had a warm restaurant smell; she began to feel better. She went to the phone and called Eleanor. A French maid answered that Mademoiselle was still asleep, but that she would tell her who had called as soon as she woke up. The she called Freddy who sounded very much excited and said he’d be there as soon as he could get over from Brooklyn.

When she saw Freddy it was just as if she hadn’t been away at all. He almost had a backer for the Maya ballet and he was mixed up in a new musical show he wanted Eveline to do costumes for. But he was very gloomy about the prospects of war with Germany, said he was a pacifist and would probably have to go to jail, unless there was a revolution. Eveline told him about her talks with José O’Riely and what a great painter he was, and said she thought maybe she was an anarchist. Freddy looked worried and asked her if she was sure she hadn’t fallen in love with him, and she blushed and smiled and said no, and Freddy said she was a hundred times better looking than last year.

They went together to see Eleanor whose house in the east thirties was very elegant and expensivelooking. Eleanor was sitting up in bed answering her mail. Her hair was carefully done and she had on a pink satin dressing gown with lace and ermine on it. They had coffee with her and hot rolls that the Martinique maid had baked herself. Eleanor was delighted to see Eveline and said how well she looked and was full of mysteries about her business and everything. She said she was on the edge of becoming a theatrical producer and spoke about “my financial adviser” this and that, until Eveline didn’t know what to think; still it was evident that things were going pretty well with her. Eveline wanted to ask her what she knew about birthcontrol, but she never got around to it, and perhaps it was just as well, as, when they got on the subject of the war they quarrelled at once.

That afternoon Freddy took her to tea with him at the house of a middleaged lady who lived on West 8th Street and was an enthusiastic pacifist. The house was full of people arguing and young men and young women wagging their heads together in important whispers. There she got to talking with a haggardlooking brighteyed young man named Don Stevens. Freddy had to go off to a rehearsal and she stayed there talking to Don Stevens. Then all of a sudden they found that everybody had gone and that they were alone with the hostess, who was a stout puffy eager woman that Eveline decided was just too tiresome. She said Goodnight and left. She had hardly gotten down the front steps to the street when Stevens was after her with his lanky stride dragging his overcoat behind him; “Where are you going to eat supper, Eveline Hutchins?” Eveline said she hadn’t thought and before she knew it was eating with him in an Italian restaurant on 3rd Street. He ate a lot of spaghetti very fast and drank a lot of red wine and introduced her to the waiter, whose name was Giovanni. “He’s a maximalist and so am I,” he said. “This young woman seems to be a philosophic anarchist, but we’ll get her over that.”

Don Stevens came from South Dakota and had worked on small town papers ever since his highschool days. He’d also worked as a harvest hand back home and been in on several I.W.W. scraps. He showed Eveline his red card with considerable pride. He’d come to New York to work on The Call, but had just resigned because they were too damn lilylivered, he said. He also wrote for the Metropolitan Magazine and the Masses, and spoke at antiwar meetings. He said that there wasn’t a chinaman’s chance that the U.S. would keep out of the war; the Germans were winning, the working class all over Europe was on the edge of revolt, the revolution in Russia was the beginning of the worldwide social revolution and the bankers knew it and Wilson knew it; the only question was whether the industrial workers in the east and the farmers and casual laborers in the middle west and west would stand for war. The entire press was bought and muzzled. The Morgans had to fight or go bankrupt. “It’s the greatest conspiracy in history.”

Giovanni and Eveline listened holding their breath. Giovanni occasionally looking nervously around the room to see if any of the customers at the other tables looked like detectives. “God damn it, Giovanni, let’s have another bottle of wine,” Don would cry out in the middle of a long analysis of Kuhn, Loeb and Company’s foreign holdings. Then suddenly he’d turn to Eveline filling up her glass, “Where have you been all these years? I’ve so needed a lovely girl like you. Let’s have a splendid time tonight, may be the last good meal we ever get, we may be in jail or shot against a wall a month from now, isn’t that so, Giovanni?”

Giovanni forgot to wait on his other tables and was bawled out by the proprietor. Eveline kept laughing. When Don asked her why, she said she didn’t know except that he was so funny.

“But it really is Armageddon, God damn it.” Then he shook his head: “What’s the use, there never was a woman living who could understand political ideas.”

“Of course I can… I think it’s terrible. I don’t know what to do.”

“I don’t know what to do,” he said savagely, “I don’t know whether to fight the war and got to jail, or to get a job as a war correspondent and see the goddam mess. If you could rely on anybody to back you up it ud be another thing… Oh, hell, let’s get out of here.”

He charged the cheque, and asked Eveline to lend him half a dollar to leave for Giovanni, said he didn’t have a cent in his jeans. She found herself drinking a last glass of wine with him in a chilly littered room up three flights of dirty wooden stairs in Patchin Place. He began to make love to her and when she objected that she’d just known him for seven hours he said that was another stupid bourgeois idea she ought to get rid of. When she asked him about birthcontrol, he sat down beside her and talked for half an hour about what a great woman Margaret Sanger was and how birthcontrol was the greatest single blessing to mankind since the invention of fire. When he started to make love to her again in a businesslike way she laughing and blushing let him take off her clothes. It was three o’clock when feeling weak and guilty and bedraggled she got back to her room at the Brevoort. She took a huge dose of castor oil and went to bed where she lay awake till daylight wondering what she could say to Freddy. She’d had a date to meet him at eleven for a bite of supper after his rehearsal. Her fear of being pregnant had disappeared, like waking up from a nightmare.

That spring was full of plans for shows and decorating houses with Eleanor and Freddy, but nothing came of them, and after a while Eveline couldn’t keep her mind on New York, what with war declared, and the streets filling with flags and uniforms, and everybody going patriotic crazy around her and seeing spies and pacifists under every bed. Eleanor was getting herself a job in the Red Cross. Don Stevens had signed up with the Friends’ Relief. Freddy announced a new decision every day, but finally said he wouldn’t decide what to do till he was called for the draft. Adelaide’s husband had a job in Washington in the new Shipping Board. Dad was writing her every few days that Wilson was the greatest president since Lincoln. Some days she felt that she must be losing her mind, people around her seemed so cracked. When she began talking about it to Eleanor, Eleanor smiled in a superior way and said she’d already asked to have her as assistant in her office in Paris.

“Your office in Paris, darling?” Eleanor nodded. “I don’t care what kind of work it is, I’ll do it gladly,” said Eveline. Eleanor sailed one Saturday on the Rochambeau, and two weeks later Eveline herself sailed on the Touraine.

It was a hazy summer evening. She’d been almost rude cutting short the goodby of Margaret and Adelaide and Margaret’s husband Bill who was a Major by this time and teaching sharpshooting out on Long Island, she was so anxious to cut loose from this America she felt was just too tiresome. The boat was two hours late in sailing. The band kept playing Tipperary and Auprès de ma Blonde and La Madelon. There were a great many young men around in various uniforms, all rather drunk. The little French sailors with their red pompons and baby faces yelled back and forth in rolling twangy bordelais. Eveline walked up and down the deck until her feet were tired. It seemed as if the boat would never sail. And Freddy, who had turned up late, kept waving to her from the dock and she was afraid Don Stevens would come and she was sick of all her life in these last years.

She went down to her cabin and started reading Barbusse’s Le Feu that Don had sent her. She fell asleep, and when the greyhaired skinny woman who was her cabinmate woke her up bustling around, the first thing she felt was the trembling pound of the ship’s engines. “Well, you missed dinner,” said the greyhaired woman.

Her name was Miss Eliza Felton and she was an illustrator of children’s books. She was going to France to drive a truck. At first Eveline thought she was just too tiresome, but as the warm quiet days of the crossing wore on she got to like her. Miss Felton had a great crush on Eveline and was a nuisance, but she was fond of wine and knew a great deal about France, where she’d lived for many years. In fact she’d studied painting at Fontainebleau in the old days of the impressionists. She was bitter against the Huns on account of Rheims and Louvain and the poor little Belgian babies with their hands cut off, but she didn’t have much use for any male government, called Wilson a coward, Clemenceau a bully and Lloyd George a sneak. She laughed at the precautions against submarine attack and said she knew the French line was perfectly safe because all the German spies travelled by it. When they landed in Bordeaux she was a great help to Eveline.

They stayed over a day to see the town instead of going up to Paris with all the other Red Cross people and Relief workers. The rows of grey eighteenth century houses were too lovely in the endless rosy summer twilight, and the flowers for sale and the polite people in the shops and the delicate patterns of the ironwork, and the fine dinner they had at the Chapon Fin.

The only trouble with going around with Eliza Felton was that she kept all the men away. They went up to Paris on the day train next day and Eveline could hardly keep from tears at the beauty of the country and the houses and the vines and the tall ranks of poplars. There were little soldiers in pale blue at every station and the elderly and deferential conductor looked like a collegeprofessor. When the train finally slid smoothly through the tunnel and into the Orleans station her throat was so tight she could hardly speak. It was as if she’d never been to Paris before.

“Now where are you going, dear? You see we have to carry our own traps,” said Eliza Felton in a businesslike way.

“Well, I suppose I should go to the Red Cross and report.”

“Too late for tonight, I can tell you that.”

“Well, I might try to call up Eleanor.”

“Might as well try to wake the dead as try to use the Paris telephone in wartime… what you’d better do, dear, is come with me to a little hotel I know on the Quai and sign up with the Red Cross in the morning; that’s what I’m going to do.”

“I’d hate to get sent back home.”

“They won’t know you’re here for weeks…. I know those dumbbells.”

So Eveline waited with their traps while Eliza Felton fetched a little truck. They piled their bags on it and rolled them out of the station and through the empty streets in the last faint mauve of twilight to the hotel. There were very few lights and they were blue and hooded with tin hats so that they couldn’t be seen from above. The Seine, the old bridges, and the long bulk of the Louvre opposite looked faint and unreal; it was life walking through a Whistler.

“We must hurry and get something to eat before everything closes up…. I’ll take you to Adrienne’s,” said Miss Felton.

They left their bags to be taken up to their rooms at the hôtel du Quai Voltaire and walked fast through a lot of narrow crisscross fastdarkening streets. They ducked into the door of the little restaurant just as some one was starting to pull the heavy iron shutter down, “Tiens, c’est Madmoiselle Elise,” cried a woman’s voice from the back of the heavily upholstered little room. A short Frenchwoman with a very large head and very large popeyes ran forward and hugged Miss Felton and kissed her a number of times. “This is Miss Hutchins,” said Miss Felton in her dry voice. “Verry plised… she is so prretty… beautiful eyes, hein?” It made Eveline uncomfortable the way the woman looked at her, the way her big powdered face was set like an egg in a cup in the frilly highnecked blouse. She brought out some soup and cold veal and bread, with many apologies on account of not having butter or sugar, complaining in a singsong voice about how severe the police were and how the profiteers were hoarding food and how bad the military situation was. Then she suddenly stopped talking; all their eyes lit at the same moment on the sign on the wall:

it is difficult to realize the colossal scale upon which Europe will have to borrow in order to make good the destruction of war

à quatorze heures precisement the Boche diurnally shelled that bridge with their wellknown precision as to time and place à quatorze heures precisement Dick Norton with his monocle in his eye lined up his section at a little distance from the bridge to turn it over to the American Red Cross

the Red Cross majors looked pudgy and white under their new uniforms in their shined Sam Browne belts in their shined tight leather puttees so this was overseas

so this was the front well well

Dick Norton adjusted his monocle and began to talk about how as gentlemen volunteers he had signed us up and as gentlemen volunteers he bade us farewell Wham the first arrivé the smell of almonds the sunday feeling of no traffic on the road not a poilu in sight Dick Norton adjusted his monocle the Red Cross majors felt the showering mud sniffed the lyddite swift whiff of latrines and of huddled troops

Wham Wham Wham like the Fourth of July the shellfragments sing our ears ring

the bridge is standing and Dick Norton adjusting his monocle is standing talking at length about gentlemen volunteers and ambulance service and la belle France

The Roosevelts had lived for seven righteous generations on Manhattan Island; they owned a big brick house on 20th Street, an estate up at Dobbs Ferry, lots in the city, a pew in the Dutch Reformed Church, interests, stocks and bonds, they felt Manhattan was theirs, they felt America was theirs. Their son,

Theodore,

was a sickly youngster, suffered from asthma, was very nearsighted; his hands and feet were so small it was hard for him to learn to box; his arms were very short;

his father was something of a humanitarian, gave Christmas dinners to newsboys, deplored conditions, slums the East Side, Hell’s Kitchen.

Young Theodore had ponies, was encouraged to walk in the woods, to go camping, was instructed in boxing and fencing (an American gentleman should know how to defend himself) taught Bible Class, did mission work (an American gentleman should do his best to uplift those not so fortunately situated);

righteousness was his by birth;

he had a passion for nature study, for reading about birds and wild animals, for going hunting; he got to be a good shot in spite of his glasses, a good walker in spite of his tiny feet and short legs, a fair horseman, an aggressive scrapper in spite of his short reach, a crack politician in spite of being the son of one of the owning Dutch families of New York.

In 1876 he went up to Cambridge to study at Harvard, a wealthy talkative erratic young man with sidewhiskers and definite ideas about everything under the sun.

at Harvard he drove around in a dogcart, collected stuffed birds, mounted specimens he’d shot on his trips in the Adirondacks; in spite of not drinking and being somewhat of a christer, having odd ideas about reform and remedying abuses, he made Porcellian and the Dickey and the clubs that were his right as the son of one of the owning Dutch families of New York.

He told his friends he was going to devote his life to social service: I wish to preach not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife.

11,000 registered harlots said the Red Cross Publicity Man infest the streets of Marseilles

the Ford stalled three times in the Rue de Rivoli in Fontainebleau we had our café au lait in bed the Forest was so achingly red yellow novemberbrown under the tiny lavender rain beyond the road climbed through dovecolored hills the air smelt of apples

Nevers (Dumas nom de dieu) Athos Porthos and d’Artagnan had ordered a bisque at the inn we wound down slowly into red Macon that smelt of wineless and the vintage fais ce que voudras saute Bourgignon in the Rhone valley the first straw-colored sunlight streaked the white road with shadows of skeleton poplars at every stop we drank wine strong as beefsteaks rich as the palace of François Premier bouquet of the last sleetlashed roses we didn’t cross the river to Lyon where Jean-Jacques suffered from greensickness as a youngster the landscapes of Provence were all out of the Gallic Wars the towns were dictionaries of latin roots Orange Tarascon Arles where Van Gogh cut off his ears the convoy became less of a conducted tour we stopped to play craps in the estaminets boys we’re going south to drink the red wine the popes loved best to eat fat meals in oliveoil and garlic bound south cêpes provençale the north wind was shrilling over the plains of the Camargue hustling us into Marseilles where the eleven thousand were dandling themselves in the fogged mirrors of the promenoir at the Apollo

oysters and vin de Cassis petite fille tellement brune tête de lune qui amait les veentair sports in the end they were all slot machines undressed as Phocean figurines posted with their legs apart around the scummy edges of the oldest port

the Riviera was a letdown but there was a candy-colored church with a pointed steeple on every hill beyond San Remo Porto Maurizio blue seltzerbottles standing in the cinzanocolored sunlight beside a glass of VERMOUTH TORINO Savona was set for the Merchant of Venice painted by Veronese Ponte Decimo in Ponte Decimo ambulances were parked in a moonlit square of bleak stone workingpeople’s houses hoarfrost covered everything in the little bar the Successful Story Writer taught us to drink cognac and maraschino half and half

havanuzzerone

it turned out he was not writing what he felt he wanted to be writing What can you tell them at home about the war? it turned out he was not wanting what he wrote he wanted to be feeling cognac and maraschino was no longer young (It made us damn sore we greedy for what we felt we wanted tell ’em all they lied see new towns go to Genoa) havanuzzerone? it turned out that he wished he was a naked brown shepherd boy sitting on a hillside playing a flute in the sunlight

going to Genoa was easy enough the streetcar went there Genoa the new town we’d never seen full of marble doges and breakneck stairs marble lions in the moonlight Genoa was the ancient ducal city burning? all the marble palaces and the square stone houses and the campaniles topping hills had one marble wall on fire

bonfire under the moon

the bars were full of Britishers overdressed civilians strolling under porticoes outside the harbor under the Genoa moon the sea was on fire the member of His Majesty’s Intelligence Service said it was a Yankee tanker had struck a mine? been torpedoed? why don’t they scuttle her?

Genoa eyes flared with the light of the burning tanker Genoa what are you looking for? the flare in the blood under the moon down the midnight streets in boys’ and girls’ face Genoa eyes the question in their eyes

through the crumbling stone courts under the Genoa moon up and down the breakneck stairs eyes on fire under the moon round the next corner full in your face the flare of the bonfire on the sea

11,000 registered harlots said the Red Cross Publicity Man infest the streets of Marseilles

It was a lousy trip. Joe was worried all the time about Del and about not making good and the deckcrew was a bunch of soreheads. The engines kept breaking down. The Higginbotham was built like a cheesebox and so slow there were days when they didn’t make more’n thirty or forty miles against moderate head winds. The only good times he had was taking boxing lessons from the second engineer, a fellow named Glen Hardwick. He was a little wiry guy, who was a pretty good amateur boxer, though he must have been forty years old. By the time they got to Bordeaux Joe was able to give him a good workout. He was heavier and had a better reach and Glen said he’d a straight natural right that would take him far as a lightweight.

In Bordeaux the first port official that came on board tried to kiss Cap’n Perry on both cheeks. President Wilson had just declared war on Germany. All over the town nothing was too good for Les Americains. Evenings when they were off Joe and Glen Hardwick cruised around together. The Bordeaux girls were damn pretty. They met up with a couple one afternoon in the public garden that weren’t hookers at all. They were nicely dressed and looked like they came of good families, what the hell it was wartime. At first Joe thought he ought to lay off that stuff now that he was married, but hell, hadn’t Del held out on him. What did she think he was, a plaster saint? They ended by going to a little hotel the girls knew and eating supper and drinking a beaucoup wine and champagne and having a big party. Joe had never had such a good time with a girl in his life. His girl’s name was Marceline and when they woke up in the morning the help at the hotel brought them in coffee and rolls and they ate breakfast, both of ’em sitting up in bed and Joe’s French began to pick up and he learned how to say C’est la guerre and On les aura and Je m’en fiche and Marceline said she’d always be his sweetie when he was in Bordeaux and called him petit lapin.

They only stayed in Bordeaux the four days it took ’em to wait their turn to go up to the dock and unload, but they drank wine and cognac all the time and the food was swell and nobody could do enough for them on account of America having come into the war and it was a great old four days.

On the trip home the Higginbotham sprung leaks so bad the old man stopped worrying about submarines altogether. It was nip and tuck if they’d make Halifax. The ship was light and rolled like a log so that even with fiddles on they couldn’t keep dishes on the messtable. One dirty night of driving fog somewhere south of Cape Race, Joe with his chin in his peajacket was taking a turn on the deck amidship when he was suddenly thrown flat. They never knew what hit ’em, a mine or a torpedo. It was only that the boats were in darn good order and the sea was smooth that they got off at all. As it was the four boats got separated. The Higginbotham faded into the fog and they never saw her sink, though the last they could make out her maindeck was awash.

They were cold and wet. In Joe’s boat nobody said much. The men at the oars had to work hard to keep her bow into the little chop that came up. Each sea a little bigger than the others drenched them with spray. They had on wool sweaters and lifepreservers but the cold seeped through. At last the fog greyed a little and it was day. Joe’s boat and the captain’s boat managed to keep together until late that afternoon they were picked up by a big fishing schooner, a banker bound for Boston.

When they were picked up old Cap’n Perry was in a bad way. The master of the fishing schooner did everything he could for him, but he was unconscious when they reached Boston four days later and died on the way to the hospital. The doctors said it was pneumonia.

Next morning Joe and the mate went to the office of the agent of Perkins and Ellerman, the owners, to see about getting themselves and the crew paid off. There was some kind of damn monkeydoodle business about the vessel’s having changed owners in midAtlantic, a man named Rosenberg had bought her on a speculation and now he couldn’t be found and the Chase National Bank was claiming ownership and the underwriters were raising cain. The agent said he was sure they’d be paid all right, because Rosenberg had posted bond, but it would be some time. “And what the hell do they expect us to do all that time, eat grass?” The clerk said he was sorry but they’d have to take it up direct with Mr. Rosenberg.

Joe and the first mate stood side by side on the curb outside the office and cursed for a while, then the mate went over to South Boston to break the news to the chief who lived there.

It was a warm June afternoon. Joe started to go around the shipping offices to see what he could do in the way of a berth. He got tired of that and went and sat on a bench on the Common, staring at the sparrows and the gobs loafing around and the shop girls coming home from work, their little heels clattering on the asphalt paths.

Joe hung around Boston broke for a couple of weeks. The Salvation Army took care of the survivors, serving ’em beans and watery soup and a lot of hymns off key that didn’t appeal to Joe the way he felt just then. He was crazy to get enough jack to go to Norfolk and see Del. He wrote her every day but the letters he got back to General Delivery seemed kinder cool. She was worried about the rent and wanted some spring clothes and was afraid they wouldn’t like it at the office if they found out about her being married.

Joe sat on the benches on the Common and roamed around among the flowerbeds in the Public Garden, and called regularly at the agent’s office to ask about a berth, but finally he got sick of hanging around and went down and signed on as quartermaster, on a United Fruit boat, the Callao. He thought it ud be a short run and by the time he got back in a couple of weeks he’d be able to get his money.

On the home trip they had to wait several days anchored outside in the roads at Roseau in Dominica, for the limes they were going to load to be crated. Everybody was sore at the port authorities, a lot of damn British niggers, on account of the quarantine and the limes not being ready and how slow the lighters were coming off from the shore. The last night in port Joe and Larry, one of the other quartermasters, got kidding some young coons in a bumboat that had been selling fruit and liquor to the crew under the stern; first thing they knew they’d offered ’em a dollar each to take ’em ashore and land ’em down the beach so’s the officers wouldn’t see them. The town smelt of niggers. There were no lights in the streets. A little coalblack youngster ran up and asked did they want some mountain chicken. “I guess that means wild women, sure,” said Joe. “All bets are off tonight.” The little dinge took ’em into a bar kept by a stout mulatto woman and said something to her in the island lingo they couldn’t understand, and she said they’d have to wait a few minutes and they sat down and had a couple of drinks of corn and oil. “I guess she must be the madam,” said Larry. “If they ain’t pretty good lookers they can go to hell for all I care. I’m not much on the dark meat.” From out back came a sound of sizzling and a smell of something frying. “Dod gast it, I could eat something,” said Joe. “Say, boy, tell her we want something to eat.” “By and by you eat mountain chicken.” “What the hell?” They finished their drinks just as the woman came back with a big platter of something fried up. “What’s that?” asked Joe. “That’s mountain chicken, mister; that’s how we call froglegs down here but they ain’t like the frogs you all has in the states. I been in the states and I know. We wouldn’t eat them here. These here is clean frogs just like chicken. You’ll find it real good if you eat it.” They roared. “Jesus, the drinks are on us,” said Larry, wiping the tears out of his eyes.

Then they thought they’d go pick up some girls. They saw a couple leaving the house where the music was and followed ’em down the dark street. They started to talk to ’em and the girls showed their teeth and wriggled in their clothes and giggled. But three or four nigger men came up sore as hell and began talking in the local lingo. “Jez, Larry, we’d better watch our step,” said Joe through his teeth. “These bozos got razors.” They were in the middle of a yelling bunch of big black men when they heard an American voice behind them, “Don’t say another word, boys, I’ll handle this.” A small man in khaki riding breeches and a panama hat was pushing his way through the crowd talking in the island lingo all the time. He was a little man with a gray triangular face tufted with a goatee. “My name’s Henderson, DeBuque Henderson of Bridgeport, Connecticut.” He shook hands with both of them.

“Well, what’s the trouble, boys? It’s all right now, everybody knows me here. You have to be careful on this island, boys, they’re touchy, these people, very touchy…. You boys better come along with me and have a drink….” He took them each by the arm and walked them hurriedly up the street. “Well, I was young once… I’m still young… sure, had to see the island… damn right too, the most interesting island in the whole Caribbean only lonely… never see a white face.”

When they got to his house he walked them through a big whitewashed room onto a terrace that smelt of vanilla flowers. They could see the town underneath with its few lights, the dark hills, the white hull of the Callao with the lighters around her lit up by the working lights. At intervals the rattle of winches came up to them and a crazy jigtune from somewhere.

The old feller poured them each a glass of rum; then another. He had a parrot on a perch that kept screeching. The landbreeze had come up full of heavy flowersmells off the mountains and blew the old feller’s stringy white hair in his eyes. He pointed at the Callao all lit up with its ring of lighters. “United Fruit… United Thieves Company… it’s a monopoly… if you won’t take their prices they let your limes rot on the wharf; it’s a monopoly. You boys are working for a bunch of thieves, but I know it ain’t your fault. Here’s lookin’ at you.”

Before they knew it Larry and Joe were singing. The old man was talking about cotton spinning machinery and canecrushers and pouring out drinks from a rumbottle. They were pretty goddam drunk. They didn’t know how they got aboard. Joe remembered the dark focastle and the sound of snoring from the bunks spinning around, then sleep hitting him like a sandbag and the sweet, sicky taste of rum in his mouth.

A couple of days later Joe came down with a fever and horrible pains in his joints. He was out of his head when they put him ashore at St. Thomas’s. It was dengue and he was sick for two months before he had the strength even to write Del to tell her where he was. The hospital orderly told him he’d been out of his head five days and they’d given him up for a goner. The doctors had been sore as hell about it because this was post hospital; after all he was a white man and unconscious and they couldn’t very well feed him to the sharks.

It was July before Joe was well enough to walk around the steep little coraldust streets of the town. He had to leave the hospital and would have been in a bad way if one of the cooks at the marina barracks hadn’t looked out for him and found him a flop in an unused section of the building. It was hot and there was never a cloud in the sky and he got pretty sick of looking at the niggers and the bare hills and the blue shutin harbor. He spent a lot of time sitting out on the old coalwharf in the shade of a piece of corrugated iron roof looking through the planking at the clear deep bluegreen water, watching shoals of snappers feeding around the piles. He got to thinking about Del and that French girl in Bordeaux and the war and how the United Fruit was a bunch of thieves and then the thoughts would go round and round in his head like the little silver and blue and yellow fish round the swaying weeds on the piles and he’d find he’d dropped off to sleep.

When a northbound fruitsteamer came into the harbor he got hold of one of the officers on the wharf and told him his sad story. They gave him passage up to New York. First thing he did was try to get hold of Janey; maybe if she thought he ought to, he’d give up this dog’s life and take a steady job ashore. He called up the J. Ward Moorehouse advertising office where she worked but the girl at the other end of the line told him she was the boss’s secretary and was out west on business.

He went over and got a flop at Mrs. Olsen’s in Redhook. Everybody over there was talking about the draft and how they rounded you up for a slacker if they picked you up on the street without a registration card. And sure enough, just as Joe was stepping out of the subway at Wall Street one morning a cop came up to him and asked him for his card. Joe said he was a merchant seaman and had just got back from a trip and hadn’t had time to register yet and that he was exempt, but the cop said he’d have to tell that to the judge. They were quite a bunch being marched down Broadway; smart guys in the crowd of clerks and counterjumpers along the sidewalks yelled “Slackers” at them and the girls hissed and booed.

In the Custom House they were herded into some of the basement rooms. It was a hot August day. Joe elbowed his way through the sweating, grumbling crowd towards the window. Most of them were foreigners, there were longshoremen and waterfront loafers; a lot of the group were talking big but Joe remembered the navy and kept his mouth shut and listened. He was in there all day. The cops wouldn’t let anybody telephone and there was only one toilet and they had to go to that under guard. Joe felt pretty weak on his pins, he hadn’t gotten over the effect of that dengue yet. He was about ready to pass out when he saw a face he knew. Damned if it wasn’t Glen Hardwick.

Glen had been picked up by a Britisher and taken into Halifax. He’d signed as second on the Chemang, taking out mules to Bordeaux and a general cargo to Genoa, going to be armed with a threeinch gun and navy gunners, Joe ought to come along. “Jesus, do you think I could get aboard her?” Joe asked. “Sure, they’re crazy for navigation officers; they’d take you on even without a ticket.” Bordeaux sounded pretty good, remember the girlfriends there? They doped out that when Glen got out he’d phone Mrs. Olsen to bring over Joe’s license that was in a cigarbox at the head of his bed. When they finally were taken up to the desk to be questioned the guy let Glen go right away and said Joe could go as soon as they got his license over but that they must register at once even if they were exempt from the draft. “After all, you boys ought to remember that there’s a war on,” said the inspector at the desk. “Well, we sure ought to know,” said Joe.

Mrs. Olsen came over all in a flurry with Joe’s papers and Joe hustled over to the office in East New York and they took him on as bosun. The skipper was Ben Tarbell who’d been first mate on the Higginbotham. Joe wanted to go down to Norfolk to see Del, but hell this was no time to stay ashore. What he did was to send her fifty bucks he borrowed from Glen. He didn’t have time to worry about it anyway because they sailed the next day with sealed orders as to where to meet the convoy.

It wasn’t so bad steaming in convoy. The navy officers on the destroyers and the Salem that was in command gave the orders, but the merchant captains kidded back and forth with wigwag signals. It was some sight to see the Atlantic Ocean full of long strings of freighters all blotched up with gray and white watermarkings like barberpoles by the camouflage artists. There were old tubs in that convoy that a man wouldn’t have trusted himself in to cross to Staten Island in peacetime and one of the new wooden Shipping Board boats leaked so bad, jerrybuilt out of new wood — somebody musta been making money — that she had to be abandoned and scuttled half way across.

Joe and Glen smoked their pipes together in Glen’s cabin and chewed the fat a good deal. They decided that everything ashore was the bunk and the only place for them was blue water. Joe got damn fed up with bawling out the bunch of scum he had for a crew. Once they got in the zone, all the ships started steering a zigzag course and everybody began to get white around the gills. Joe never cussed so much in his life. There was a false alarm of submarines every few hours and seaplanes dropping depth bombs and excited gun crews firing at old barrels, bunches of seaweed, dazzle in the water. Steaming into the Gironde at night with the searchlights crisscrossing and the blinker signals and the patrolboats scooting around, they sure felt good.

It was a relief to get the dirty trampling mules off the ship and their stench out of everything, and to get rid of the yelling and cussing of the hostlers. Glen and Joe only got ashore for a few hours and couldn’t find Marceline and Loulou. The Garonne was beginning to look like the Delaware with all the new Americanbuilt steel and concrete piers. Going out they had to anchor several hours to repair a leaky steampipe and saw a patrol boat go by towing five ships’ boats crowded to the gunnels, so they guessed the fritzes must be pretty busy outside.

No convoy this time. They slipped out in the middle of a foggy night. When one of the deckhands came up out of the focastle with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, the mate knocked him flat and said he’d have him arrested when he got back home for a damn German spy. They coasted Spain as far as Finisterre. The skipper had just changed the course to southerly when they saw a sure enough periscope astern. The skipper grabbed the wheel himself and yelled down the tube to the engine room to give him everything they’d got, that wasn’t much to be sure, and the gun crew started blazing away.

The periscope disappeared but a couple of hours later they overhauled a tubby kind of ketch, must be a Spanish fishingboat, that was heading for the shore, for Vigo probably, scudding along wing and wing in the half a gale that was blowing up west northwest. They’d no sooner crossed the wake of the ketch than there was a thud that shook the ship and a column of water shot up that drenched them all on the bridge. Everything worked like clockwork. No. 1 was the only compartment flooded. As luck would have it, the crew was all out of the focastle standing on deck amidships in their life preservers. The Chemang settled a little by the bow, that was all. The gunners were certain it was a mine dropped by the old black ketch that had crossed their bow and let them have a couple of shots, but the ship was rolling so in the heavy sea that the shots went wild. Anyway, the ketch went out of sight behind the island that blocks the mouth of the roadstead of Vigo. The Chemang crawled on in under one bell.

By the time they got into the channel opposite the town of Vigo, the water was gaining on the pumps in No. 2, and there was four feet of water in the engineroom. They had to beach her on the banks of hard sand to the right of the town.

So they were ashore again with their bundles standing around outside the consul’s office, waiting for him to find them somewhere to flop. The consul was a Spaniard and didn’t speak as much English as he might have but he treated them fine. The Liberal Party of Vigo invited officers and crew to go to a bullfight there was going to be that afternoon. More monkeydoodle business, the skipper got a cable to turn the ship over to the agents of Gomez and Ca. of Bilboa who had bought her as she stood and were changing her registry.

When they got to the bullring half the crowd cheered them and yelled, “Viva los Aliados,” and the rest hissed and shouted, “Viva Maura.” They thought there was going to be a fight right there but the bull came out and everybody quieted down. The bullfight was darn bloody, but the boys with the spangles were some steppers and the people sitting around made them drink wine all the time out of little black skins and passed around bottles of cognac so that the crew got pretty cockeyed and Joe spent most of his time keeping the boys in order. Then the officers were tendered a banquet by the local pro-allied society and a lot of bozos with mustachios made fiery speeches that nobody could understand and the Americans cheered and sang, The Yanks are Coming and Keep the Home Fires Burning and We’re Bound for the Hamburg Show. The chief, an old fellow named McGillicudy, did some card tricks, and the evening was a big success. Joe and Glen bunked together at the hotel. The maid there was awful pretty but wouldn’t let ’em get away with any foolishness. “Well, Joe,” said Glen, before they went to sleep, “it’s a great war.” “Well, I guess that’s strike three,” said Joe. “That was no strike, that was a ball,” said Glen.

They waited two weeks in Vigo while the officials quarreled about their status and they got pretty fed up with it. Then they were all loaded on a train to take them to Gibraltar where they were to be taken on board a Shipping Board boat. They were three days on the train with nothing to sleep on but hard benches. Spain was just one set of great dusty mountains after another. They changed cars in Madrid and in Seville and a guy turned up each time from the consulate to take care of them. When they got to Seville they found it was Algeciras they were going to instead of Gib.

When they got to Algeciras they found that nobody had ever heard of them. They camped out in the consulate while the consul telegraphed all over the place and finally chartered two trucks and sent them over to Cadiz. Spain was some country, all rocks and wine and busty black eyed women and olive trees. When they got to Cadiz the consular agent was there to meet them with a telegram in his hand. The tanker Gold Shell was waiting in Algeciras to take them on board there, so it was back again cooped up on the trucks, bouncing on the hard benches with their faces powdered with dust and their mouths full of it and not a cent in anybody’s jeans left to buy a drink with. When they got on board the Gold Shell around three in the morning a bright moonlight night some of the boys were so tired they fell down and went to sleep right on the deck with their heads on their seabags.

his voice was three thousand miles away all the time he kept wanting to get up outa bed his cheeks were bright pink and the choky breathing No kid you better lay there quiet we dont want you catching more cold that’s why they sent me down to stay with you to keep you from getting up outa bed

the barrelvaulted room all smells fever and whitewash carbolic sick wops outside the airraid siren’s got a nightmare

(Mestre’s a railhead and its moonlight over the Brenta and the basehospital and the ammunition dump

carbolic blue moonlight)

all the time he kept trying to get up outa bed Kiddo you better lay there quiet his voice was in Minnesota but dontjaunerstandafellersgottogetup I got a date animportantengagementtoseeabout those lots ought nevertohavestayedinbedsolate I’ll lose my deposit For chrissake dont you think I’m broke enough as it is?

Kiddo you gotto lay there quiet we’re in the hospital in Mestre you got a little fever makes things seem funny

Cant you letafellerbe? You’re in cahoots withem thaswhassematteris I know theyreouttorookme they think Imagoddamsucker tomadethatdeposit I’ll showem Illknockyergoddamblockoff

my shadow on the vault bulkyclumsily staggering and swaying from the one candle spluttering red in the raw winterhospital carbolic night above the shadow on the cot gotto keep his shoulders down to the cot Curley’s husky inspite of

(you can hear their motors now the antiaircraft batteries are letting loose must be great up there in the moonlight out of the smell of carbolic and latrines and sick wops)

sit back and light a macedonia by the candle he seems to be asleep his breathing’s so tough pneumonia breathing can hear myself breathe and the water tick in the faucet doctors and orderlies all down in the bombproof cant even hear a sick wop groan

Jesus is the guy dying?

they’ve cut off their motors the little drums in my ears sure that’s why they call em drums (up there in the blue moonlight the Austrian observer’s reaching for the string that dumps the applecart) the candleflame stands up still

not that time but wham in the side of the head woke Curley and the glass tinkling in the upstairs windows the candle staggered but didnt go out the vault sways with my shadow and Curley’s shadow dammit he’s strong head’s full of the fever reek Kiddo you gotto stay in bed (they dumped the applecart allright) shellfragments hailing around outside Kiddo you gotto get back to bed

But I gotadate oh christohsweetjesus cant you tell me how to get back to the outfit haveaheart dad I didntmeannoharm itsonlyaboutthose lots

the voice dwindles into a whine I’m pulling the covers up to his chin again light the candle again smoke a macedonia again look at my watch again must be near day ten o’clock they dont relieve me till eight

way off a voice goes up and up and swoops like the airraid siren ayayoooTO

General Pershing’s forces today occupied Belle Joyeuse Farm and the southern edges of the Bois des Loges. The Americans encountered but little machinegun opposition. The advance was in the nature of a linestraightening operation. Otherwise the activity along the front today consisted principally of artillery firing and bombing. Patrols are operating around Belluno having preceded the flood of allies pouring through the Quero pass in the Grappa region

Hibben, Paxton, journalist, Indianapolis, Ind., Dec. 5, 1880, s. Thomas Entrekin and Jeannie Merrill (Ketcham) H.; A.B. Princeton 1903, A.M. Harvard 1904

Thinking men were worried in the middle west in the years Hibben was growing up there, something was wrong with the American Republic, was it the Gold Standard, Privilege, The Interests, Wall Street?

The rich were getting richer, the poor were getting poorer, small farmers were being squeezed out, workingmen were working twelve hours a day for a bare living; profits were for the rich, the law was for the rich, the cops were for the rich;

was it for that the pilgrims had bent their heads into the storm, filled the fleeing Indians with slugs out of their blunderbusses

and worked the stony farms of New England;

was it for that the pioneers had crossed the Appalachians,

long squirrelguns slung across lean backs,

a fistful of corn in the pocket of the buckskin vest,

was it for that the Indiana farmboys had turned out to shoot down Johnny Reb and make the black man free?

EUROPE ON KNIFE EDGE

It was at Fontainebleau lined up in the square in front of Francis I’s palace they first saw the big grey Fiat ambulances they were to drive. Schuyler came back from talking with the French drivers who were turning them over with the news that they were sore as hell because it meant they had to go back into the front line. They asked why the devil the Americans couldn’t stay home and mind their own business instead of coming over here and filling up all the good embusqué jobs. That night the section went into cantonment in tarpaper barracks that stank of carbolic, in a little town in Champagne. It turned out to be the Fourth of July, so the maréchale-de-logis served out champagne with supper and a general with white walrus whiskers came and made a speech about how with the help of Amérique héroique la victoire was certain, and proposed a toast to le président Veelson. The chef of the section, Bill Knickerbocker, got up a little nervously and toasted la France héroique, l’héroique Cinquième Armée and la victorie by Christmas. Fireworks were furnished by the Boches who sent over an airraid that made everybody scuttle for the bombproof dugout.

Once they got down there Fred Summers said it smelt too bad and anyway he wanted a drink and he and Dick went out to find an estaminet, keeping close under the eaves of the houses to escape the occasional shrapnel fragments from the antiaircraft guns. They found a little bar all full of tobacco smoke and French poilus singing la Madelon. Everybody cheered when they came in and a dozen glasses were handed to them. They smoked their first caporal ordinaire and everybody set them up to drinks so that at closing time, when the bugles blew the French equivalent of taps, they found themselves walking a little unsteadily along the pitchblack streets arm in arm with two poilus who’d promised to find them their cantonment. The poilus said la guerre was une saloperie and la victoire was une sale blague and asked eagerly if les americains knew anything about la revolution en Russie. Dick said he was a pacifist and was for anything that would stop the war and they all shook hands very significantly and talked about la revolution mondiale. When they were turning in on their folding cots, Fred Summers suddenly sat bolt upright with his blanket around him and said in a solemn funny way he had, “Fellers, this ain’t a war, it’s a goddam madhouse.”

There were two other fellows in the section who liked to drink wine and chatter bad French; Steve Warner, who’d been a special student at Harvard, and Ripley who was a freshman at Columbia. The five of them went around together, finding places to get omelettes and pommes frites in the villages within walking distance, making the rounds of the estaminets every night; they got to be known as the grenadine guards. When the section moved up onto the Voie Sacrée back of Verdun and was quartered for three rainy weeks in a little ruined village called Erize la Petite, they set up their cots together in the same corner of the old brokendown barn they were given for a cantonment. It rained all day and all night; all day and all night camions ground past through the deep liquid putty of the roads carrying men and munitions to Verdun. Dick used to sit on his cot looking out through the door at the jiggling mudspattered faces of the young French soldiers going up for the attack, drunk and desperate and yelling à bas la guerre, mort au vaches, à bas la guerre. Once Steve came in suddenly, his face pale above the dripping poncho, his eyes snapping, and said in a low voice, “Now I know what the tumbrils were like in the Terror, that’s what they are, tumbrils.”

Dick was relieved to find out, when they finally moved up within range of the guns, that he wasn’t any more scared than anybody else. The first time they went on post he and Fred lost their way in the shellshredded woods and were trying to turn the car around on a little rise naked as the face of the moon when three shells from an Austrian eightyeight went past them like three cracks of a whip. They never knew how they got out of the car and into the ditch, but when the sparse blue almondsmelling smoke cleared they were both lying flat in the mud. Fred went to pieces and Dick had to put his arm around him and keep whispering in his ear, “Come on, boy, we got to make it. Come on, Fred, we’ll fool ’em.” It all hit him funny and he kept laughing all the way back along the road into the quieter section of the woods where the dressing station had been cleverly located right in front of a battery of 405s so that the concussion almost bounced the wounded out of their stretchers every time a gun was fired. When they got back to the section after taking a load to the triage they were able to show three jagged holes from shellfragments in the side of the car.

Next day the attack began and continual barrages and counter-barrages and heavy gasbombardments; the section was on twentyfour hour duty for three days, at the end of it everybody had dysentery and bad nerves. One fellow got shellshock, although he’d been too scared to go on post, and had to be sent back to Paris. A couple of men had to be evacuated for dysentery. The grenadine guards came through the attack pretty well, except that Steve and Ripley had gotten a little extra sniff of mustard gas up at P2 one night and vomited whenever they ate anything.

In their twentyfour hour periods off duty they’d meet in a little garden at Récicourt that was the section’s base. No one else seemed to know about it. The garden had been attached to a pink villa but the villa had been mashed to dust as if a great foot had stepped on it. The garden was untouched, only a little weedy from neglect, roses were in bloom there and butterflies and bees droned around the flowers on sunny afternoons. At first they took the bees for distant arrivés and went flat on their bellies when they heard them. There had been a cement fountain in the middle of the garden and there they used to sit when the Germans got it into their heads to shell the road and the nearby bridge. There was regular shelling three times a day and a little scattering between times. Somebody would be detailed to stand in line at the Copé and buy south of France melons and four franc fifty champagne. Then they’d take off their shirts to toast their backs and shoulders if it was sunny and sit in the dry fountain eating the melons and drinking the warm cidery champagne and talk about how they’d go back to the States and start an underground newspaper like La Libre Belgique to tell people what the war was really like.

What Dick liked best in the garden was the little backhouse, like the backhouse in a New England farm, with a clean scrubbed seat and a half moon in the door, through which on sunny days the wasps who had a nest in the ceiling hummed busily in and out. He’d sit there with his belly aching listening to the low voices of his friends talking in the driedup fountain. Their voices made him feel happy and at home while he stood wiping himself on a few old yellowed squares of a 1914 Petit Journal that still hung on the nail. Once he came back buckling his belt and saying, “Do you know? I was thinking how fine it would be if you could reorganize the cells of your body into some other kind of life… it’s too damn lousy being a human… I’d like to be a cat, a nice comfortable housecat sitting by the fire.”

“It’s a hell of a note,” said Steve, reaching for his shirt and putting it on. A cloud had gone over the sun and it was suddenly chilly. The guns sounded quiet and distant. Dick felt suddenly chilly and lonely. “It’s a hell of a note when you have to be ashamed of belonging to your own race. But I swear I am, I swear I’m ashamed of being a man… it will take some huge wave of hope like a revolution to make me feel any selfrespect ever again…. God, we’re a lousy cruel vicious dumb type of tailless ape.” “Well, if you want to earn your selfrespect, Steve, and the respect of us other apes, why don’t you go down, now that they’re not shelling, and buy us a bottle of champagny water?” said Ripley.

HER WOUNDED HERO OF WAR A FRAUD

there were always two cats the color of hot milk with a little coffee in it with aquamarine eyes and sootblack faces in the window of the laundry opposite the little creamery where we ate breakfast on the Montagne St. Geneviève huddled between the old squeezedup slategrey houses of the Latin Quarter leaning over steep small streets cosy under the fog minute streets lit with different-colored chalks cluttered with infinitesimal bars restaurants paintships and old prints beds bidets faded perfumery microscopic sizzle of frying butter

the Bertha made a snapping noise no louder than a cannon-cracker near the hotel where Oscar Wilde died we all ran up stairs to see if the house was on fire but the old woman whose lard was burning was sore as a crutch

all the big new quarters near the Arc de Triomphe were deserted but in the dogeared yellowbacked Paris of the Carmagnole the Faubourg St Antoine the Commune we were singing

Eveline went to live with Eleanor in a fine apartment Eleanor had gotten hold of somehow on the quai de la Tournelle. It was the mansard floor of a grey peelingfaced house built at the time of Richelieu and done over under Louis Quinze. Eveline never tired of looking out the window, through the delicate tracing of the wroughtiron balcony, at the Seine where toy steamboats bucked the current, towing shinyvarnished barges that had lace curtains and geraniums in the windows of their deckhouses painted green and red, and at the island opposite where the rocketing curves of the flying buttresses shoved the apse of Nôtre Dâme dizzily upwards out of the trees of a little park. They had tea at a small Buhl table in the window almost every evening when they got home from the office on the Rue de Rivoli, after spending the day pasting pictures of ruined French farms and orphaned children and starving warbabies into scrapbooks to be sent home for use in Red Cross drives.

After tea she’d go out in the kitchen and watch Yvonne cook. With the groceries and sugar they drew at the Red Cross commissary, Yvonne operated a system of barter so that their food hardly cost them anything. At first Eveline tried to stop her but she’d answer with a torrent of argument: did Mademoiselle think that President Poincaré or the generals or the cabinet ministers, ces salots de profiteurs, ces salots d’embusqués, went without their brioches? It was the systme D, ils’s’en fichent des particuliers, des pauvres gens… very well her ladies would eat as well as any old camels of generals, if she had her way she’d have all the generals line up before a firingsquad and the embusqué ministers and the ronds de cuir too. Eleanor said her sufferings had made the old woman a little cracked but Jerry Burnham said it was the rest of the world that was cracked.

Jerry Burnham was the little redfaced man who’d been such a help with the colonel the first night Eveline got to Paris. They often laughed about it afterwards. He was working for the U.P. and appeared every few days in her office on his rounds covering Red Cross activities. He knew all the Paris restaurants and would take Eveline out to dinner at the Tour d’Argent or to lunch at the Taverne Nicholas Flamel and they’d walk around the old streets of the Marais afternoons and get late to their work together. When they’d settle in the evening at a good quiet table in a café where they couldn’t be overheard (all the waiters were spies he said), he’d drink a lot of cognac and soda and pour out his feelings, how his work disgusted him, how a correspondent couldn’t get to see anything anymore, how he had three or four censorships on his neck all the time and had to send out prepared stuff that was all a pack of dirty lies every word of it, how a man lost his selfrespect doing things like that year after year, how a newspaperman had been little better than a skunk before the war, but that now there wasn’t anything low enough you could call him. Eveline would try to cheer him up telling him that when the war was over he ought to write a book like Le Feu and really tell the truth about it. “But the war won’t ever be over… too damn profitable, do you get me? Back home they’re coining money, the British are coining money; even the French, look at Bordeaux and Toulouse and Marseilles coining money and the goddam politicians, all of ’em got bank accounts in Amsterdam or Barcelona, the sons of bitches.” Then he’d take her hand and get a crying jag and promise that if it did end he’d get back his selfrespect and write the great novel he felt he had in him.

Late that fall Eveline came home one evening tramping through the mud and the foggy dusk to find that Eleanor had a French soldier to tea. She was glad to see him, because she was always complaining that she wasn’t getting to know any French people, nothing but professional relievers and Red Cross women who were just too tiresome; but it was some moments before she realized it was Maurice Millet. She wondered how she could have fallen for him even when she was a kid, he looked so middleaged and pasty and oldmaidish in his stained blue uniform. His large eyes with their girlish long lashes had heavy violet rings under them. Eleanor evidently thought he was wonderful still, and drank up his talk about l’élan suprème du sacrifice and l’harmonie mysterieuse de la mort. He was a stretcherbearer in a basehospital at Nancy, had become very religious and had almost forgotten his English. When they asked him about his painting he shrugged his shoulders and wouldn’t answer. At supper he ate very little and drank only water. He stayed till late in the evening telling them about miraculous conversions of unbelievers, extreme unction on the firing line, a vision of the young Christ he’d seen walking among the wounded in a dressingstation during a gasattack. Après la guerre he was going into a monastery. Trappist perhaps. After he left Eleanor said it had been the most inspiring evening she’d ever had in her life; Eveline didn’t argue with her.

Maurice came back one other afternoon before his perme expired bringing a young writer who was working at the Quai d’Orsay, a tall young Frenchman with pink cheeks who looked like an English publicschool boy, whose name was Raoul Lemonnier. He seemed to refer to speak English than French. He’d been at the front for two years in the Chasseurs Alpins and had been reformé on account of his lungs or his uncle who was a minister he couldn’t say which. It was all very boring, he said. He thought tennis was ripping, though, and went out to St. Cloud to row every afternoon. Eleanor discovered that what she’d been wanting all fall had been a game of tennis. He said he liked English and American women because they liked sport. Here every woman thought you wanted to go to bed with her right away; “Love is very boring,” he said. He and Eveline stood in the window talking about cocktails (he adored American drinks) and looked out at the last purple shreds of dusk settling over Nôtre Dâme and the Seine, while Eleanor and Maurice sat in the dark in the little salon talking about St. Francis of Assisi. She asked him to dinner.

The next morning Eleanor said she thought she was going to become a Catholic. On their way to the office she made Eveline stop into Nôtre Dâme with her to hear mass and they both lit candles for Maurice’s safety at the front before what Eveline thought was a just too tiresomelooking virgin near the main door. But it was impressive all the same, the priests moaning and the lights and the smell of chilled incense. She certainly hoped poor Maurice wouldn’t be killed.

For dinner that night Eveline invited Jerry Burnham, Miss Felton who was back from Amiens and Major Appleton who was in Paris doing something about tanks. It was a fine dinner, duck roasted with oranges, although Jerry, who was sore about how much Eveline talked to Lemonnier, had to get drunk and use a lot of bad language and tell about the retreat at Caporetto and say that the Allies were in a bad way. Major Appleton said he oughtn’t to say it even if it was true and got quite red in the face. Eleanor was pretty indignant and said he ought to be arrested for making such a statement, and after everybody had left she and Eveline had quite a quarrel. “What will that young Frenchman be thinking of us? You’re a darling, Eveline dear, but you have the vulgarest friends. I don’t know where you pick them up, and that Felton woman drank four cocktails, a quart of beaujolais and three cognacs, I kept tabs on her myself;” Eveline started to laugh and they both got to laughing. But Eleanor said that their life was getting much too bohemian and that it wasn’t right with the war on and things going so dreadfully in Italy and Russia and the poor boys in the trenches and all that.

That winter Paris gradually filled up with Americans in uniform, and staffcars, and groceries from the Red Cross supply store; and Major Moorehouse who, it turned out, was an old friend of Eleanor’s, arrived straight from Washington to take charge of the Red Cross publicity. Everybody was talking about him before he came because he’d been one of the best known publicity experts in New York before the war. There was no one who hadn’t heard of J. Ward Moorehouse. There was a lot of scurry around the office when word came around that he’d actually landed in Brest and everybody was nervous worrying where there axe was going to fall.

The morning he arrived the first thing Eveline noticed was that Eleanor had had her hair curled. Then just before noon the whole publicity department was asked into Major Wood’s office to meet Major Moorehouse. He was a biggish man with blue eyes and hair so light it was almost white. His uniform fitted well and his Sam Browne belt and his puttees shone like glass. Eveline thought at once that there was something sincere and appealing about him, like about her father, that she liked. He looked young too, in spite of the thick jowl, and he had a slight southern accent when he talked. He made a little speech about the importance of the work the Red Cross was doing to keep up the morale of civilians and combatants, and that their publicity ought to have two aims, to stimulate giving among the folks back home and to keep people informed of the progress of the work. The trouble now was that people didn’t know enough about what a valuable effort the Red Cross workers were making and were too prone to listen to the criticisms of proGermans working under the mask of pacifism and knockers and slackers always ready to carp and criticize; and that the American people and the warwracked populations of the Allied countries must be made to know the splendid sacrifice the Red Cross workers were making, as splendid in its way as the sacrifice of the dear boys in the trenches.

“Even at this moment, my friends, we are under fire, ready to make the supreme sacrifice that civilization shall not perish from the earth.” Major Wood leaned back in his swivelchair and it let out a squeak that made everybody look up with a start and several people looked out of the window as if they expected to see a shell from big Bertha hurtling right in on them. “You see,” said Major Moorehouse eagerly, his blue eyes snapping, “that is what we must make people feel… the catch in the throat, the wrench to steady the nerves, the determination to carry on.”

Eveline felt stirred in spite of herself. She looked a quick sideways look at Eleanor, who looked cool and lilylike as she had when she was listening to Maurice tell about the young Christ of the gasattack. Can’t ever tell what she’s thinking, though, said Eveline to herself.

That afternoon when J.W., as Eleanor called Major Moorehouse, came down to have a cup of tea with them, Eveline felt that she was being narrowly watched and minded her P’s and Q’s as well as she could; it is the financial adviser; she was giggling about inside. He looked a little haggard and didn’t say much, and winced noticeably when they talked about airraids moonlight nights, and how President Poincaré went around in person every morning to visit the ruins and condole with the survivors. He didn’t stay long and went off someplace in a staffcar to confer with some high official or other. Eveline thought he looked nervous and uneasy and would rather have stayed with them. Eleanor went out on the landing of the stairs with him and was gone some time. Eveline watched her narrowly when she came back into the room but her face had its accustomed look of finely chiselled calm. It was on the tip of Eveline’s tongue to ask her if Major Moorehouse was her… her… but she couldn’t think of a way of putting it.

Eleanor didn’t say anything for some time; then she shook her head and said, “Poor Gertrude.” “Who’s that?” Eleanor’s voice was just a shade tinny, “J.W.’s wife… she’s in a sanitarium with a nervous breakdown… the strain, darling, this terrible war.”

Major Moorehouse went down to Italy to reorganize the publicity of the American Red Cross there, and a couple of weeks later Eleanor got orders from Washington to join the Rome office. That left Eveline alone with Yvonne in the apartment.

It was a chilly, lonely winter and working with all these relievers was just too tiresome, but Eveline managed to hold her job and to have some fun sometimes in the evening with Raoul, who would come around and take her out to some petite boite or other that he’d always say was very boring. He took her to the Noctambules where you could sometimes get drinks after the legal hour; or up to a little restaurant on the Butte of Montmartre where one cold moonlit January night they stood on the porch of the Sacré Coeur and saw the Zeppelins come over. Paris stretched out cold and dead as if all the tiers of roofs and domes were carved out of snow and the shrapnel sparkled frostily overhead and the searchlights were antennae of great insects moving through the milky darkness. At intervals came red snorting flares of the incendiary bombs. Just once they caught sight of two tiny silver cigars overhead. They looked higher than the moon.

Eveline found that Raoul’s arm that had been around her waist had slipped up and that he had his hand over her breast. “C’est fou tu sais… c’est fou tu sais,” he was saying in a singsong voice, he seemed to have forgotten his English. After that they talked French and Eveline thought she loved him terribly much. After the breloque had gone through the streets they walked home across dark silent Paris. At one corner a gendarme came up and asked Lemonnier for his papers. He read them through painfully in the faint blue glow of a corner light, while Eveline stood by breathless, feeling her heart pound. The gendarme handed back the papers, saluted, apologized profusely and walked off. Neither of them said anything about it, but Raoul seemed to be taking it for granted he was going to sleep with her at her apartment. They walked home briskly through the cold black streets, their footsteps clacking sharply on the cobbles. She hung on his arm; there was something tight and electric and uncomfortable in the way their hips occasionally touched as they walked.

Her house was one of the few in Paris that didn’t have a concièrge. She unlocked the door and they climbed shivering together up the cold stone stairs. She whispered to him to be quiet, because of her maid. “It is very boring,” he whispered; his lips brushed warm against her ear. “I hope you won’t think it’s too boring.”

While he was combing his hair at her dressingtable, taking little connoisseur’s sniffs at her bottles of perfume, preening himself in the mirror without haste and embarrassment, he said, “Charmante Eveline, would you like to be my wife? It could be arranged, don’t you know. My uncle who is the head of the family is very fond of Americans. Of course it would be very boring, the contract and all that.” “Oh, no, that wouldn’t be my idea at all,” she whispered giggling and shivering from the bed. Raoul gave her a furious offended look, said good night very formally and left.

When the trees began to bud outside her window and the flower-women in the markets began to sell narcissuses and daffodils, the feeling that it was spring made her long months alone in Paris seem drearier than ever. Jerry Burnham had gone to Palestine; Raoul Lemonnier had never come to see her again; whenever he was in town Major Appleton came around and paid her rather elaborate attentions, but he was just too tiresome. Eliza Felton was driving an ambulance attached to a U.S. basehospital on the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne and would come around those Sundays when she was off duty and make Eveline’s life miserable with her complaints that Eveline was not the free pagan soul she’d thought at first. She said that nobody loved her and that she was praying for the Bertha with her number on it that would end it all. It got so bad that Eveline wasn’t able to stay in the house at all on Sunday and often spent the afternoon in her office reading Anatole France.

Then Yvonne’s crotchets were pretty trying; she tried to run Eveline’s life with her tightlipped comments. When Don Stevens turned up for a leave, looking more haggard than ever in the grey uniform of the Quaker outfit, it was a godsend, and Eveline decided maybe she’d been in love with him after all. She told Yvonne he was her cousin and that they’d been brought up like brother and sister and put him up in Eleanor’s room.

Don was in a tremendous state of excitement about the success of the Bolsheviki in Russia, ate enormously, drank all the wine in the house, and was full of mysterious references to underground forces he was in touch with. He said all the armies were mutinous and that what had happened at Caporetto would happen on the whole front, the German soldiers were ready for revolt too and that would be the beginning of the world revolution. He told her about the mutinies at Verdun, about long trainloads of soldiers he’d seen going up to an attack crying, “A bas la guerre,” and shooting at the gendarmes as they went.

“Eveline, we’re on the edge of gigantic events…. The working classes of the world won’t stand for this nonsense any longer… damn it, the war will have been almost worth while if we get a new socialist civilization out of it.” He leaned across the table and kissed her right under the thin nose of Yvonne who was bringing in pancakes with burning brandy on them. He wagged his finger at Yvonne and almost got a smile out of her by the way he said, “Après la guerre finie.”

That spring and summer things certainly did seem shaky, almost as if Don were right. At night she could hear the gigantic surf of the guns in continuous barrage on the crumbling front. The office was full of crazy rumors: the British Fifth army had turned and run, the Canadians had mutinied and seized Amiens, spies were disabling all the American planes, the Austrians were breaking through in Italy again. Three times the Red Cross office had orders to pack up their records and be ready to move out of Paris. In the face of all that it was hard for the publicity department to keep up the proper cheerful attitude in their releases, but Paris kept on filling up reassuringly with American faces, American M.P.s, Sam Browne belts and canned goods; and in July Major Moorehouse, who had just arrived back from the States, came into the office with a firsthand account of Château Thierry and announced that the war would be over in a year.

The same evening he asked Eveline to dine with him at the Café de la Paix and to do it she broke a date she had with Jerry Burnham who had gotten back from the Near East and the Balkans and was full of stories of cholera and calamity. J.W. ordered a magnificent dinner, he said Eleanor had told him to see if Eveline didn’t need a little cheering up. He talked about the gigantic era of expansion that would dawn for America after the war. America the good samaritan healing the wounds of wartorn Europe. It was as if he was rehearsing a speech, when he got to the end of it he looked at Eveline with a funny deprecatory smile and said, “And the joke of it is, it’s true,” and Eveline laughed and suddenly found that she liked J.W. very much indeed.

She had on a new dress she’d bought at Paquin’s with some money her father had sent her for her birthday, and it was a relief after the uniform. They were through eating before they had really gotten started talking. Eveline wanted to try to get him to talk about himself. After dinner they went to Maxim’s, but that was full up with brawling drunken aviators, and the rumpus seemed to scare J.W. so that Eveline suggested to him that they go down to her place and have a glass of wine. When they got to the quai de la Tournelle, just as they were stepping out of J.W.’s staffcar she caught sight of Don Stevens walking down the street. For a second she hoped he wouldn’t see them, but he turned around and ran back. He had a young fellow with him in a private’s uniform whose name was Johnson. They all went up and sat around glumly in her parlor. She and J.W. couldn’t seem to talk about anything but Eleanor, and the other two sat glumly in their chairs looking embarrassed until J.W. got to his feet, went down to his staffcar, and left.

“God damn it, if there’s anything I hate it’s a Cross Red Major,” broke out Don as soon as the door closed behind J.W.

Eveline was angry. “Well, it’s no worse than being a fake Quaker,” she said icily.

“You must forgive our intruding, Miss Hutchins,” mumbled the doughboy who had a blonde Swedish look.

“We wanted to get you to come out to a café or something, but it’s too late now,” started Don crossly. The doughboy interrupted him, “I hope, Miss Hutchins, you don’t mind our intruding, I mean my intruding… I begged Don to bring me along. He’s talked so much about you and it’s a year since I’ve seen a real nice American girl.”

He had a deferential way of talking and a whiny Minnesota accent that Eveline hated at first, but by the time he excused himself and left she liked him and stood up for him when Don said, “He’s an awful sweet guy but there’s something sappy about him. I was afraid you wouldn’t like him.” She wouldn’t let Don spend the night with her as he’d expected and he went away looking very sullen.

In October Eleanor came back with a lot of antique Italian painted panels she’d picked up for a song. In the Red Cross office there were more people than were needed for the work and she and Eleanor and J.W. took a tour of the Red Cross canteens in the east of France in a staffcar. It was a wonderful trip, the weather was good for a wonder, almost like American October, they had lunch and dinner at regimental headquarters and army corps headquarters and divisional headquarters everywhere, and all the young officers were so nice to them, and J.W. was in such a good humor and kept them laughing all the time, and they saw field batteries firing and an airplane duel and sausage balloons and heard the shriek of an arrivé. It was during that trip that Eveline began to notice for the first time something cool in Eleanor’s manner that hurt her; they’d been such good friends the first week Eleanor had gotten back from Rome.

Back in Paris it suddenly got very exciting, so many people they knew turned up, Eveline’s brother George who was an interpreter at the headquarters of the S.O.S. and a Mr. Robbins, a friend of J.W.’s who was always drunk and had a very funny way of talking and Jerry Burnham and a lot of newspaper men and Major Appleton who was now a Colonel. They had little dinners and parties and the main difficulty was sorting out ranks and getting hold of people who mixed properly. Fortunately their friends were all officers or correspondents who ranked as officers. Only once Don Stevens turned up just before they were having Colonel Appleton and Brigadier General Byng to dinner, and Eveline’s asking him to stay made things very awkward because the General thought Quakers were slackers of the worst kind, and Don flared up and said a pacifist could be a better patriot than a staff officer in a soft job and that patriotism was a crime against humanity anyway. It would have been very disagreeable if Colonel Appleton who had drunk a great many cocktails hadn’t broken through the little gilt chair he was sitting on and the General had laughed and kidded the Colonel with a bad pun about avoir du poise that took everybody’s mind off the argument. Eleanor was very sore about Don, and after the guests had left she and Eveline had a standup quarrel. Next morning Eleanor wouldn’t speak to her; Eveline went out to look for another apartment.

Oh the eagles they fly high

In Mobile, in Mobile

Joe had been hanging around New York and Brooklyn for a while, borrowing money from Mrs. Olsen and getting tanked up all the time. One day she went to work and threw him out. It was damned cold and he had to go to a mission a couple of nights. He was afraid of getting arrested for the draft and he was fed up with every goddam thing; it ended by his going out as ordinary seaman on the Appalachian, a big new freighter bound for Bordeaux and Genoa. It kinder went with the way he felt being treated like a jailbird again and swabbing decks and chipping paint. In the focastle there was mostly country kids who’d never seen the sea and a few old bums who weren’t good for anything. They got into a dirty blow four days out and shipped a small tidal wave that stove in two of the starboard lifeboats and the convoy got scattered and they found that the deck hadn’t been properly caulked and the water kept coming down into the focastle. It turned out that Joe was the only man they had on board the mate could trust at the wheel, so they took him off scrubbing paint and in his four hour tricks he had plenty of time to think about how lousy everything was. In Bordeaux he’d have liked to look up Marceline, but none of the crew got to go ashore.

The bosun went and got cockeyed with a couple of doughboys and came back with a bottle of cognac for Joe, whom he’d taken a shine to, and a lot of latrine talk about how the frogs were licked and the limeys and the wops were licked something terrible and how if it hadn’t been for us the Kaiser ud be riding into gay Paree any day and as it was it was nip and tuck. It was cold as hell. Joe and the bosun went and drank the cognac in the galley with the cook who was an old timer who’d been in the Klondike gold rush. They had the ship to themselves because the officers were all ashore taking a look at the mademosels and everybody else was asleep. The bosun said it was the end of civilization and the cook said he didn’t give a f — k and Joe said he didn’t give a f — k and the bosun said they were a couple of goddam bolshevikis and passed out cold.

It was a funny trip round Spain and through the Straits and up the French coast to Genoa. All the way there was a single file of camouflaged freighters, Greeks and Britishers and Norwegians and Americans, all hugging the coast and creeping along with lifepreservers piled on deck and boats swung out on the davits. Passing ’em was another line coming back light, transports and colliers from Italy and Saloniki, white hospital ships, every kind of old tub out of the seven seas, rusty freighters with their screws so far out of the water you could hear ’em thrashing a couple of hours after they were hull down and out of sight. Once they got into the Mediterranean there were French and British battleships to seaward all the time and sillylooking destroyers with their long smokesmudges that would hail you and come aboard to see the ship’s papers. Ashore it didn’t look like war a bit. The weather was sunny after they passed Gibraltar. The Spanish coast was green with bare pink and yellow mountains back of the shore and all scattered with little white houses like lumps of sugar that bunched up here and there into towns. Crossing the Gulf of Lyons in a drizzling rain and driving fog and nasty choppy sea they came within an ace of running down a big felucca loaded with barrels of wine. Then they were bowling along the French Riviera in a howling northwest wind, with the redroofed towns all bright and shiny and the dry hills rising rocky behind them, and snowmountains standing out clear up above. After they passed Monte Carlo it was a circus, the houses were all pink and blue and yellow and there were tall poplars and tall pointed churchsteeples in all the valleys.

That night they were on the lookout for the big light marked on the chart for Genoa when they saw a red glare ahead. Rumor went around that the heinies had captured the town and were burning it. The second mate put up to the skipper right on the bridge that they’d all be captured if they went any further and they’d better go back and put into Marseilles but the skipper told him it was none of his goddam business and to keep his mouth shut till his opinion was asked. The glare got brighter as they not nearer. It turned out to be a tanker on fire outside the breakwater. She was a big new Standard Oil tanker, settled a little in the bows with fire pouring out of her and spreading out over the water. You could see the breakwater and the lighthouses and the town piling up the hills behind with red glitter in all the windows and the crowded ships in the harbor all lit up with the red flare.

After they’d anchored, the bosun took Joe and a couple of the youngsters in the dingy and they went over to see what they could do aboard the tanker. The stern was way up out of water. So far as they could see there was no one on the ship. Some wops in a motorboat came up and jabbered at them but they pretended not to understand what they meant. There was a fireboat standing by too, but there wasn’t anything they could do. “Why the hell don’t they scuttle her?” the bosun kept saying.

Joe caught sight of a ropeladder hanging into the water and pulled the dingy over to it. Before the others had started yelling at him to come back he was half way up it. When he jumped down onto the deck from the rail he wondered what the hell he was doing up there. God damn it, I hope she does blow up, he said aloud to himself. It was bright as day up there. The forward part of the ship and the sea around it was burning like a lamp. He reckoned the boat had hit a mine or been torpedoed. The crew had evidently left in a hurry as there were all sorts of bits of clothing and a couple of seabags by the davits aft where the lifeboats had been. Joe picked himself out a nice new sweater and then went down into the cabin. On a table he found a box of Havana cigars. He took out a cigar and lit one. It made him feel good to stand there and light a cigar with the goddam tanks ready to blow him to Halifax any minute. It was a good cigar, too. In a tissuepaper package on the table were seven pairs of ladies’ silk stockings. Swell to take home to Del, was his first thought. But then he remembered that he was through with all that. He stuffed the silk stockings into his pants pockets anyway, and went back on deck.

The bosun was yelling at him from the boat for chrissake to come along or he’d get left. He just had time to pick up a wallet on the companion way. “It ain’t gasoline, it’s crude oil. She might burn for a week,” he yelled at the guys in the boat as he came slowly down the ladder pulling at the cigar as he came and looking out over the harbor packed with masts and stacks and derricks at the big marble houses and the old towers and porticos and the hills behind all lit up in red. “Where the hell’s the crew?”

“Probably all cockeyed ashore by this time, where I’d like to be,” said the bosun. Joe divvied up the cigars but he kept the silk stockings for himself. There wasn’t anything in the wallet. “Hellofa note,” grumbled the bosun, “haven’t they got any chemicals?” “These goddam wops wouldn’t know what to do with ’em if they did have,” said one of the youngsters.

They rowed back to the Appalachian and reported to the skipper that the tanker had been abandoned and it was up to the port authorities to get rid of her.

All next day the tanker burned outside the breakwater. About nightfall another of her tanks went off like a roman candle and the fire began spreading more and more over the water. The Appalachian heaved her anchor and went up to the wharf.

That night Joe and the bosun went out to look at the town. The streets were narrow and had steps in them leading up the hill to broad avenues, with cafés and little tables out under the colonnades, where the pavements were all polished marble set in patterns. It was pretty chilly and they went into a bar and drank pink hot drinks with run in them.

There they ran into a wop named Charley who’d been twelve years in Brooklyn and he took them to a dump where they ate a lot of spaghetti and fried veal and drank white wine. Charley told about how they treated you like a dog in the Eyetalian army and the pay was five cents a day and you didn’t even get that and Charley was all for il Presidente Veelson and the fourteen points and said soon they’d make peace without victory and bigga revoluzione in Italia and make bigga war on the Francese and the Inglese treata Eyetalian lika dirt. Charley brought in two girls he said were his cousins, Nedda and Dora, and one of ’em sat on Joe’s knees and, boy, how she could eat spaghetti, and they all drank wine. It cost ’em all the money Joe had to pay for supper.

When he was taking Nedda up to bed up an outside staircase in the courtyard he could see the flare of the tanker burning outside of the harbor on the blank walls and tiled roofs of the houses.

Nedda wouldn’t get undressed but wanted to see Joe’s money. Joe didn’t have any money so he brought out the silk stockings. She looked worried and shook her head but she was darn pretty and had big black eyes and Joe wanted it bad and yelled for Charley and Charley came up the stairs and talked wop to the girl and said sure she’d take the silk stockings and wasn’t America the greatest country in the world and tutti aleati and Presidente Veelson big man for Italia. But the girl wouldn’t go ahead until they’d gotten hold of an old woman who was in the kitchen, who came wheezing up the stairs and felt the stockings, and musta said they were real silk and worth money, because the girl put her arm around Joe’s neck and Charley said, “Sure, pard, she sleepa with you all night, maka love good.”

But about midnight when the girl had gone to sleep Joe got tired of lying there. He could smell the closets down in the court and a rooster kept crowing loud as the dickens like it was right under his ear. He got up and put on his clothes and tiptoed out. The silk stockings were hanging on a chair. He picked ’em up and shoved them in his pockets again. His shoes creaked like hell. The street door was all bolted and barred and he had a devil of a time getting it open. Just as he got out in the street a dog began to bark somewhere and he ran for it. He got lost in a million little narrow stone streets, but he figured that if he kept on going down hill he’d get to the harbor sometime. Then he began to see the pink glow from the burning tanker again on some of the housewalls and steered by that.

On some steep steps he ran into a couple of Americans in khaki uniforms and asked them the way and they gave him a drink out of a bottle of cognac and said they were on their way to the Eyetalian front and that there’d been a big retreat and that everything was cockeyed and they didn’t know where the cockeyed front was and they were going to wait right there till the cockeyed front came right to them. He told ’em about the silk stockings and they thought it was goddam funny, and showed him the way to the wharf where the Appalachian was and they shook hands a great many times when they said goodnight and they said the wops were swine and he said they were princes to have shown him the way and they said he was a prince and they finished up the cognac and he went on board and tumbled into his bunk.

When the Appalachian cleared for home the tanker was still burning outside the harbor. Joe came down with dose on the trip home and he couldn’t drink anything for several months and kinda steadied down when he got to Brooklyn. He went to the shoreschool run by the Shipping Board in Platt Institute and got his second mate’s license and made trips back and forth between New York and St. Nazaire all through that year on a new wooden boat built in Seattle called the Owanda, and a lot of trouble they had with her.

He and Janey wrote each other often. She was overseas with the Red Cross and very patriotic. Joe began to think that maybe she was right. Anyway if you believed the papers the heinies were getting licked, and it was a big opportunity for a young guy if you didn’t get in wrong by being taken for a proGerman or a Bolshevik or some goddam thing. After all as Janey kept writing civilization had to be saved and it was up to us to do it. Joe started a savings account and bought him a Liberty bond.

Armistice night Joe was in St. Nazaire. The town was wild. Everybody ashore, all the doughboys out of their camps, all the frog soldiers out of their barracks, everybody clapping everybody else on the back, pulling corks, giving each other drinks, popping champagne bottles, kissing every pretty girl, being kissed by old women, kissed on both cheeks by French veterans with whiskers. The mates and the skipper and the chief and a couple of naval officers they’d never seen before all started to have a big feed in a café but they never got further than soup because everybody was dancing in the kitchen and they poured the cook so many drinks he passed out cold and they all sat there singing and drinking champagne out of tumblers and cheering the allied flags that girls kept carrying through.

Joe went cruising looking for Jeanette who was a girl he’d kinder taken up with whenever he was in St. Nazaire. He wanted to find her before he got too zigzag. She’d promised to couchay with him that night before it turned out to be Armistice Day. She said she never couchayed with anybody else all the time the Owanda was in port and he treated her right and brought her beaucoup presents from L’Amerique, and du sucer and du cafay. Joe felt good, he had quite a wad in his pocket and, god damn it, American money was worth something these days; and a couple of pounds of sugar he’d brought in the pockets of his raincoat was better than money with the mademosels.

He went in back where there was a cabaret all red plush with mirrors and the music was playing The Star Spangled Banner and everybody cried Vive L’Amerique and pushed drinks in his face as he came in and then he was dancing with a fat girl and the music was playing some damn foxtrot or other. He pulled away from the fat girl because he’d seen Jeanette. She had an American flag draped over her dress. She was dancing with a big sixfoot black Senegalese. Joe saw red. He pulled her away from the nigger who was a frog officer all full of gold braid and she said, “Wazamatta cherie,” and Joe hauled off and hit the damn nigger as hard as he could right on the button but the nigger didn’t budge. The nigger’s face had a black puzzled smiling look like he was just going to ask a question. A waiter and a coupla frog soldiers came up and tried to pull Joe away. Everybody was yelling and jabbering. Jeanette was trying to get between Joe and the waiter and got a sock in the jaw that knocked her flat. Joe laid out a couple of frogs and was backing off towards the door, when he saw in the mirror that a big guy in a blouse was bringing down a bottle on his head held with both hands. He tried to swing around but he didn’t have time. The bottle crashed his skull and he was out.

the arrival of the news caused the swamping of the city’s telephone lines

when we emptied the rosies to leeward over the side every night after the last inspection we’d stop for a moment’s gulp of the November gale the lash of spray in back of your ears for a look at the spume splintered off the leaping waves shipwreckers drowners of men (in their great purple floating mines rose and fell gently submarines travelled under them on an even keel) to glance at the sky veiled with scud to take our hands off the greasy handles of the cans full of slum they couldnt eat (nine meals nine dumpings of the leftover grub nine cussingmatches with the cockney steward who tried to hold out on the stewed apricots inspections AttenSHUN click clack At Ease shoot the flashlight in everycorner of the tin pans nine lineups along the leaving airless corridor of seasick seascared doughboys with their messkits in their hands)

Hay sojer tell me they’ve signed an armistice tell me the wars over they’re takin us home latrine talk the hell you say now I’ll tell one we were already leading the empty rosies down three flights of iron ladders into the heaving retching hold starting up with the full whenever the ship rolled a little slum would trickle out the side

The year that Buchanan was elected president Thomas Woodrow Wilson

was born to a presbyterian minister’s daughter

in the manse at Staunton in the valley of Virginia; it was the old Scotch-Irish stock; the father was a presbyterian minister too and teacher of rhetoric in theological seminaries; the Wilsons lived in a universe of words linked into an incontrovertible firmament by two centuries of calvinist divines,

God was the Word

and the Word was God.

Dr. Wilson was a man of standing who loved his home and his children and good books and his wife and correct syntax and talked to God every day at family prayers;

he brought his sons up

between the bible and the dictionary.

MONSTER GUNS REMOVED?

alphabetically according to rank tapped out with two cold index fingers on the company Corona Allots Class A & B Ins prem C & D

Atten — SHUN snap to the hooks and eyes at my throat constricting the adamsapple bringing together the US and the Caduceus

At Ease

outside they’re drilling in the purple drizzle of a winter afternoon in Ferrières en Gatinais, Abbaye founded by Clovis over the skeletons of three disciples of nôtre seigneur Jésus-Christ 3rd Lib Loan Sec of Treas Altian Politian and Hermatian 4th Lib Loan Sec of Treas must be on CL E or other form Q.M.C. 38 now it’s raining hard and the gutters gurgle there’s tinkling from all the little glassgreen streams Alcuin was prior once and millwheels grind behind the mossed stone walls and Clodhilde and Clodomir were buried here

promotions only marked under gains drowsily clacked out on the rusteaten Corona in the cantonment of O’Reilly’s Travelling Circus alone except for the undertaker soldiering in his bunk and the dry hack of the guy that has TB that the MO was never sober enough to examine

washing and dressing hastily they came to the ground floor at the brusque call of the commissaries, being assembled in one of the rear rooms in the basement of the house. Here they were lined up in a semicircle along the wall, the young grandduchesses trembling at the unusual nature of the orders given and at the gloomy hour. They more than suspected the errand upon which the commissaries had come. Addressing the czar, Yarodsky, without the least attempt to soften his announcement, stated that they must all die and at once. The revolution was in danger, he stated, and the fact that there were still the members of the reigning house living added to that danger. Therefore to remove them was the duty of all Russian patriots. “Thus your life is ended,” he said in conclusion.

“I am ready,” was the simple announcement of the czar, while the czarina, clinging to him, loosed her hold long enough to make the sign of the cross, an example followed by the grandduchess Olga and by Dr. Botkin.

The czarevitch, paralyzed with fear, stood in stupefaction beside his mother, uttering no sound either in supplication or protest, while his three sisters and the other grandduchesses sank to the floor trembling.

Yarodsky drew his revolver and fired the first shot. A volley followed and the prisoners reeled to the ground. Where the bullets failed to find their mark the bayonet put the finishing touches. The mingled blood of the victims not only covered the floor of the room where the execution took place but ran in streams along the hallway

The Trents lived in a house on Pleasant avenue that was the finest street in Dallas that was the biggest and fastest growing town in Texas that was the biggest state in the Union and had the blackest soil and the whitest people and America was the greatest country in the world and Daughter was Dad’s onlyest sweetest little girl. Her real name was Anne Elizabeth Trent after poor dear mother who had died when she was a little tiny girl but Dad and the boys called her Daughter. Buddy’s real name was William Delaney Trent like Dad who was a prominent attorney, and Buster’s real name was Spencer Anderson Trent.

Winters they went to school and summers they ran wild on the ranch that grandfather had taken up as a pioneer. When they’d been very little there hadn’t been any fences yet and still a few maverick steers out along the creekbottoms, but by the time Daughter was in highschool everything was fenced and they were building a macadam road out from Dallas and Dad went everywhere in the Ford instead of on his fine Arab stallion Mullah he’d been given by a stockman at the Fat Stock Show in Waco when the stockman had gone broke and hadn’t been able to pay his lawyer’s fee. Daughter had a creamcolored pony named Coffee who’d nod his head and paw with his hoof when he wanted a lump of sugar, but some of the girls she knew had cars and Daughter and the boys kept after Dad to buy a car, a real car instead of that miserable old flivver he drove around the ranch.

When Dad bought a Pierce Arrow touring car the spring Daughter graduated from highschool, she was the happiest girl in the world. Sitting at the wheel in a fluffy white dress the morning of Commencement outside the house waiting for Dad, who had just come out from the office and was changing his clothes, she had thought how much she’d like to be able to see herself sitting there in the not too hot June morning in the lustrous black shiny car among the shiny brass and nickel fixtures under the shiny paleblue big Texas sky in the middle of the big flat rich Texas country that ran for two hundred miles in every direction. She could see half her face in the little oval mirror on the mudguard. It looked red and sunburned under her sandybrown hair. If she only had red hair and a skin white like buttermilk like Susan Gillespie had, she was wishing when she saw Joe Washburn coming along the street dark and seriouslooking under his panama hat. She fixed her face in a shy kind of smile just in time to have him say, “How lovely you look, Daughter, you must excuse ma sayin’ so.” “I’m just waiting for Dad and the boys to go to the exercises. O Joe, we’re late and I’m so excited…. I feel like a sight.”

“Well, have a good time.” He walked on unhurriedly putting his hat back on his head as he went. Something hotter than the June sunshine had come out of Joe’s very dark eyes and run in a blush over her face and down the back of her neck under her thin dress and down the middle of her bosom, where the little breasts that she tried never to think of were just beginning to be noticeable. At last Dad and the boys came out all looking blonde and dressed up and sunburned. Dad made her sit in the back seat with Bud who sat up stiff as a poker.

The big wind that had come up drove grit in their faces. After she caught sight of the brick buildings of the highschool and the crowd and the light dresses and the stands and the big flag with the stripes all wiggling against the sky she got so excited she never remembered anything that happened.

That night, wearing her first evening dress at the dance she came to in the feeling of tulle and powder and crowds, boys all stiff and scared in their dark coats, girls packing into the dressing room to look at each other’s dresses. She never said a word while she was dancing, just smiled and held her head a little to one side and hoped somebody would cut in. Half the time she didn’t know who she was dancing with, just moved smiling in a cloud of pink tulle and colored lights; boys’ faces bobbed in front of her, tried to say smarty ladykillerish things or else were shy and tonguetied, different colored faces on top of the same stiff bodies. Honestly she was surprised when Susan Gillespie came up to her when they were getting their wraps to go home and giggled, “My dear, you were the belle of the ball.” When Bud and Buster said so next morning and old black Emma who’d brought them all up after mother died came in from the kitchen and said, “Lawsy, Miss Annie, folks is talkin’ all over town abut how you was the belle of the ball last night,” she felt herself blushing happily all over. Emma said she’d heard it from that noaccount yaller man on the milk route whose aunt worked at Mrs. Washburn’s, then she set down the popovers and went out with a grin as wide as a piano. “Well, Daughter,” said Dad in his deep quiet voice, tapping the top of her hand, “I thought so myself but I thought maybe I was prejudiced.”

During the summer Joe Washburn, who’d just graduated from law school at Austin and who was going into Dad’s office in the fall, came and spent two weeks with them on the ranch. Daughter was just horrid to him, made old Hildreth give him a mean little old oneeyed pony to ride, put horned toads in his cot, would hand him hot chile sauce instead of catsup at table or try to get him to put salt instead of sugar in his coffee. The boys got so off her they wouldn’t speak to her and Dad said she was getting to be a regular tomboy, but she couldn’t seem to stop acting like she did.

Then one day they all rode over to eat supper on Clear Creek and went swimming by moonlight in the deep hole there was under the bluff. Daughter got a crazy streak in her after a while and ran up and said she was going to dive from the edge of the bluff. The water looked so good and the moon floated shivering on top. They all yelled at her not to do it but she made a dandy dive right from the edge. But something was the matter. She’d hit her head, it hurt terribly. She was swallowing water, she was fighting a great weight that was pressing down on her, that was Joe. The moonlight flowed out in a swirl leaving it all black, only she had her arms around Joe’s neck, her fingers were tightening around the ribbed muscles of his arms. She came to with his face looking into hers and the moon up in the sky again and warm stuff pouring over her forehead. She was trying to say, “Joe, I wanto, Joe, I wanto,” but it all drained away into warm sticky black again, only she caught his voice deep, deep…“pretty near had me drowned too…” and Dad sharp and angry like in court, “I told her she oughtn’t to dive off there.”

She came to herself again in bed with her head hurting horribly and Dr. Winslow there, and the first thing she thought was where was Joe and had she acted like a little silly telling him she was crazy about him? But nobody said anything about it and they were all awful nice to her except that Dad came, still talking with his angry courtroom voice, and lectured her for being foolhardy and a tomboy and having almost cost Joe his life by the stranglehold she had on him when they’d pulled them both out of the water. She had a fractured skull and had to be in bed all summer and Joe was awful nice though he looked at her kinder funny out of his sharp black eyes the first time he came in her room. As long as he stayed on the ranch he came to read to her after lunch. He read her all of Lorna Doone and half of Nicholas Nickleby and she lay there in bed, hot and cosy in her fever, feeling the rumble of his deep voice through the pain in her head and fighting all the time inside not to cry out like a little silly that she was crazy about him and why didn’t he like her just a little bit. When he’d gone it wasn’t any fun being sick any more. Dad or Bud came and read to her sometimes but most of the time she liked better reading to herself. She read all of Dickens, Lorna Doone twice, and Poole’s The Harbor, that made her want to go to New York.

Next fall Dad took her north for a year in a finishing school in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She was excited on the trip up on the train and loved every minute of it, but Miss Tynge’s was horrid and the girls were all northern girls and so mean and made fun of her clothes and talked about nothing but Newport, and Southampton, and matinée idols she’d never seen; she hated it. She cried every night after she’d gone to bed thinking how she hated the school and how Joe Washburn would never like her now. When Christmas vacation came and she had to stay on with the two Miss Tynges and some of the teachers who lived too far away to go home either, she just decided she wouldn’t stand it any longer and one morning before anybody was up she got out of the house, walked down to the station, bought herself a ticket to Washington, and got on the first westbound train with nothing but a toothbrush and a nightgown in her handbag. She was scared all alone on the train at first but such a nice young Virginian who was a West Point Cadet got on at Havre de Grace where she had to change; they had the time of their lives together laughing and talking. In Washington he asked permission to be her escort in the nicest way and took her all around, to see the Capitol and the White House and the Smithsonian Institute and set her up to lunch at the New Willard and put her on the train for St. Louis that night. His name was Paul English. She promised she’d write him every day of her life. She was so excited she couldn’t sleep lying in her berth looking out of the window of the pullman at the trees and the circling hills all in the faint glow of snow and now and then lights speeding by; she could remember exactly how he looked and how his hair was parted and the long confident grip of his hand when they said goodby. She’d been a little nervous at first, but they’d been like old friends right from the beginning and he’d been so courteous and gentlemanly. He’d been her first pickup.

When she walked in on Dad and the boys at breakfast a sunny winter morning two days later, my, weren’t they surprised; Dad tried to scold her, but Daughter could see that he was as pleased as she was. Anyway, she didn’t care, it was so good to be home.

After Christmas she and Dad and the boys went for a week’s hunting down near Corpus Christi and had the time of their lives and Daughter shot her first deer. When they got back to Dallas Daughter said she wasn’t going back to be finished but that what she would like to do was go up to New York to stay with Ada Washburn, who was studying at Columbia, and to take courses where she’d really learn something. Ada was Joe Washburn’s sister, an old maid but bright as a dollar and was working for her Ph.D in Education. It took a lot of arguing because Dad had set his heart on having Daughter go to a finishing school but she finally convinced him and was off again to New York.

She was reading Les Misérables all the way up on the train and looking out at the greyishbrownish winter landscape that didn’t seem to have any life to it after she left the broad hills of Texas, pale green with winter wheat and alfalfa, feeling more and more excited and scared as hour by hour she got nearer New York. There was a stout motherly woman who’d lost her husband who got on the train at Little Rock and wouldn’t stop talking about the dangers and pitfalls that beset a young woman’s path in big cities. She kept such a strict watch on Daughter that she never got a chance to talk to the interesting looking young man with the intense black eyes who boarded the train at St. Louis and kept going over papers of some kind he had in a brown briefcase. She thought he looked a little like Joe Washburn. At last when they were crossing New Jersey and there got to be more and more factories and grimy industrial towns, Daughter’s heart got to beating so fast she couldn’t sit still but kept having to go out and stamp around in the cold raw air of the vestibule. The fat greyheaded conductor asked her with a teasing laugh if her beau was going to be down at the station to meet her, she seemed so anxious to get in. They were going through Newark then. Only one more stop. The sky was lead color over wet streets full of automobiles and a drizzly rain was pitting the patches of snow with grey. The train began to cross wide desolate saltmarshes, here and there broken by an uneven group of factory structures or a black river with steamboats on it. There didn’t seem to be any people; it looked so cold over those marshes Daughter felt scared and lonely just looking at them and wished she was home. Then suddenly the train was in a tunnel, and the porter was piling all the bags in the front end of the car. She got into the fur coat Dad had bought her as a Christmas present and pulled her gloves on over her hands cold with excitement for fear that maybe Ada Washburn hadn’t gotten her telegram or hadn’t been able to come down to meet her.

But there she was on the platform in noseglasses and raincoat looking as oldmaidish as ever and a slightly younger girl with her who turned out to be from Waco and studying art. They had a long ride in a taxi up crowded streets full of slush with yellow and grey snowpiles along the sidewalks. “If you’d have been here a week ago, Anne Elizabeth, I declare you’d have seen a real blizzard.”

“I used to think snow was like on Christmas cards,” said Esther Wilson who was an interestinglooking girl with black eyes and a long face and a deep kind of tragicsounding voice. “But it was just an illusion like a lot of things.” “New York’s no place for illusions,” said Ada sharply. “It all looks kinder like a illusion to me,” said Daughter, looking out of the window of the taxicab.

Ada and Esther had a lovely big apartment on University Heights where they had fixed up the dining room as a bedroom for Daughter. She didn’t like New York but it was exciting; everything was grey and grimy and the people all seemed to be foreigners and nobody paid any attention to you except now and then a man tried to pick you up on the street or brushed up against you in the subway which was disgusting. She was signed up as a special student and went to lectures about Economics and English Literature and Art and talked a little occasionally with some boy who happened to be sitting next to her, but she was so much younger than anybody she met and she didn’t seem to have the right line of talk to interest them. It was fun going to matinées with Ada sometimes or riding down all bundled up on top of the bus to go to the art-museum with Esther on Sunday afternoons, but they were both of them so staid and grown up and all the time getting shocked by things she said and did.

When Paul English called up and asked her to go to a matinée with him one Saturday, she was very thrilled. They’d written a few letters back and forth but they hadn’t seen each other since Washington. She was all morning putting on first one dress and then the other, trying out different ways of doing her hair and was still taking a hot bath when he called for her so that Ada had to entertain him for the longest time. When she saw him all her thrill dribbled away, he looked so stiff and stuckup in his dress uniform. First thing she knew she was kidding him, and acting silly going downtown in the subway so that by the time they got to the Astor where he took her to lunch, he looked sore as a pup. She left him at the table and went to the ladies’ room to see if she couldn’t get her hair to look a little better than it did and got to talking with an elderly Jewish lady in diamonds who’d lost her pocketbook, and when she got back the lunch was standing cold on the table and Paul English was looking at his wristwatch uneasily. She didn’t like the play and he tried to get fresh in the taxicab driving up Riverside Drive although it was still broad daylight, and she slapped his face. He said she was the meanest girl he’d ever met and she said she liked being mean and if he didn’t like it he knew what he could do. Before that she’d made up her mind that she’d crossed him off her list.

She went in her room and cried and wouldn’t take any supper. She felt real miserable having Paul English turn out a pill like that. It was lonely not having anybody to take her out and no chance of meeting anybody because she had to go everywhere with those old maids. She lay on her back on the floor looking at the furniture from underneath like when she’d been little and thinking of Joe Washburn. Ada came in and found her in the silliest position lying on the floor with her legs in the air; she jumped up and kissed her all over her face and hugged her and said she’d been a little idiot but it was all over now and was there anything to eat in the icebox.

When she met Edwin Vinal at one of Ada’s Sunday evening parties that she didn’t usually come out to on account of people sitting around so prim and talking so solemn and deep over their cocoa and cupcakes, it made everything different and she began to like New York. He was a scrawny kind of young fellow who was taking courses in sociology. He sat on a stiff chair with his cocoacup balanced uncomfortably in his hand and didn’t seem to know where to put his legs. He didn’t say anything all evening but just as he was going, he picked up something Ada said about values and began to talk a blue streak, quoting all the time from a man named Veblen. Daughter felt kind of attracted to him and asked who Veblen was, and he began to talk to her. She wasn’t up on what he was talking about but it made her feel lively inside to have him talking right to her like that. He had light hair and black eyebrows and lashes around very pale grey eyes with little gold specks in them. She liked his awkward lanky way of moving around. Next evening he came to see her and brought her a volume of the Theory of the Leisure Class and asked her if she didn’t want to go skating with him at the St. Nicholas rink. She went in her room to get ready and began to dawdle around powdering her face and looking at herself in the glass. “Hey, Anne, for gosh sakes, we haven’t got all night,” he yelled through the door. She had never had iceskates on her feet before, but she knew how to rollerskate, so with Edwin holding her arm she was able to get around the big hall with its band playing and all the tiers of lights and faces around the balcony. She had more fun than she’d had any time since she left home.

Edwin Vinal had been a social worker and lived in a settlement house and now he had a scholarship at Columbia but he said the profs were too theoretical and never seemed to realize it was real people like you and me they were dealing with. Daughter had done churchwork and taken around baskets to poorwhite families at Christmas time and said she’d like to do some socialservicework right here in New York. As they were taking off their skates he asked her if she really meant it and she smiled up at him and said, “Hope I may die if I don’t.”

So the next evening he took her downtown threequarters of an hour’s ride in the subway and then a long stretch on a crosstown car to a settlement house on Grand Street where she had to wait while he gave an English lesson to a class of greasylooking young Lithuanians or Polaks or something like that. Then they walked around the streets and Edwin pointed out the conditions. It was like the Mexican part of San Antonio or Houston only there were all kinds of foreigners. None of them looked as if they ever bathed and the streets smelt of garbage. There was laundry hanging out everywhere and signs in all kinds of funny languages. Edwin showed her some in Russian and Yiddish, one in Armenian and two in Arabic. The streets were awful crowded and there were pushcarts along the curb and peddlers everywhere and funny smells of cooking coming out of restaurants, and outlandish phonograph music. Edwin pointed out two tiredlooking painted girls who he said were streetwalkers, drunks stumbling out of a saloon, a young man in a checked cap he said was a cadet drumming up trade for a disorderly house, some sallowfaced boys he said were gunmen and dope peddlers. It was a relief when they came up again out of the subway way uptown where a springy wind was blowing down the broad empty streets that smelt of the Hudson River. “Well, Anne, how did you like your little trip to the underworld?”

“Allright,” she said after a pause. “Another time I think I’ll take a gun in my handbag…. But all those people, Edwin, how on earth can you make citizens out of them? We oughtn’t to let all those foreigners come over and mess up our country.”

“You’re entirely wrong,” Edwin snapped at her. “They’d all be decent if they had a chance. We’d be just like them if we hadn’t been lucky enough to be born of decent families in small prosperous American towns.”

“Oh, how can you talk so silly, Edwin, they’re not white people and they never will be. They’s just like Mexicans or somethin’, or niggers.” She caught herself up and swallowed the last word. The colored elevator boy was drowsing on a bench right behind her.

“If you’re not the benightedest little heathen I ever saw,” said Edwin teasingly. “You’re a Christian, aren’t you, well, have you ever thought that Christ was a Jew?”

“Well, I’m fallin’ down with sleep and can’t argue with you but I know you’re wrong.” She went into the elevator and the colored elevator boy got up yawning and stretching. The last she saw of Edwin in the rapidly decreasing patch of light between the floor of the elevator and the ceiling of the vestibule he was shaking his fist at her. She threw him a kiss without meaning to.

When she got in the apartment, Ada, who was reading in the livingroom, scolded her a little for being so late, but she pleaded that she was too tired and sleepy to be scolded. “What do you think of Edwin Vinal, Ada?” “Why, my dear, I think he’s a splendid young fellow, a little restless maybe, but he’ll settle down…. Why?”

“Oh, I dunno,” said Daughter, yawning, “Good night, Ada darlin’.”

She took a hot bath and put a lot of perfume on and went to bed, but she couldn’t go to sleep. Her legs ached from the greasy pavements and she could feel the walls of the tenements sweating lust and filth and the smell of crowded bodies closing in on her, in spite of the perfume she still had the rank garbagy smell in her nose, and the dazzle of street lights and faces pricked her eyes. When she went to sleep she dreamed she had rouged her lips and was walking up and down, up and down with a gun in her handbag; Joe Washburn walked by and she kept catching at his arm to try to make him stop but he kept walking by without looking at her and so did Dad and they wouldn’t look when a big Jew with a beard kept getting closer to her and he smelt horrid of the East Side and garlic and waterclosets and she tried to get the gun out of her bag to shoot him and he had his arms around her and was pulling her face close to his. She couldn’t get the gun out of the handbag and behind the roaring clatter of the subway in her ears was Edwin Vinal’s voice saying, “You’re a Christian, aren’t you? You’re entirely wrong… a Christian, aren’t you? Have you ever thought that Christ would have been just like them if he hadn’t been lucky enough to have been born of decent people… a Christian, aren’t you….”

Ada, standing over her in a nightgown, woke her up, “What can be the matter, child?” “I was having a nightmare… isn’t that silly?” said Daughter and sat boltupright in bed. “Did I yell bloody murder?” “I bet you children were out eating Welsh Rabbit, that’s why you were so late,” said Ada, and went back to her room laughing.

That spring Daughter coached a girls’ basketball team at a Y.W.C.A. in the Bronx, and got engaged to Edwin Vinal. She told him she didn’t want to marry anybody for a couple of years yet, and he said he didn’t care about carnal marriage but that the important thing was for them to plan a life of service together. Sunday evenings, when the weather got good, they would go and cook a steak together in Palisades Park and sit there looking through the trees at the lights coming on in the great toothed rockrim of the city and talk about what was good and evil and what real love was. Coming back they’d stand hand in hand in the bow of the ferry boat among the crowd of boyscouts and hikers and picnickers and look at the great sweep of lighted buildings fading away into the ruddy haze down the North River and talk about all the terrible conditions in the city. Edwin would kiss her on the forehead when he said Goodnight and she’d go up in the elevator feeling that the kiss was a dedication.

At the end of June she went home to spend three months on the ranch, but she was very unhappy there that summer. Somehow she couldn’t get around to telling Dad about her engagement. When Joe Washburn came out to spend a week the boys made her furious teasing her about him and telling her that he was engaged to a girl in Oklahoma City, and she got so mad she wouldn’t speak to them and was barely civil to Joe. She insisted on riding a mean little pinto that bucked and threw her once or twice. She drove the car right through a gate one night and busted both lamps to smithereens. When Dad scolded her about her recklessness she’d tell him he oughtn’t to care because she was going back east to earn her own living and he’d be rid of her. Joe Washburn treated her with the same grave kindness as always, and sometimes when she was acting crazy she’d catch a funny understanding kidding gleam in his keen eyes that would make her feel suddenly all weak and silly inside. The night before he left the boys cornered a rattler on the rockpile behind the corral and Daughter dared Joe to pick it up and snap its head off. Joe ran for a forked stick and caught the snake with a jab behind the head and threw it with all his might against the wall of the little smokehouse. As it lay wriggling on the grass with a broken back Bud took its head off with a hoe. It had six rattles and a button. “Daughter,” Joe drawled, looking her in the face with his steady smiling stare, “sometimes you talk like you didn’t have good sense.”

“You’re yaller, that’s what’s the matter with you,” she said.

“Daughter, you’re crazy… you apologize to Joe,” yelled Bud, running up red in the face with the dead snake in his hand. She turned and went into the ranchhouse and threw herself on her bed. She didn’t come out of her room till after Joe had left in the morning.

The week before she left to go back to Columbia she was good as gold and tried to make it up to Dad and the boys by baking cakes for them and attending to the housekeeping for having acted so mean and crazy all summer. She met Ada in Dallas and they engaged a section together. She’d been hoping that Joe would come down to the station to see them off, but he was in Oklahoma City on oil business. On her way north she wrote him a long letter saying she didn’t know what had gotten into her that day with the rattler and wouldn’t he please forgive her.

Daughter worked hard that autumn. She’d gotten herself admitted to the School of Journalism, in spite of Edwin’s disapproval. He wanted her to study to be a teacher or social worker, but she said journalism offered more opportunity. They more or less broke off over it; although they saw each other a good deal, they didn’t talk so much about being engaged. There was a boy named Webb Cruthers studying journalism that Daughter got to be good friends with although Ada said he was no good and wouldn’t let her bring him to the house. He was shorter than she, had dark hair and looked about fifteen although he said he was twentyone. He had a creamy white skin that made people call him Babyface, and a funny confidential way of talking as if he didn’t take what he was saying altogether seriously himself. He said he was an anarchist and talked all the time about politics and the war. He used to take her down to the East Side, too, but it was more fun than going with Edwin. Webb always wanted to go in somewhere to get a drink and talk to people. He took her to saloons and to Romanian rathskellers and Arabian restaurants and more places than she’d ever imagined. He knew everybody everywhere and seemed to manage to make people trust him for the check, because he hardly ever had any money, and when they’d spent whatever she had with her Webb would have to charge the rest. Daughter didn’t drink more than an occasional glass of wine, and if he began to get too obstreperous, she’d make him take her to the nearest subway and go on home. Then next day he’d be a little weak and trembly and tell her about his hangover and funny stories about adventures he’d had when he was tight. He always had pamphlets in his pockets about socialism and syndicalism and copies of Mother Earth or The Masses.

After Christmas Webb got all wrapped up in a strike of textile workers that was going on in a town over in New Jersey. One Sunday they went over to see what it was like. They got off the train at a grimy brick station in the middle of the empty business section, a few people standing around in front of lunchcounters, empty stores closed for Sunday; there seemed nothing special about the town until they walked out to the long low square brick buildings of the mills. There were knots of policemen in blue standing about in the wide muddy roadway outside and inside the wiremesh gates huskylooking young men in khaki. “These are special deputies, the sons of bitches,” muttered Webb between his teeth. They went to Strike Headquarters to see a girl Webb knew who was doing publicity for them. At the head of a grimy stairway crowded with greyfaced foreign men and women in faded greylooking clothes, they found an office noisy with talk and click of typewriters. The hallway was piled with stacks of handbills that a tiredlooking young man was giving out in packages to boys in ragged sweaters. Webb found Sylvia Dalhart, a longnosed girl with glasses who was typing madly at a desk piled with newspapers and clippings. She waves a hand and said, “Webb, wait for me outside. I’m going to show some newspaper guys around and you’d better come.”

Out in the hall they ran into a fellow Webb knew, Ben Compton, a tall young man with a long thin nose and redrimmed eyes, who said he was going to speak at the meeting and asked Webb if he wouldn’t speak. “Jeez, what could I say to those fellers? I’m just a bum of a college student, like you, Ben.” “Tell ’em the workers have got to win the world, tell ’em this fight is part of a great historic battle. Talking’s the easiest part of the movement. The truth’s simple enough.” He had an explosive way of talking with a pause between each sentence, as if the sentence took sometime to come up from someplace way down inside. Daughter sized up that he was attractive, even though he was probably a Jew. “Well, I’ll try to stammer out something about democracy in industry,” said Webb.

Sylvia Dalhart was already pushing them down the stairs. She had with her a pale young man in a raincoat and black felt hat who was chewing the end of a half of a cigar that had gone out. “Fellow-workers, this is Joe Biglow from the Globe,” she had a western burr in her voice that made Daughter feel at home. “We’re going to show him around.”

They went all over town, to strikers’ houses where tiredlooking women in sweaters out at the elbows were cooking up lean Sunday dinners of corned beef and cabbage or stewed meat and potatoes, or in some houses they just had cabbage and bread or just potatoes. Then they went to a lunchroom near the station and ate some lunch. Daughter paid the check as nobody seemed to have any money, and it was time to go to the meeting.

The trolleycar was crowded with strikers and their wives and children. The meeting was to be held in the next town because in that town the Mills owned everything and there was no way of hiring a hall. It had started to sleet, and they got their feet wet wading through the slush to the mean frame building where the meeting was going to be held. When they got to the door there were mounted police out in front. “Hall full,” a cop told them at the streetcorner, “no more allowed inside.”

They stood around in the sleet waiting for somebody with authority. There were thousands of strikers, men and women and boys and girls, the older people talking among themselves in low voices in foreign languages. Webb kept saying, “Jesus, this is outrageous. Somebody ought to do something.” Daughter’s feet were cold and she wanted to go home.

Then Ben Compton came around from the back of the building. People began to gather around him, “There’s Ben… there’s Compton, good boy, Benny,” she heard people saying. Young men moved around through the crowd whispering, “Overflow meeting… stand your ground, folks.”

He began to speak hanging by one arm from a lamppost. “Comrades, this is another insult flung in the face of the working class. There are not more than forty people in the hall and they close the doors and tell us it’s full…” The crowd began swaying back and forth, hats, umbrellas bobbing in the sleety rain. Then she saw the two cops were dragging Compton off and heard the jangle of the patrolwagon. “Shame, shame,” people yelled. They began to back off from the cops; the flow was away from the hall. People were moving quietly and dejectedly down the street toward the trolley tracks with the cordon of mounted police pressing them on. Suddenly Webb whispered in her ear, “Let me lean on your shoulder,” and jumped on a hydrant.

“This is outrageous,” he shouted, “you people had a permit to use the hall and had hired it and no power on earth has a right to keep you out of it. To hell with the cossacks.”

Two mounted police were loping towards him, opening a lane through the crowd as they came. Webb was off the hydrant and had grabbed Daughter’s hand, “Let’s run like hell,” he whispered and was off doubling back and forth among the scurrying people. She followed him laughing and out of breath. A trolley car was coming down the main street. Webb caught it on the move but she couldn’t make it and had to wait for the next. Meanwhile the cops were riding slowly back and forth among the crowd breaking it up.

Daughter’s feet ached from paddling in slush all afternoon and she was thinking that she ought to get home before she caught her death of cold. At the station waiting for the train she saw Webb. He looked scared to death. He’d pulled his cap down over his eyes and his muffler up over this chin and pretended not to know Daughter when she went up to him. Once they got on the overheated train he sneaked up the aisle and sat down next to her.

“I was afraid some dick ud recognize me at the station,” he whispered. “Well, what do you think of it?”

“I thought it was terrible… they’re all so yaller… the only people looked good to me were those boys guardin’ the mills, they looked like white men…. And as for you, Webb Cruthers, you ran like a deer.”

“Don’t talk so loud…. Do you think I ought to have waited and gotten arrested like Ben.”

“Of course it’s none of my business.”

“You don’t understand revolutionary tactics, Anne.”

Going over on the ferry they were both of them cold and hungry. Webb said he had the key to a room a friend of his had down on Eighth Street and that they’d better go there and warm their feet and make some tea before they went uptown. They had a long sullen walk, neither of them saying anything, from the ferry landing to the house. The room, that smelt of turpentine and was untidy, turned out to be a big studio heated by a gasburner. It was cold as Greenland, so they wrapped themselves in blankets and took off their shoes and stockings and toasted their feet in front of the gas. Daughter took her skirt off under the blanket and hung it up over the heater. “Well, I declare,” she said, “if your friend comes in we sure will be compromised.”

“He won’t,” said Webb, “he’s up at Cold Spring for the weekend.” Webb was moving around in his bare feet, putting on water to boil and making toast. “You’d better take your trousers off, Webb, I can see the water dripping off them from here.” Webb blushed and pulled them off, draping the blanket around himself like a Roman senator.

For a long time they didn’t say anything and all they could hear above the distant hum of traffic was the hiss of the gasflame and the intermittent purr of the kettle just beginning to boil. Then Webb suddenly began to talk in a nervous spluttering way. “So you think I’m yellow, do you? Well, you may be right, Anne… not that I give a damn… I mean, you see, there’s times when a fellow ought to be a coward and times when he ought to do the he-man stuff. Now don’t talk for a minute, let me say something…. I’m hellishly attracted to you… and it’s been yellow of me not to tell you about it before, see? I don’t believe in love or anything like that, all bourgeois nonsense; but I think when people are attracted to each other I think it’s yellow of them not to… you know what I mean.”

“No, I doan’, Webb,” said Daughter after a pause.

Webb looked at her in a puzzled way as he brought her a cup of tea and some buttered toast with a piece of cheese on it. They ate in silence for a while; it was so quiet they could hear each other gulping little swallows of tea. “Now, what in Jesus Christ’s name did you mean by that?” Webb suddenly shouted out.

Daughter felt warm and drowsy in her blanket, with the hot tea in her and the dry gasheat licking the soles of her feet. “Well, what does anybody mean by anything,” she mumbled dreamily.

Webb put down his teacup and began to walk up and down the room trailing the blanket after him. “S — t,” he suddenly said, as he stepped on a thumbtack. He stood on one leg looking at the sole of his foot that was black from the grime of the floor. “But, Jesus Christ, Anne… people ought to be free and happy about sex… come ahead let’s.” His cheeks were pink and his black hair that needed cutting was every which way. He kept on standing on one leg and looking at the sole of his foot. Daughter began to laugh. “You look awful funny like that, Webb.” She felt a warm glow all over her. “Give me another cup of tea and make me some more toast.”

After she’d had the tea and toast she said, “Well, isn’t it about time we ought to be going uptown?” “But Christ, Anne, I’m making indecent proposals to you,” he said shrilly, half laughing and half in tears. “For God’s sake pay attention… Damn it, I’ll make you pay attention, you little bitch.” He dropped his blanket and ran at her. She could see he was fighting mad. He pulled her up out of her chair and kissed her on the mouth. She had quite a tussle with him, as he was wiry and strong, but she managed to get her forearm under his chin and to push his face away far enough to give him a punch on the nose. His nose began to bleed. “Don’t be silly, Webb,” she said, breathing hard, “I don’t want that sort of thing, not yet, anyway… go and wash your face.”

He went to the sink and began dabbling his face with water. Daughter hurried into her skirt and shoes and stockings and went over to the sink where he was washing his face, “That was mean of me, Webb, I’m terribly sorry. There’s something always makes me be mean to people I like.” Webb wouldn’t say anything for a long time. His nose was still bleeding.

“Go along home,” he said, “I’m going to stay here…. It’s all right… my mistake.”

She put on her dripping raincoat and went out into the shiny evening streets. All the way home on the express in the subway she was feeling warm and tender towards Webb, like towards Dad or the boys.

She didn’t see him for several days, then one evening he called and asked her if she wanted to go out on the picket line next morning. It was still dark when she met him at the ferry station. They were both cold and sleepy and didn’t say much going out on the train. From the train they had to run through the slippery streets to get to the mills in time to join the picket line. Faces looked cold and pinched in the blue early light. Women had shawls over their heads, few of the men or boys had overcoats. The young girls were all shivering in their cheap fancy topcoats that had no warmth to them. The cops had already begun to break up the head of the line. Some of the strikers were singing Solidarity Forever, others were yelling Scabs, Scabs and making funny long jeering hoots. Daughter was confused and excited.

Suddenly everybody around her broke and ran and left her in a stretch of empty street in front of the wire fencing of the mills. Ten feet in front of her a young woman slipped and fell. Daughter caught the scared look in her eyes that were round and black. Daughter stepped forward to help her up but two policemen were ahead of her swinging their nightsticks. Daughter thought they were going to help the girl up. She stood still for a second, frozen in her tracks when she saw one of the policemen’s feet shoot out. He’d kicked the girl full in the face. Daughter never remembered what happened except that she was wanting a gun and punching into the policeman’s big red face and against the buttons and the thick heavy cloth of his overcoat. Something crashed down on her head from behind; dizzy and sick she was being pushed into the policewagon. In front of her was the girl’s face all caved in and bleeding. In the darkness inside were other men and women cursing and laughing. But Daughter and the woman opposite looked at each other dazedly and said nothing. Then the door closed behind them and they were in the dark.

When they were committed she was charged with rioting, felonious assault, obstructing an officer and inciting to sedition. It wasn’t so bad in the county jail. The women’s section was crowded with strikers, all the cells were full of girls laughing and talking, singing songs and telling each other how they’d been arrested, how long they’d been in, how they were going to win the strike. In Daughter’s cell the girls all clustered around her and wanted to know how she’d gotten there. She began to feel she was quite a hero. Towards evening her name was called and she found Webb and Ada and a lawyer clustered around the policesergeant’s desk. Ada was mad, “Read that, young woman, and see how that’ll sound back home,” she said, poking an afternoon paper under her nose.

TEXAS BELLE ASSAULTS COP said one headline. Then followed an account of her knocking down a policeman with a left on the jaw. She was released on a thousand dollars bail; outside the jail, Ben Compton broke away from the group of reporters around him and rushed up to her. “Congratulations, Miss Trent,” he said, “that was a darn nervy thing to do… made a very good impression in the press.” Sylvia Dalhart was with him. She threw her arms around her and kissed her: “That was a mighty spunky thing to do. Say, we’re sending a delegation to Washington to see President Wilson and present a petition and we want you on it. The President will refuse to see the delegation and you’ll have a chance to picket the White House and get arrested again.”

“Well, I declare,” said Ada when they were safely on the train for New York. “I think you’ve lost your mind.” “You’d have done the same thing, Ada darlin’, if you’d seen what I saw… when I tell Dad and the boys about it they’ll see red. It’s the most outrageous thing I ever heard of.” Then she burst out crying.

When they got back to Ada’s apartment they found a telegram from Dad saying Coming at once. Make no statement until I arrive. Late that night another telegram came; it read: Dad seriously ill come on home at once have Ada retain best lawyer obtainable. In the morning Daughter scared and trembling was on the first train south. At St. Louis she got a telegram saying Don’t worry condition fair double pneumonia. Upset as she was it certainly did her good to see the wide Texas country, the spring crops beginning, a few bluebonnets in bloom. Buster was there to meet her at the depot, “Well, Daughter,” he said after he had taken her bag, “you’ve almost killed Dad.”

Buster was sixteen and captain of the highschool ball team. Driving her up to the house in the new Stutz he told her how things were. Bud had been tearing things up at the University and was on the edge of getting fired and had gotten balled up with a girl in Galveston who was trying to blackmail him. Dad had been very much worried because he’d gotten in too deep in the oil game and seeing Daughter spread all over the front page for knocking down a cop had about finished him; old Emma was getting too old to run the house for them anymore and it was up to Daughter to give up her crazy ideas and stay home and keep house for them. “See this car? A dandy ain’t it…. I bought it myself…. Did a little tradin’ in options up near Amarillo on my own, jus’ for the hell of it, and I made five thousand bucks.” “Why, you smart kid. I tell you, Bud, it’s good to be home. But about the policeman you’d have done the same yourself or you’re not my brother. I’ll tell you all about it sometime. Believe me it does me good to see Texas faces after those mean weaselfaced Easterners.” Dr. Winslow was in the hall when they came in. He shook hands warmly and told her how well she was looking and not to worry because he’d pull her Dad through if it was the last thing he did on earth. The sickroom and Dad’s restless flushed face made her feel awful, and she didn’t like finding a trained nurse running the house.

After Dad began to get around a little they both went down to Port Arthur for a couple of weeks for a change to stay with an old friend of Dad’s. Dad said he’d give her a car if she’d stay on, and that he’d get her out of this silly mess she’d gotten into up north.

She began to play a lot of tennis and golf again and to go out a good deal socially. Joe Washburn had married and was living in Oklahoma getting rich on oil. She felt easier in Dallas when he wasn’t there; seeing him upset her so. The next fall Daughter went down to Austin to finish her journalism course, mostly because she thought her being there would keep Bud in the straight and narrow. Friday afternoons they drove back home together in her Buick sedan for the weekend. Dad had bought a new Tudor style house way out and all her spare time was taken up picking out furniture and hanging curtains and arranging the rooms. She had a great many beaux always coming around to take her out and had to start keeping an engagement book. Especially after the declaration of war social life became very hectic. She was going every minute and never got any sleep. Everybody was getting commissions or leaving for officers training camps. Daughter went in for Red Cross work and organized a canteen, but that wasn’t enough and she kept applying to be sent abroad. Bud went down to San Antonio to learn to fly and Buster, who’d been in the militia, lied about his age and joined up as a private and was sent to Jefferson Barracks. At the canteen she lived in a whirl and had one or two proposals of marriage a week, but she always told them that she hadn’t any intention of being a war bride.

Then one morning a War Department telegram came. Dad was in Austin on business so she opened it. Bud had crashed, killed. First thing Daughter thought was how hard it would hit Dad. The phone rang; it was a long distance call from San Antonio, sounded like Joe Washburn’s voice. “Is that you, Joe?” she said weakly. “Daughter, I want to speak to your father,” came his grave drawl. “I know… O Joe.”

“It was his first solo flight. He was a great boy. Nobody seems to know how it happened. Must have been defect in structure. I’ll call Austin. I know where to get hold of him…. I’ve got the number… see you soon, Daughter.” Joe rang off. Daughter went into her room and burrowed face down into the bed that hadn’t been made up. For a minute she tried to imagine that she hadn’t gotten up yet, that she dreamed the phone ringing and Joe’s voice. Then she thought of Bud so sharply it was as if he’d come into the room, the way he laughed, the hard pressure of his long thin hand over her hands when he’d suddenly grabbed the wheel when they’d skidded going around a corner into San Antonio the last time she’d driven him down after a leave, the clean anxious lean look of his face above the tight khaki collar of the uniform. Then she heard Joe’s voice again: Must have been some defect in structure.

She went down and jumped into her car. At the fillingstation where she filled up with gas and oil the garageman asked her how the boys liked it in the army. She couldn’t stop to tell him about it now. “Bully, they like it fine,” she said, with a grin that hurt her like a slap in the face. She wired Dad at his lawpartner’s office that she was coming and pulled out of town for Austin. The roads were in bad shape, it made her feel better to feel the car plough through the muddy ruts and the water spraying out in a wave on either side when she went through a puddle at fifty.

She averaged fortyfive all the way and got to Austin before dark. Dad had already gone down to San Antonio on the train. Dead tired, she started off. She had a blowout and it took her a long time to get it fixed; it was midnight before she drew up at the Menger. Automatically she looked at herself in the little mirror before going in. There were streaks of mud on her face and her eyes were red.

In the lobby she found Dad and Joe Washburn sitting side by side with burntout cigars in their mouths. Their faces looked a little alike. Must have been the grey drawn look that made them look alike. She kissed them both. “Dad, you ought to go to bed,” she said briskly. “You look all in.” “I suppose I might as well… There’s nothing left to do,” he said.

“Wait for me, Joe, until I get Dad fixed up,” she said in a low voice as she passed him. She went up to the room with Dad, got herself a room adjoining, ruffled his hair and kissed him very gently and left him to go to bed.

When she got back down to the lobby Joe was sitting in the same place with the same expression on his face. It made her mad to see him like that.

Her sharp brisk voice surprised her. “Come outside a minute, Joe, I want to walk around a little.” The rain had cleared the air. It was a transparent early summer night. “Look here, Joe, who’s responsible for the condition of the planes? I’ve got to know.” “Daughter, how funny you talk… what you ought to do is get some sleep, you’re all overwrought.” “Joe, you answer my question.” “But Daughter, don’t you see nobody’s responsible. The army’s a big institution. Mistakes are inevitable. There’s a lot of money being made by contractors of one kind or another. Whatever you say aviation is in its infancy… we all knew the risks before we joined up.”

“If Bud had been killed in France I wouldn’t have felt like this.. but here… Joe, somebody’s directly responsible for my brother’s death. I want to go and talk to him, that’s all. I won’t do anything silly. You all think I’m a lunatic I know, but I’m thinking of all the other girls who have brothers training to be aviators. The man who inspected those planes is a traitor to his country and ought to be shot down like a dog.” “Look here, Daughter,” Joe said as he brought her back to the hotel, “we’re fightin’ a war now. Individual lives don’t matter, this isn’t the time for lettin’ your personal feelin’s get away with you or embarrassin’ the authorities with criticism. When we’ve licked the huns’ll be plenty of time for gettin’ the incompetents and the crooks… that’s how I feel about it.”

“Well, good night, Joe… you be mighty careful yourself. When do you expect to get your wings?” “Oh, in a couple of weeks.” “How’s Gladys and Bunny?” “Oh, they’re all right,” said Joe; a funny constraint came into his voice and he blushed. “They’re in Tulsa with Mrs. Higgins.”

She went to bed and lay there without moving, feeling desperately quiet and cool; she was too tired to sleep. When morning came she went around to the garage to get her car. She felt in the pocket on the door to see if her handbag was there that always had her little pearlhandled revolver in it, and drove out to the aviation camp. At the gate the sentry wouldn’t let her by, so she sent a note to Colonel Morrissey who was a friend of Dad’s, saying that she must see him at once. The corporal was very nice and got her a chair in the little office at the gate and a few minutes later said he had Colonel Morrissey on the wire. She started to talk to him but she couldn’t think what to say. The desk and the office and the corporal began swaying giddily and she fainted.

She came to in a staffcar with Joe Washburn who was taking her back to the hotel. He was patting her hand saying, “That’s all right, Daughter.” She was clinging to him and crying like a little tiny girl. They put her to bed at the hotel and gave her bromides and the doctor wouldn’t let her get up until after the funeral was over.

She got a reputation for being a little crazy after that. She stayed on in San Antonio. Everything was very gay and tense. All day she worked in a canteen and evenings she went out, supper and dancing, every night with a different aviation officer. Everybody had taken to drinking a great deal. It was like when she used to go to highschool dances, she felt herself moving in a brilliantly lighted daze of suppers and lights and dancing and champagne and different colored faces and stiff identical bodies of men dancing with her, only now she had a kidding line and let them hug her and kiss her in taxicabs, in phonebooths, in people’s backyards.

One night she met Joe Washburn at a party Ida Olsen was giving for some boys who were leaving for overseas. It was the first time she’d ever seen Joe drink. He wasn’t drunk but she could see that he’d been drinking a great deal. They went and sat side by side on the back steps of the kitchen in the dark. It was a clear hot night full of dryflies with a hard hot wind rustling the dry twigs of all the trees. Suddenly she took Joe’s hand: “Oh, Joe, this is awful.”

Joe began to talk about how unhappy he was with his wife, how he was making big money through his oil leases and didn’t give a damn about it, how sick he was of the army. They’d made him an instructor and wouldn’t let him go overseas and he was almost crazy out there in camp. “Oh, Joe, I want to go overseas too. I’m leading such a silly life here.” “You have been actin’ kinder wild, Daughter, since Bud died,” came Joe’s soft deep drawling voice. “Oh, Joe, I wisht I was dead,” she said and put her head on his knee and began to cry. “Don’t cry, Daughter, don’t cry,” he began to say, then suddenly he was kissing her. His kisses were hard and crazy and made her go all limp against him.

“I don’t love anybody but you, Joe,” she suddenly said quietly. But he already had control of himself; “Daughter, forgive me,” he said in a quiet lawyer’s voice, “I don’t know what I was thinking of, I must be crazy… this war is making us all crazy… Good night… Say… er… erase this all from the record, will you?”

That night she couldn’t sleep a wink. At six in the morning she got into her car, filled up with gas and oil and started for Dallas. It was a bright fall morning with blue mist in the hollows. Dry cornstalks rustled on the long hills red and yellow with fall. It was late when she got home. Dad was sitting up reading the war news in pyjamas and bathrobe. “Well, it won’t be long now, Daughter,” he said. “The Hindenburg line is crumpling up. I knew our boys could do it once they got started.” Dad’s face was more lined with his hair whiter than she’d remembered it. She heated up a can of Campbell’s soup as she hadn’t taken any time to eat. They had a cosy little supper together and read a funny letter of Buster’s from Camp Merritt where his outfit was waiting to go overseas. When she went to bed in her own room it was like being a little girl again, she’d always loved times when she got a chance to have a cosy chat with Dad all alone; she went to sleep the minute her head hit the pillow.

She stayed on in Dallas taking care of Dad; it was only sometimes when she thought of Joe Washburn that she felt she couldn’t stand it another minute. The fake armistice came and then the real armistice, everybody was crazy for a week like a New Orleans mardigras. Daughter decided that she was going to be an old maid and keep house for Dad. Buster came home looking very tanned and full of army slang. She started attending lectures at Southern Methodist, doing church work, getting books out of the circulating library, baking angelcake; when young girlfriends of Buster’s came to the house she acted as a chaperon.

Thanksgiving Joe Washburn and his wife came to dinner with them. Old Emma was sick so Daughter cooked the turkey herself. It was only when they’d all sat down to table, with the yellow candles lighted in the silver candlesticks and the salted nuts set out in the little silver trays and the decoration of pink and purple mapleleaves, that she remembered Bud. She suddenly began to feel faint and ran into her room. She lay face down on the bed listening to their grave voices. Joe came to the door to see what was the matter. She jumped up laughing, and almost scared Joe to death by kissing him square on the mouth. “I’m all right Joe,” she said. “How’s yourself?”

Then she ran to the table and started cheering everybody up, so that they all enjoyed their dinner. When they were drinking their coffee in the other room she told them that she’d signed up to go overseas for six months with the Near East Relief, that had been recruiting at Southern Methodist. Dad was furious and Buster said she ought to stay home now the war was over, but Daughter said, others had given their lives to save the world from the Germans and that she certainly could give up six months to relief work. When she said that they all thought of Bud and were quiet.

It wasn’t actually true that she’d signed up, but she did the next morning and got around Miss Frazier, a returned missionary from China who was arranging it, so that they sent her up to New York that week, with orders to sail immediately with the office in Rome as her first destination. She was so widely excited all the time she was getting her passport and having her uniform fitted, she hardly noticed how glum Dad and Buster looked. She only had a day in New York. When the boat backed out of the dock with its siren screaming and started steaming down the North River, she stood on the front deck with her hair blowing in the wind, sniffing the funny steamboard harbor overseas smell and feeling like a twoyearold.

GOLDEN VOICE OF CARUSO SWELLS IN

sealed signed and delivered all over Tours you can smell lindens in bloom it’s hot my uniform sticks the OD chafes me under the chin

only four days ago AWOL crawling under the freight cars at the station of St. Pierre-des-Corps waiting in the buvette for the MP on guard to look away from the door so’s I could slink out with a cigarette (and my heart) in my mouth then in a tiny box of a hotel room changing the date on that old movement order

but today

my discharge sealed signed and delivered sends off sparks in my pocket like a romancandle

I walk past the headquarters of the SOS Hay sojer your tunic’s unbuttoned (f — k you buddy) and down the lindenshaded street to the bathhouse that has a court with flowers in the middle of it the hot water gushes green out of brass swanheads into the whitemetal tub I strip myself naked soap myself all over with the sour pink soap slide into the warm deepgreen tub through the white curtain in the window a finger of afternoon sunlight lengthens on the ceiling towel’s dry and warm smells of steam in the suitcase I’ve got a suit of civvies I borrowed from a fellow I know the buck private in the rear rank of Uncle Sam’s Medical Corps (serial number… never could remember the number anyway I dropped it in the Loire) goes down the drain with a gurgle and hiss and

having amply tipped and gotten the eye from the fat woman who swept up the towels

I step out into the lindensmell of a July afternoon and stroll up to the café where at the little tables outside only officers may set their whipcord behinds and order a drink of cognac unservable to those in uniform while waiting for the train to Paris and sit down firmly in long pants in the iron chair

an anonymous civilian

CAN’T RECALL KILLING SISTER; CLAIMS

Eveline had moved to a little place on the rue de Bussy where there was a street market every day. Eleanor to show that there was no hard feeling had given her a couple of her Italian painted panels to decorate the dark parlor with. In early November rumors of an armistice began to fly around and then suddenly one afternoon Major Wood ran into the office that Eleanor and Eveline shared and dragged them both away from their desks and kissed them both and shouted, “At last it’s come.” Before she knew it Eveline found herself kissing Major Moorehouse right on the mouth. The Red Cross office turned into a college dormitory the night of a football victory: it was the Armistice.

Everybody seemed suddenly to have bottles of cognac and to be singing, There’s a long long trail awinding or La Madellon pour nous n’est pas sévère.

She and Eleanor and J.W. and Major Wood were in a taxicab going to the Café de la Paix.

For some reason they kept getting out of taxicabs and other people kept getting in. They had to get to the Café de la Paix but whenever they got into a taxicab it was stopped by the crowd and the driver disappeared. But when they got there they found every table filled and files of people singing and dancing streaming in and out all the doors. They were Greeks, Polish legionaires, Russians, Serbs, Albanians in white kilts, a Highlander with bagpipes and a lot of girls in Alsatian costume. It was annoying not being able to find a table. Eleanor said maybe they ought to go somewhere else. J.W. was preoccupied and wanted to get to a telephone.

Only Major Wood seemed to be enjoying himself. He was a greyhaired man with a little grizzled mustache and kept saying, “Ah, the lid’s off today.” He and Eveline went upstairs to see if they could find room there and ran into two Anzacs seated on a billiard table surrounded by a dozen bottles of champagne. Soon they were all drinking champagne with the Anzacs. They couldn’t get anything to eat although Eleanor said she was starving and when J.W. tried to get into the phone booth he found an Italian officer and a girl tightly wedged together in it. The Anzacs were pretty drunk, and one of them was saying that the Armistice was probably just another bloody piece of lying propaganda; so Eleanor suggested they try to go back to her place to have something to eat. J.W. said yes, they could stop at the Bourse so that he could send some cables. He must get in touch with his broker. The Anzacs didn’t like it when they left and were rather rude.

They stood around for a long time in front of the opera in the middle of swirling crowds. The streetlights were on; the grey outlines of the opera were edged along the cornices with shimmering gas flames. They were jostled and pushed about. There were no busses, no automobiles; occasionally they passed a taxicab stranded in the crowd like a rock in a stream. At last on a side street they found themselves alongside a Red Cross staffcar that had nobody in it. The driver, who wasn’t too sober, said he was trying to get the car back to the garage and said he’d take them down to the quai de la Tournelle first.

Eveline was just climbing in when somehow she felt it was just too tiresome and she couldn’t. The next minute she was marching arm in arm with a little French sailor in a group of people mostly in Polish uniform who were following a Greek flag and singing la Brabançonne.

A minute later she realized she’d lost the car and her friends and was scared. She couldn’t recognize the streets even, in this new Paris full of arclights and flags and bands and drunken people. She found herself dancing with the little sailor in the asphalt square in front of a church with two towers, then with a French colonial officer in a red cloak, then with a Polish legionaire who spoke a little English and had lived in Newark, New Jersey, and then suddenly some young French soldiers were dancing in a ring around her holding hands. The game was you had to kiss one of them to break the ring. When she caught on she kissed one of them and everybody clapped and cheered and cried Vive l’Amerique. Another bunch came and kept on and on dancing around her until she began to feel scared. Her head was beginning to whirl around when she caught sight of an American uniform on the outskirts of the crowd. She broke through the ring bowling over a little fat Frenchman and fell on the doughboy’s neck and kissed him, and everybody laughed and cheered and cried encore. He looked embarrassed; the man with him was Paul Johnson, Don Stevens’ friend. “You see I had to kiss somebody,” Eveline said blushing. The doughboy laughed and looked pleased.

“Oh, I hope you didn’t mind, Miss Hutchins, I hope you don’t mind this crowd and everything,” apologized Paul Johnson.

People spun around them dancing and shouting and she had to kiss Paul Johnson too before they’d let them go. He apologized solemnly again and said, “Isn’t it wonderful to be in Paris to see the armistice and everything, if you don’t mind the crowd and everything… but honestly, Miss Hutchins, they’re awful goodnatured. No fights or nothin’… Say, Don’s in this café.”

Don was behind a little zinc bar in the entrance to the café shaking up cocktails for a big crowd of Canadian and Anzac officers all very drunk. “I can’t get him out of there,” whispered Paul. “He’s had more than he ought.” They got Don out from behind the bar. There seemed to be nobody there to pay for the drinks. In the door he pulled off his grey cap and cried, “Vive les quakers… à bas la guerre,” and everybody cheered. They roamed around aimlessly for a while, now and then they’d be stopped by a ring of people dancing around her and Don would kiss her. He was noisy drunk and she didn’t like the way he acted as if she was his girl. She began to feel tired by the time they got to the place de la Concorde and suggested that they cross the river and try to get to her apartment where she had some cold veal and salad.

Paul was embarrassedly saying perhaps he’d better not come, when Don ran off after a group of Alsatian girls who were hopping and skipping up the Champs Elysées. “Now you’ve got to come,” she said. “To keep me from being kissed too much by strange men.”

“But Miss Hutchins, you mustn’t think Don meant anything running off like that. He’s very excitable, especially when he drinks.” She laughed and they walked on without saying anything more.

When they got to her apartment the old concièrge hobbled out from her box and shook hands with both of them. “Ah, madame, c’est la victoire,” she said, “but it won’t make my dead son come back to life, will it? For some reason Eveline could not think of anything to do but give her five francs and she went back muttering a singsong, “Merci, m’sieur, madame.”

Up in Eveline’s tiny rooms Paul seemed terribly embarrassed. They ate everything there was to the last crumb of stale bread and talked a little vaguely. Paul sat on the edge of his chair and told her about his travels back and forth with despatches. He said how wonderful it had been for him coming abroad and seeing the army and European cities and meeting people like her and Don Sevens and that he hoped she didn’t mind his not knowing much about all the things she and Don talked about. “If this really is the beginning of peace I wonder what we’ll all do, Miss Hutchins.” “Oh, do call me Eveline, Paul.” “I really do think it is the peace, Eveline, according to Wilson’s Fourteen Points. I think Wilson’s a great man myself in spite of all Don says, I know he’s a darn sight cleverer than I am, but still… maybe this is the last war there’ll ever be. Gosh, think of that…” She hoped he’d kiss her when he left but all he did was shake hands awkwardly and say all in a breath, “I hope you won’t mind if I come to see you next time I can get to Paris.”

WHOLE WORLD IS SHORT OF PLATINUM

I commit my soul into the hands of my savior, wrote John Pierpont Morgan in his will, in full confidence that having redeemed it and washed it in His most precious blood, He will present it faultless before my heavenly father, and I intreat my children to maintain and defend at all hazard and at any cost of personal sacrifice the blessed doctrine of complete atonement for sin through the blood of Jesus Christ once offered and through that alone,

and into the hands of the House of Morgan represented by his son,

he committed,

when he died in Rome in 1913,

the control of the Morgan interests in New York, Paris and London, four national banks, three trust companies, three life insurance companies, ten railroad systems, three street railway companies, an express company, the International Mercantile Marine,

power,

on the cantilever principle, through interlocking directorates

over eighteen other railroads, U.S. Steel, General Electric, American Tel and Tel, five major industries;

the interwoven cables of the Morgan Stillman Baker combination held credit up like a suspension bridge, thirteen percent of the banking resources of the world.

the Grand Prix de la Victoire, run yesterday for fiftysecond time was an event that will long remain in the memories of those present, for never in the history of the classic race has Longchamps presented such a glorious scene

daylight enlarges out of ruddy quiet very faintly throbbing wanes into my sweet darkness broadens red through the warm blood weighting the lids warmsweetly then snaps on

enormously blue yellow pink

today is Paris pink sunlight hazy on the clouds against patches of robinsegg a tiny siren hoots shrilly traffic drowsily rumbles clatters over the cobbles taxis squawk the yellow’s the comforter through the open window the Louvre emphasizes its sedate architecture of greypink stone between the Seine and the sky

and the certainty of Paris

the towboat shiny green and red chugs against the current towing three black and mahoganyvarnished barges their deckhouse windows have green shutters and lace curtains and pots of geraniums in flower to get under the bridge a fat man in blue had to let the little black stack drop flat to the deck

Paris comes into the room in the servantgirl’s eyes the warm bulge of her breasts under the grey smock the smell of chickory in coffee scalded milk and the shine that crunches on the crescent rolls stuck with little dabs of very sweet unsalted butter

in the yellow paperback of the book that halfhides the agreeable countenance of my friend

Paris of 1919

paris-mutuel

roulettewheel that spins round the Tour Eiffel red square white square a million dollars a billion marks a trillion roubles baisse du franc or a mandate for Montmartre

Cirque Médrano the steeplechase gravity of cellos tuning up on the stage at the Salle Gaveau oboes and a triangle la musique’s’en fout de moi says the old marchioness jingling with diamonds as she walks out on Stravinski but the red colt took the jumps backwards and we lost all our money

la peinture opposite the Madeleine Cezanne Picassso Modigliani

Nouvelle Athènes

la poesie of manifestos always freshtinted on the kiosks and slogans scrawled in chalk on the urinals L’UNION DES TRAVAILLEURS FERA LA PAIX DU MONDE

revolution round the spinning Eiffel Tower

that burns up our last year’s diagrams the dates fly off the calendar we’ll make everything new today is the Year I Today is the sunny morning of the first day of spring We gulp our coffee splash water on us jump into our clothes run downstairs set out wideawake into the first morning of the first day of the first year

TO THE GLORY OF FRANCE ETERNAL

Dick and Ned felt pretty rocky the morning they sighted Fire Island lightship. Dick wasn’t looking forward to landing in God’s Country with no money and the draft board to face, and he was worried about how his mother was going to make out. All Ned was complaining about was wartime prohibition. They were both a little jumpy from all the cognac they’d drunk on the trip over. They were already in the slategreen shallow seas off Long Island; no help for it now. The heavy haze to the west and then the low boxlike houses that looked as if they were drowned in the water and then the white strip of beach of the Rockaways; the scenicrailways of Coney Island; the full green summer trees and the grey framehouses with their white trim on Staten Island; it was all heartbreakingly like home. When the immigration tug came alongside Dick was surprised to see Hiram Halsey Cooper, in khaki uniform and puttees, clambering up the steps. Dick lit a cigarette and tried to look sober.

“My boy, it’s a great relief to see you…. Your mother and I have been… er…” Dick interrupted to introduce him to Ned. Mr. Cooper, who was in the uniform of a major, took him by the sleeve and drew him up the deck. “Better put on your uniform to land.” “All right, sir, I thought it looked rather shabby.” “All the better…. Well, I suppose it’s hell over there… and no chance for courting the muse, eh?… You’re coming up to Washington with me tonight. We’ve been very uneasy about you, but that’s all over now… made me realize what a lonely old man I am. Look here, my boy, your mother was the daughter of Major General Ellsworth, isn’t that so?” Dick nodded. “Of course she must have been because my dear wife was his niece…. Well, hurry and put your uniform on and remember… leave all the talking to me.”

While he was changing into the old Norton-Harjes uniform Dick was thinking how suddenly Mr. Cooper had aged and wondering just how he could ask him to lend him fifteen dollars to pay the bill he’d run up at the bar.

New York had a funny lonely empty look in the summer afternoon sunlight; well here he was home. At the Pennsylvania station there were policemen and plainclothes men at all the entrances demanding the registration cards of all the young men who were not in uniform. As he and Mr. Cooper ran for the train he caught sight of a dejectedlooking group of men herded together in a corner hemmed by a cordon of sweating cops. When they got in their seats in the parlorcar on the Congressional Mr. Cooper mopped his face with a handkerchief. “You understand why I said to put your uniform on. Well, I suppose it was hell?”

“Some of it was pretty bad,” said Dick casually. “I hated to come back though.”

“I know you did, my boy…. You didn’t expect to find your old mentor in the uniform of a major… well, we must all put our shoulders to the wheel. I’m in the purchasing department of Ordnance. You see the chief of our bureau of personnel is General Sykes; he turns out to have served with your grandfather. I’ve told him about you, your experience on two fronts, your knowledge of languages and… well… naturally he’s very much interested…. I think we can get you a commission right away.”

“Mr. Cooper, it’s…” stammered Dick, “it’s extraordinarily decent… damn kind of you to interest yourself in me this way.”

“My boy, I didn’t realize how I missed you… our chats about the muse and the ancients… until you had gone.” Mr. Cooper’s voice was drowned out by the roar of the train. Well, here I am home, something inside Dick’s head kept saying to him.

When the train stopped at the West Philadelphia station the only sound was the quiet droning of the electric fans; Mr. Cooper leaned over and tapped Dick’s knee, “Only one thing you must promise… no more peace talk till we win the war. When peace comes we can put some in our poems…. Then’ll be the time for us all to work for a lasting peace…. As for the little incident in Italy… it’s nothing… forget it… nobody ever heard of it.” Dick nodded; it made him sore to feel that he was blushing. They neither of them said anything until the waiter came through calling, “Dinner now being served in the dining car forward.”

In Washington (now you are home, something kept saying in Dick’s head) Mr. Cooper had a room in the Willard where he put Dick up on the couch as the hotel was full and it was impossible to get another room anywhere. After he’d rolled up in the sheet Dick heard Mr. Cooper tiptoe over and stand beside the couch breathing hard. He opened his eyes and grinned. “Well, my boy,” said Mr. Cooper, “it’s nice to have you home… sleep well,” and he went back to bed.

Next morning he was introduced to General Sykes: “This is the young man who wants to serve his country,” said Mr. Cooper with aflourish, “as his grandfather served it…. In fact he was so impatient that he went to war before his country did, and enlisted in the volunteer ambulance service with the French and afterwards with the Italians.” General Sykes was a little old man with bright eyes and a hawk nose and extremely deaf. “Yes, Ellsworth was a great fellow, we campaigned against Hieronimo together… Ah, the old west… I was only fourteen at Gettysburg and damme I don’t think he was there at all. We went through West Point in the same class after the war, poor old Ellsworth…. So you’ve smelled powder have you, my boy?” Dick colored and nodded.

“You see, General,” shouted Mr. Cooper, “he feels he wants some more… er… responsible work than was possible in the ambulance service.”

“Yessiree, no place for a highspirited young fellow…. You know Andrews, Major…” The General was scribbling on a pad. “Take him to see Colonel Andrews with this memorandum and he’ll fix him up, has to decide on qualifications etc…. You understand… good luck, my boy.” Dick managed a passable salute and they were out in the corridor; Mr. Cooper was smiling broadly. “Well, that’s done. I must be getting back to my office. You go and fill out the forms and take your medical examination… or perhaps that’ll be at the camp… Anyway come and lunch with me at the Willard at one. Come up to the room.” Dick saluted smiling.

He spent the rest of the morning filling out blanks. After lunch he went down to Atlantic City to see his mother. She looked just the same. She was staying in a boarding house at the Chelsea end and was very much exercised about spies. Henry had enlisted as a private in the infantry and was somewhere in France. Mother said it made her blood boil to think of the grandson of General Ellsworth being a mere private, but that she felt confident he’d soon rise from the ranks. Dick hadn’t heard her speak of her father since she used to talk about him when he was a child, and asked her about him. He had died when she was quite a little girl leaving the family not too well off considering their station in life. All she remembered was a tall man in blue with a floppy felt hat caught up on one side and a white goatee; when she’d first seen a cartoon of Uncle Sam she’d thought it was her father. He always had hoarhound drops in a little silver bonbonnière in his pocket, she’d been so excited about the military funeral and a nice kind army officer giving her his handkerchief. She’d kept the bonbonnière for many years but it had had to go with everything else when your poor father… er… failed.

A week later Dick received a war department envelope addressed to Savage, Richard Ellsworth, 2nd Lieut. Ord. Dept., enclosing his commission and ordering him to proceed to Camp Merritt, N.J., within 24 hours. Dick found himself in charge of a casuals company at Camp Merritt and wouldn’t have known what on earth to do if it hadn’t been for the sergeant. Once they were on the transport it was better; he had what had been a first class cabin with two other 2nd Lieutenants and a Major; Dick had the drop on them all because he’d been at the front. The transport was the Leviathan; Dick began to feel himself again when he saw the last of Sandy Hook; he wrote Ned a long letter in doggerel that began:

SOVIET GUARDS DISPLACED

I walked all over town general strike no busses no taxicabs the gates of the Metro closed Place de Iéna I saw red flags Anatole France in a white beard placards MUTILES DE LA GUERRE and the nutcracker faces of the agents de sûreté

Mort aux vaches

at the place de la Concorde the Republican Guards in christmastree helmets were riding among the crowd whacking the Parisians with the flat of their swords scraps of the International worriedlooking soldiers in their helmets lounging with grounded arms all along the Grands Boulevards

Vive les poilus

at the Republique à bas la guerre MORT AUX VACHES à bas la Paix des Assassins they’ve torn up the gratings from around the trees and are throwing stones and bits of cast iron at the fancydressed republican guards hissing whistling poking at the horses with umbrellas scraps of the International

at the Gare de l’Est they’re singing the International entire the gendarmerie nationale is making its way slowly down Magenta into stones whistles bits of iron the International Mort Aux Vaches Barricades we must build barricades young kids are trying to break down the shutters of an arms shop revolver shots an old woman in a window was hit (Whose blood is that on the cobbles?) we’re all running down a side street dodging into courtyards concièrges trying to close the outside doors on cavalry charging twelve abreast firecracker faces scared and mean behind their big moustaches under their Christmastree helmets

at a corner I run into a friend running too Look out They’re shooting to kill and it’s begun to rain hard so we dive in together just before a shutter slams down on the door of the little café dark and quiet inside a few working men past middle age are grumblingly drinking at the bar Ah les salops There are no papers Somebody said the revolution had triumphed in Marseilles and Lille Ca va taper dure We drink grog americain our feet are wet at the next table two elderly men are playing chess over a bottle of white wine

later we peep out from under the sliding shutter that’s down over the door into the hard rain on the empty streets only a smashed umbrella and an old checked cap side by side in the clean stone gutter and a torn handbill L’UNION DES TRAVAILLEURS FERA

C’est la lutte finale

Groupons-nous et demain

L’internationale

Sera le genre humain

She wasn’t sick a bit and was popular on the crossing that was very gay although the sea was rough and it was bitter cold. There was a Mr. Barrow who had been sent on a special mission by the President who paid her a great deal of attention. He was a very interesting man and full of information about everything. He’d been a socialist and very close to labor. He was so interested when she told him about her experiences in the textile strike over in Jersey. In the evenings they’d walk around and around the deck arm in arm, now and then being almost thrown off their feet by an especially heavy roll. She had a little trouble with him trying to make love to her, but managed to argue him out of it by telling him what she needed right now was a good friend, that she’d had a very unhappy love affair and couldn’t think of anything like that any more. He was so kind and sympathetic, and said he could understand that thoroughly because his relation with women had been very unsatisfactory all his life. He said people ought to be free in love and marriage and not tied by conventions or inhibitions. He said what he believed in was passionate friendship. She said she did too, but when he wanted her to come to his room in the hotel the first night they were in Paris, she gave him a terrible tonguelashing. But he was so nice to her on the trip down to Rome that she began to think that maybe if he asked her to marry him she might do it.

There was an American officer on the train, Captain Savage, so good looking and such a funny talker, on his way to Rome with important despatches. From the minute she met Dick, Europe was wonderful. He talked French and Italian, and said how beautiful the old tumbledown towns were and screwed up his mouth so funnily when he told stories about comical things that happened in the war. He was a little like Webb only so much nicer and more selfreliant and betterlooking. From the minute she saw him she forgot all about Joe and as for G. H. Barrow, she couldn’t stand the thought of him. When Captain Savage looked at her it made her all melt up inside; by the time they’d gotten to Rome she’d admitted to herself she was crazy about him. When they went out walking together the day they all made an excursion to the ruins of the Emperor Hadrian’s villa, and the little town where the waterfall was, she was glad that he’d been drinking. She wanted all the time to throw herself in his arms; there was something about the rainy landscape and the dark lasciviouseyed people and the old names of the towns and the garlic and oil in the food and the smiling voices and the smell of the tiny magenta wildflowers he said were called cyclamens that made her not care about anything anymore. She almost fainted when he started to make love to her. Oh, she wished he would, but No, No, she couldn’t just then, but the next day she’d drink in spite of the pledge she’d signed with the N.E.R. and shoot the moon. It wasn’t so sordid as she’d expected but it wasn’t so wonderful either; she was terribly scared and cold and sick, like when she’d told him she hadn’t ever before. But the next day he was so gentle and strong, and she suddenly felt very happy. When he had to go back to Paris and there was nothing but office work and a lot of dreary old maids to talk to, it was too miserable.

When she found she was going to have a baby she was scared, but she didn’t really care so much; of course he’d marry her. Dad and Buster would be sore at first but they’d be sure to like him. He wrote poetry and was going to be a writer when he got out of the army; she was sure he was going to be famous. He didn’t write letters very often and when she made him come back to Rome he wasn’t nearly as nice about it as she expected; but of course it must have been a shock to him. They decided that perhaps it would be better not to have the baby just then or get married till he got out of the service, though there didn’t seem to be any doubt in his mind about getting married then. She tried several things and went riding a great deal with Lieutenant Grassi, who had been educated at Eton and spoke perfect English and was so charming to her and said she was the best woman rider he’d ever known. It was on account of her going out riding so much with Lieutenant Grassi and getting in so late that the old cats at the N.E.R. got sore and sent her home to America.

Going to Paris on the train, Daughter really was scared. The horseback riding hadn’t done any good, and she was sore all over from a fall she’d had when one of Lieutenant Grassi’s cavalry horses fell with her and broke his leg when she took him over a stone wall. The horse had to be shot and the Lieutenant had been horrid about it; these foreigners always showed a mean streak in the end. She was worried about people’s noticing how she looked because it was nearly three months now. She and Dick would have to get married right away, that’s all there was to it. Perhaps it would even be better to tell people they’d been married in Rome by a fat little old priest.

The minute she saw Dick’s face when she was running down the corridor towards him in his hotel, she knew it was all over; he didn’t love her the least bit. She walked home to her hotel hardly able to see where she was going through the slimywet Paris streets. She was surprised when she got there because she expected she’d lose her way. She almost hoped she’d lose her way. She went up to her room and sat down in a chair without taking off her dripping wet hat and coat. She must think. This was the end of everything.

The next morning she went around to the office; they gave her her transportation back home and told her what boat she was going on and said she must sail in four days. After that she went back to the hotel and sat down in a chair again and tried to think. She couldn’t go home to Dallas like this. A note from Dick came around giving her the address of a doctor.

Do forgive me, he wrote. You’re a wonderful girl and I’m sure it’ll be all right.

She tore the thin blue letter up in little tiny pieces and dropped it out the window. Then she lay down on the bed and cried till her eyes burned. Her nausea came on and she had to go out in the hall to the toilet. When she lay down again she went to sleep for a while and woke up feeling hungry.

The day had cleared; sunlight was streaming into the room. She walked downstairs to the desk and called up G. H. Barrow in his office. He seemed delighted and said if she’d wait for him a half an hour, he’d come and fetch her out to lunch in the Bois; they’d forget everything except that it was spring and that they were beautiful pagans at heart. Daughter made a sour face, but said pleasantly enough over the phone that she’d wait for him.

When he came he wore a sporty grey flannel suit and a grey fedora hat. She felt very drab beside him in the darkgray uniform she hated so. “Why, my dearest little girl… you’ve saved my life,” he said. “Susu-spring makes me think of suicide unless I’m in lu-lu-love… I was feeling… er… er… elderly and not in love. We must change all that.” “I was feeling like that too.” “What’s the matter?” “Well, maybe I’ll tell you and maybe I won’t.” She almost liked his long nose and his long jaw today. “Anyway, I’m too starved to talk.” “I’ll do all the talking…” he said laughing. “Alwawaways do anywawaway… and I’ll set you up to the bububest meal you ever ate.”

He talked boisterously all the way out in the cab about the Peace Conference and the terrible fight the President had had to keep his principles intact. “Hemmed in by every sinister intrigue, by all the poisonous ghosts of secret treaties, with two of the cleverest and most unscrupulous manipulators out of oldworld statecraft as his opponents… He fought on… we are all of us fighting on… It’s the greatest crusade in history; if we win, the world will be a better place to live in, if we lose, it will be given up to Bolshevism and despair… you can imagine, Anne Elizabeth, how charming it was to have your pretty little voice suddenly tickle my ear over the telephone and call me away if only for a brief space from all this worry and responsibility… why, there’s even a rumor that an attempt has been made to poison the President at the hôtel Mûrat… it’s the President alone with a few backers and wellwishers and devoted adherents who is standing out for decency, fairplay and good sense, never forget that for an instant….” He talked on and on as if he was rehearsing a speech. Daughter heard him faintly like through a faulty telephone connection. The day too, the little pagodas of bloom on the horsechestnuts, the crowds, the overdressed children, the flags against the blue sky, the streets of handsome houses behind trees with their carved stonework and their iron balconies and their polished windows shining in the May sunshine; Paris was all little and bright and far away like a picture seen through the wrong end of a field glass. When the luncheon came on at the big glittery outdoor restaurant it was the same thing, she couldn’t taste what she was eating.

He made her drink quite a lot of wine and after a while she heard herself talking to him. She’d never talked like this to a man before. He seemed so understanding and kind. She found herself talking to him about Dad and how hard it had been giving up Joe Washburn, and how going over on the boat her life had suddenly seemed all new… “Somethin’ funny’s happened to me, I declare… I always used to get along with everybody fine and now I can’t seem to. In the N.E.R. office in Rome I couldn’t get along with any of those old cats, and I got to be good friends with an Italian boy, used to take me horseback riding an’ I couldn’t get along with him, and you know Captain Savage on the train to Italy who let us ride in his compartment, we went out to Tivoli with him,” her ears began to roar when she spoke of Dick. She was going to tell Mr. Barrow everything. “We got along so well we got engaged and now I’ve quarreled with him.”

She saw Mr. Barrow’s long knobbly face leaning towards her across the table. The gap was very wide between his front teeth when he smiled. “Do you think, Annie girl, you could get along with me a little?” He put his skinny puffyveined hand towards her across the table. She laughed and threw her head to one side, “We seem to be gettin’ along all right right now.”

“It would make me very happy if you could… you make me very happy, anyway, just to look at you… I’m happier at this moment than I’ve been for years, except perhaps for the mumumoment when the Covenant for the League of Nations was signed.”

She laughed again, “Well, I don’t feel like any Peace Treaty, the fact is I’m in terrible trouble.” She found herself watching his face carefully; the upper lip thinned, he wasn’t smiling any more.

“Why, what’s the mamamatter… if there was any wawaway I could… er… be of assistance… I’d be the happiest fellow in the world.”

“Oh, no… I hate losing my job though and having to go home in disgrace… that’s about the size of it… it’s all my fault for running around like a little nitwit.” She was going to break down and cry, but suddenly the nausea came on again and she had to hurry to the ladies’ room of the restaurant. She got there just in time to throw up. The shapeless leatherfaced woman there was very kind and sympathetic; it scared Daughter how she immediately seemed to know what was the matter. She didn’t know much French but she could see that the woman was asking if it was Madame’s first child, how many months, congratulating her. Suddenly she decided she’d kill herself. When she got back Barrow had paid the bill and was walking back and forth on the gravel path in front of the tables.

“You poor little girl,” he said. “What can be the matter? You suddenly turned deathly pale.”

“It’s nothing… I think I’ll go home and lie down… I don’t think all that spaghetti and garlic agreed with me in Italy… maybe it’s that wine.”

“But perhaps I could do something about finding you a job in Paris. Are you a typist or stenographer?”

“Might make a stab at it,” said Daughter bitterly. She hated Mr. Barrow. All the way back in the taxi she couldn’t get to say anything. Mr. Barrow talked and talked. When she got back to the hotel she lay down on the bed and gave herself up to thinking about Dick.

She decided she’d go home. She stayed in her room and although Mr. Barrow kept calling up asking her out and making suggestions about possible jobs she wouldn’t see him. She said she was having a bilious attack and would stay in bed. The night before she was to sail he asked her to dine with him and some friends and before she knew it she said she’d go along. He called for her at six and took her for cocktails at the Ritz Bar. She’d gone out and bought herself an evening dress at the Galleries Lafayette and was feeling fine, she was telling herself as she sat drinking the champagne cocktail, that if Dick should come in now she wouldn’t bat an eyelash. Mr. Barrow was talking about the Fiume situation and the difficulties the President was having with Congress and how he feared that the whole great work of the League of Nations was in danger, when Dick came in looking very handsome in his uniform with a pale older woman in grey and a tall stoutish lighthaired man, whom Mr. Barrow pointed out as J. Ward Moorehouse. Dick must have seen her but he wouldn’t look at her. She didn’t care anymore about anything. They drank down their cocktails and went out. On the way up to Montmartre she let Mr. Barrow give her a long kiss on the mouth that put him in fine spirits. She didn’t care; she had decided she’d kill herself.

Waiting for them at the table at the Hermitage Mr. Barrow had reserved, was a newspaper correspondent named Burnham and a Miss Hutchins who was a Red Cross worker. They were very much excited about a man named Stevens who had been arrested by the Army of Occupation, they thought accused of Bolshevik propaganda; he’d been courtmartialed and they were afraid he was going to be shot. Miss Hutchins was very upset and said Mr. Barrow ought to go to the President about it as soon as Mr. Wilson got back to Paris. In the meantime they had to get the execution stayed. She said Don Stevens was a newspaper man and although a radical not connected with any kind of propaganda and anyway it was horrible to shoot a man for wanting a better world. Mr. Barrow was very embarrassed and stuttered and hemmed and hawed and said that Stevens was a very silly young man who talked too much about things he didn’t understand, but that he supposed he’d have to do the best he could to try to get him out but that after all, he hadn’t shown the proper spirit…. That made Miss Hutchins very angry, “But they’re going to shoot him… suppose it had happened to you…” she kept saying. “Can’t you understand that we’ve got to save his life?”

Daughter couldn’t seem to think of anything to say as she didn’t know what they were talking about; she sat there in the restaurant looking at the waiters and the lights and the people at the tables. Opposite there was a party of attractive looking young French officers. One of them, a tall man with a hawk nose, was looking at her. Their eyes met and she couldn’t help grinning. Those boys looked as if they were having a fine time. A party of Americans dressed up like plush horses crossed the floor between her and the Frenchman. It was Dick and the pale woman and J. Ward Moorehouse and a big middleaged woman in a great many deep pink ruffles and emeralds. They sat down at the table next to Daughter’s table where there had been a sign saying Reservee all evening. Everybody was introduced and she and Dick shook hands very formally, as if they were the merest acquaintances. Miss Stoddard, whom she’d been so friendly with in Rome, gave her a quick inquisitive cold stare that made her feel terrible.

Miss Hutchins immediately went over and began talking about Don Stevens and trying to get Mr. Moorehouse to call up Colonel House right away and get him to take some action in his case. Mr. Moorehouse acted very quiet and calm and said he was sure she need have no anxiety, he was probably only being held for investigation and in any case he didn’t think the courtmartial in the Army of Occupation would take extreme measures against a civilian and an American citizen. Miss Hutchins said all she wanted was a stay because his father was a friend of La Follette’s and would be able to get together considerable influence in Washington. Mr. Moorehouse smiled when he heard that. “If his life depended on the influence of Senator La Follette, I think you would have cause to be alarmed, Eveline, but I think I can assure you that it doesn’t.” Miss Hutchins looked very cross when she heard that and settled back to glumly eating her supper. Anyway the party was spoiled. Daughter couldn’t imagine what it was that had made everybody so stiff and constrained; maybe she was imagining it on account of her and Dick. Now and then she gave him a sideways glance. He looked so different from the way she’d known him sitting there so prim and prissylooking, talking to the stout woman in pink in a low pompous whisper now and then. It made her want to throw a plate at him.

It was a relief when the orchestra started playing dance music. Mr. Barrow wasn’t a very good dancer and she didn’t like the way he kept squeezing her hand and patting her neck. After they were through dancing they went into the bar to have a gin fizz. The ceiling was hung with tricolor decoration; the four French officers were in there; there were people singing La Madelon de la Victoire and all the tough little girls were laughing and talking loud shrill French. Mr. Barrow was whispering in her ear all the time, “Darling girl, you must let me take you home tonight…. You mustn’t sail… I’m sure I can arrange everything with the Red Cross or whatever it is…. I’ve led such an unhappy life and I think I’d kill myself if I had to give you up… couldn’t you love me just a little… I’ve dedicated my life to unattainable ideals and here I am getting old without grasping true happiness for a moment. You’re the only girl I’ve ever known who seemed really a beautiful pagan at heart… appreciate the art of life.” Then he kissed her wetly in the ear.

“But, George, I can’t love anybody now… I have everybody.”

“Let me teach you… just give me a chance.”

“If you knew about me, you wouldn’t want me,” she said coldly. She caught again a funny scared look on his face and a thinning of his lips over his widely spaced teeth.

They went back to the table. She sat there fidgeting while everybody talked carefully, with long pauses, about the Peace Treaty, when it was going to be signed, whether the Germans would sign. Then she couldn’t stand it any longer and went to the ladies’ room to powder her nose. On the way back to the table she peeped into the bar to see what was going on in there. The hawknosed French officer caught sight of her, jumped to his feet, clicked his heels together, saluted, bowed and said in broken English, “Charming lady, will you not stay a moment and drink once with your umble servant?” Daughter went to their table and sat down. “You boys looked like you were having such a good time,” she said. “I’m with the worst old set of plush horses… They make me tired.” “Permettez, mademoiselle,” he said, and introduced her to his friends. He was an aviator. They were all aviation officers. His name was Pierre. When she told them her brother had been an aviator and had been killed, they were very nice to her. She couldn’t help letting them think Bud had been killed at the front. “Mademoiselle,” said Pierre solemnly, “allow me, with all possible respect, to be your brother.” “Shake,” she said. They all shook hands solemnly, they were drinking little glasses of cognac, but after that they ordered champagne. She danced with them all. She was very happy and didn’t care what happened. They were young goodlooking boys, all the time laughing and nice to her. They had clasped their hands and were dancing ring around the rosy in the middle of the floor while everybody around was clapping, when she saw Mr. Barrow’s face red and indignant in the door. Next time the doorway spun around she yelled over her shoulder. “Be back in a minute, teacher.” The face disappeared. She was dizzy but Pierre caught her and held her tight; he smelt of perfume but still she liked having him hold her tight.

He suggested they go somewhere else, “Mademoiselle Sistair,” he whispered, “allow us to show you the mystères de Paree… afterwards we can come back to your plus orsairs. They will probably become intoxicate… plus orsairs invariably intoxicate.” They laughed. He had grey eyes and light hair, he said he was a Norman. She said he was the nicest Frenchman she’d ever met. She had a hard time getting her coat from the checkroom because she didn’t have any check, but she went in and picked it out while Pierre talked French to the checkgirl. They got into a long low grey car; Daughter had never seen such speeding. Pierre was a fine driver though; he had a game of running full speed towards a gendarme and swerving just enough at the right moment. She said supposing he hit one; he shrugged his shoulders and said, “It does not mattair… they are… ow do you call it?… bloody cows.” They went to Maxims, where it was too quiet for them, then to a little tough dancehall way across Paris. Daughter could see that Pierre was wellknown everywhere and an Ace. The other aviators met girls in different places and dropped away. Before she realized it she and Pierre were alone in the long grey car. “Primo,” he was explaining, “we will go to Les Halles to eat soupe à l’oignon… and then I shall take you a little tour en avion.” “Oh, please do. I’ve never been up in a plane… I’d like to go up and loop the loop… promise you’ll loop the loop.” “Entendu,” he said.

They sat a little sleepily in a small empty eatingplace and ate onion soup and drank some more champagne. He was still very kind and considerate but he seemed to have exhausted his English. She thought vaguely about going back to the hotel and catching the boattrain, but all she seemed to be able to say was, “Loop the loop, promise me you’ll loop the loop.” His eyes had gotten a little glazy, “With Mademoiselle Sistair,” he said, “I do not make love… I make the loop the loop.”

It was a long drive out to the aviation field. A little greyness of dawn was creeping over everything. Pierre couldn’t drive straight any more, so that she had to grab the wheel once or twice to steady him. When they drew up with a jerk at the field she could see the row of hangars and three planes standing out in deepest blue and beyond, rows of poplartrees against the silver rim of the plain. Overhead the sky sagged heavily like a wet tent. Daughter got out of the car shivering. Pierre was staggering a little. “Perhaps you will go instead to bed… to bed it is very good,” he said yawning. She put her arm around him, “You promised you’d take me up and loop the loop.” “Allright,” he said angrily and walked towards one of the planes. He fumbled with the engine a while and she could hear him swearing in French. Then he went into the hangar to wake up a mechanic. Daughter stood there shivering in the growing silvery light. She wouldn’t think of anything. She wanted to go up in a plane. Her head ached but she didn’t feel nauseated. When the mechanic came back with Pierre she could make out that he was arguing with him trying to make him give up the flight. She got very sore: “Pierre, you’ve got to take me up,” she yelled at the two men sleepily arguing in French. “Aw-right, Mademoiselle Sistair.” They wrapped a heavy armycoat around her and strapped her very carefully in the observer’s seat. Pierre climbed into the pilot seat. It was a Bleriot monoplane, he said. The mechanic spun the propeller. The engine started. Everything was full of the roar of the engine. Suddenly she was scared and sober, thought about home and Dad and Buster and the boat she was going to take tomorrow, no it was today. It seemed an endless time with the engine roaring. The light was brighter. She started to fumble with the straps to unstrap them. It was crazy going up like this. She had to catch that boat. The plane had started. It was bouncing over the field, bouncing along the ground. They were still on the ground rumbling bouncing along. Maybe it wouldn’t go up. She hoped it wouldn’t go up. A row of poplars swept past below them. The motor was a settled roar now, they were climbing. It was daylight; a cold silver sun shone in her face. Underneath them was a floor of thick white clouds like a beach. She was terribly cold and stunned by the roar of the motor. The man in goggles in front of her turned around and yelled something. She couldn’t hear. She’d forgotten who Pierre was. She stretched her hand out towards him and waved it around. The plane went on climbing steadily. She began to see hills standing up in the light on either side of the white beach of clouds, must be the valley of the Seine full of fog; where was Paris? They were plunging into the sun, no, no, don’t, don’t, now it’s the end. The white clouds were a ceiling overhead, the sun spun around once first fast then slowly then the plane was climbing again. She felt terribly sick, she was afraid she was going to faint. Dying must be like this. Perhaps she’d have a miscarriage. Her body was throbbing with the roar of the engine. She had barely strength enough to stretch her hand toward him again and make the same motion. The same thing again. This time she didn’t feel so bad. They were climbing again into the blue sky, a wind must have come up because the plane was lunging a little, took an occasional sickening drop into a pocket. The face in the goggles turned around and swayed from side to side. She thought the lips formed the words, No good; but now she could see Paris like an embroidered pincushion, with all the steeples and the Eiffel Tower and the towers of the Trocadèro sticking up through a milky haze. The Sacré Cœur on Montmartre was very white and cast a shadow clear to the garden that looked like a map. Then it was behind them and they were circling over green country. It was rough and she began to feel sick again. There was a ripping sound of some kind. A little wire waving loose and glistening against the blue began to whine. She tried to yell to the man in the goggles. He turned and saw her waving and went up into another dive. This time. No. Paris, the Eiffel Tower, the Sacré Cœur, the green fields spun. They were climbing again. Daughter saw the shine of a wing gliding by itself a little way from the plane. The spinning sun blinded her as they dropped.

spectacle of ruined villages and tortured earth “the work of fiends” wrings heart of Mr. Hugh C. Wallace during his visit to wasted and shelltorn regions

arent you coming to the anarchist picnic there’s going to be an anarchist picnic sure you’ve got to come to the anarchist picnic this afternoon it was way out at Garches in a kind of park it took a long time to get out there we were late there were youngsters and young girls with glasses and old men with their whiskers and long white zits and everybody wore black artist ties some had taken off their shoes and stockings and were wandering around in the long grass a young man with a black artist tie was reading a poem Voilà said a voice c’est plûtot le geste proletaire it was a nice afternoon we sat on the grass and looked around le geste proletaire

But God damn it they’ve got all the machineguns in the world all the printingpresses linotypes tickerribbon curling irons plush-horses Ritz and we you I? barehands a few songs not very good songs plûtot le geste proletaire

CRIMINAL IN PYJAMAS SAWS BARS;

SCALES WALLS; FLEES

A young Swede name Hillstrom went to sea, got himself calloused hands on sailingships and tramps, learned English in the focastle of the steamers that make the run from Stockholm to Hull, dreamed the Swede’s dream of the west;

when he got to America they gave him a job polishing cuspidors in a Bowery saloon.

He moved west to Chicago and worked in a machineshop.

He moved west and followed the harvest, hung around employment agencies, paid out many a dollar for a job in a construction camp, walked out many a mile when the grub was too bum, or the boss too tough, or too many bugs in the bunkhouse;

read Marx and the I.W.W. Preamble and dreamed about forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.

He was in California for the S.P. strike (Casey Jones, two locomotives, Casey Jones), used to play the concertina outside the bunkhouse door, after supper, evenings (Longhaired preachers come out every night), had a knack for setting rebel words to tunes (And the union makes us strong).

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. …

The old people were Jews but at school Benny always said no he wasn’t a Jew he was an American because he’d been born in Brooklyn and lived at 2531 25th Avenue in Flatbush and they owned their home. The teacher in the seventh grade said he squinted and sent him home with a note, so Pop took an afternoon off from the jewelry store where he worked with a lens in his eye repairing watches, to take Benny to an optician who put drops in his eyes and made him read little teeny letters on a white card. Pop seemed tickled when the optician said Benny had to wear glasses, “Vatchmaker’s eyes… takes after his old man,” he said and patted his cheek. The steel eyeglasses were heavy on Benny’s nose and cut into him behind the ears. It made him feel funny to have Pop telling the optician that a boy with glasses wouldn’t be a bum and a baseball player like Sam and Isidore but would attend to his studies and be a lawyer and a scholar like the men of old. “A rabbi maybe,” said the optician, but Pop said rabbis were loafers and lived on the blood of the poor, he and the old woman still ate kosher and kept the sabbath like their fathers but synagogue and the rabbis… he made a spitting sound with his lips. The optician laughed and said as for himself he was a freethinker but religion was good for the commonpeople. When they got home momma said the glasses made Benny look awful old. Sam and Izzy yelled, “Hello, foureyes,” when they came in from selling papers, but at school next day they told the other kids it was a statesprison offence to roughhouse a feller with glasses. Once he had the glasses Benny got to be very good at his lessons.

In highschool he made the debating team. When he was thirteen Pop had a long illness and had to give up work for a year. They lost the house that was almost paid for and went to live in a flat on Myrtle Avenue. Benny got work in a drugstore evenings. Sam and Izzy left home, Sam to work in a furrier’s in Newark; Izzy had gotten to loafing in poolparlors so Pop threw him out. He’d always been a good athlete and palled around with an Irishman named Pug Riley who was going to get him into the ring. Momma cried and Pop forbade any of the kids to mention his name; still they all knew that Gladys, the oldest one, who was working as a stenographer over in Manhattan, sent Izzy a five dollar bill now and then. Benny looked much older than he was and hardly ever thought of anything except making money so the old people could have a house of their own again. When he grew up he’d be a lawyer and a business man and make a pile quick so that Gladys could quit work and get married and the old people could buy a big house and live in the country. Momma used to tell him about how when she was a young maiden in the old country they used to go out in the woods after strawberries and mushrooms and stop by a farmhouse and drink milk all warm and foamy from the cow. Benny was going to get rich and take them all out in the country for a trip to a summer resort.

When Pop was well enough to work again he rented half a two-family house in Flatbush where at least they’d be away from the noise of the elevated. The same year Benny graduated from highschool and won a prize for an essay on The American Government. He’d gotten very tall and thin and had terrible headaches. The old people said he’d outgrown himself and took him to see Dr. Cohen who lived on the same block but had his office downtown near Borough Hall. The doctor said he’d have to give up night work and studying too hard, what he needed was something that would keep him outdoors and develop his body. “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” he said, scratching the grizzled beard under his chin. Benny said he had to make some money this summer because he wanted to go to New York University in the fall. Dr. Cohen said he ought to eat plenty of milkdishes and fresh eggs and go somewhere where he could be out in the sun and take it easy all summer. He charged two dollars. Walking home the old man kept striking his forehead with the flat of his hand and saying he was a failure, thirty years he had worked in America and now he was a sick old man all used up and couldn’t provide for his children. Momma cried. Gladys told them not to be silly, Benny was a clever boy and a bright student and what was the use of all his booklearning if he couldn’t think up some way of getting a job in the country. Benny went to bed without saying anything.

A few days later Izzy came home. He rang the doorbell as soon as the old man had gone to work one morning. “You almost met Pop,” said Benny who opened the door. “Nutten doin’. I waited round the corner till I seen him go…. How’s everybody?” Izzy had on a light grey suit and a green necktie and wore a fedora hat to match the suit. He said he had to get to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to fight a Filipino featherweight on Saturday. “Take me with you,” said Benny. “You ain’t tough enough, kid… too much the momma’s boy.” In the end Benny went with him. They rode on the L to Brooklyn Bridge and then walked across New York to the ferry. They bought tickets to Elizabeth. When the train stopped in a freightyard they sneaked forward into the blind baggage. At West Philadelphia they dropped off and got chased by the yard detective. A brewery wagon picked them up and carried them along the road as far as West Chester. They had to walk the rest of the way. A Mennonite farmer let them spend the night in the barn, but in the morning he wouldn’t let them have any breakfast until they’d chopped wood for two hours. By the time they got to Lancaster Benny was all in. He went to sleep in the lockerroom at the Athletic Club and didn’t wake up until the fight was over. Izzy had knocked out the Filipino featherweight in the third round and won a purse of twentyfive dollars. He sent Benny over to a lodginghouse with the shine who took care of the lockerroom and went out with the boys to paint the town red. Next morning he turned up with his face green and got his eyes bloodshot; he’d spent all his money, but he’d gotten Benny a job helping a feller who did a little smalltime fightpromoting and ran a canteen in a construction camp up near Mauch Chunk.

It was a road job. Ben stayed there for two months earning ten dollars a week and his keep. He learned to drive a team and to keep books. The boss of the canteen, Hiram Volle, gypped the construction workers in their accounts, but Benny didn’t think much about it because they were most of ’em wops, until he got to be friends with a young fellow named Nick Gigli who worked with the gang at the gravelpit. Nick used to hang around the canteen before closingtime in the evening; then they’d go out and smoke a cigarette together and talk. Sundays they’d walk out in the country with the Sunday paper and fool around all afternoon lying in the sun and talking about the articles in the magazine section. Nick was from north Italy and all the men in the gang were Sicilians, so he was lonely. His father and elder brothers were anarchists and he was too; he told Benny about Bakunin and Malatesta and said Benny ought to be ashamed of himself for wanting to get to be a rich businessman; sure he ought to study and learn, maybe he ought to get to be a lawyer, but he ought to work for the revolution and the working class, to be a business man was to be a shark and a robber like that son of a bitch Volle. He taught Benny to roll cigarettes and told him about all the girls that were in love with him; that girl in the boxoffice of the movie in Mauch Chunk; he could have her anytime he wanted, but a revolutionist ought to be careful about the girls he went with, women took a classconscious working man’s mind off his aims, they were the main seduction of capitalist society. Ben asked him if he thought he ought to throw up his job with Volle, because Volle was such a crook, but Nick said any other capitalist would be the same, all they could do was wait for the Day. Nick was eighteen with bitter brown eyes and a skin almost as dark as a mulatto’s. Ben thought he was great on account of all he’d done; he’d shined shoes, been a sailor, a miner, a dishwasher and had worked in textile mills, shoefactories and a cement factory and had had all kinds of women and been in jail for three weeks in the Paterson strike. Round the camp if any of the wops saw Ben going anywhere alone he’d yell at him, “Hey, kid, where’s Nick?”

On Friday evening there was an argument in front of the window where the construction boss was paying the men off. That night, when Ben was getting into his bunk in the back of the tarpaper shack the canteen was in, Nick came around and whispered in his ear that the bosses had been gypping the men on time and that they were going on strike tomorrow. Ben said if they went out he’d go out too. Nick called him a brave comrade in Italian and hauled off and kissed him on both cheeks. Next morning only a few of the pick and shovel men turned out when the whistle blew. Ben hung around the door of the cookshack not knowing what to do with himself. Volle noticed him and told him to hitch up the team to go down to the station after a box of tobacco. Ben looked at his feet and said he couldn’t because he was on strike. Volle burst out laughing and told him to quit his kidding, funniest thing he’d ever heard of a kike walking out with a lot of wops. Ben felt himself go cold and stiff all over: “I’m not a kike any more’n you are…. I’m an American born… and I’m goin’ to stick with my class, you dirty crook.” Volle turned white and stepped up and shook a big fist under Ben’s nose and said he was fired and that if he wasn’t a little f — g shrimp of a foureyed kike he’d knock his goddam block off, anyway his brother sure would give him a whaling when he heard about it.

Ben went to his bunk and rolled his things into a bundle and went off to find Nick. Nick was a little down the road where the bunkhouses were, in the center of a bunch of wops all yelling and waving their arms. The superintendent and the gangbosses all turned out with revolvers in black holsters strapped around their waists and one of them made a speech in English and another one Sicilian saying that this was a squareshooting concern that had always treated laborers square and if they didn’t like it they could get the hell out. They’d never had a strike and didn’t propose to begin now. There was big money involved in this job and the company wasn’t going to work and see it tied up by any goddam foolishness. Any man who wasn’t on his job next time the whistle blew was fired and would have to get a move on and remember that the State of Pennsylvania had vagrancy laws. When the whistle blew again everybody went back to work except Ben and Nick. They walked off down the road with their bundles. Nick had tears in his eyes and was saying, “Too much gentle, too much patient… we do not know our strength yet.”

That night they found a brokendown schoolhouse a little off the road on a hill above a river. They’d bought some bread and peanut butter at a store and sat out in front eating it and talking about what they’d do. By the time they’d finished eating it was dark. Ben had never been out in the country alone like that at night. The wind rustled the woods all around and the rapid river seethed down in the valley. It was a chilly August night with a heavy dew. They didn’t have any covering so Nick showed Ben how to take his jacket off and put it over his head and how to sleep against the wall to keep from getting sore lying on the bare boards. He’d hardly gotten to sleep when he woke up icycold and shaking. There was a window broken; he could see the frame and the jagged bits of glass against the cloudy moonlight. He lay back, musta been dreaming. Something banged on the roof and rolled down the shingles over his head and dropped to the ground. “Hay, Ben, for chrissake wassat?” came Nick’s voice in a hoarse whisper. They both got up and stared out through the broken windowframe.

“That was busted before,” said Nick. He walked over and opened the outside door. They both shivered in the chilly wind up the valley that rustled the trees like rain, the river down below made a creaking grinding noise like a string of carts and wagons.

A stone hit the roof above them and rolled off. The next one went between their heads and hit the cracked plaster of the wall behind. Ben heard the click of the blade as Nick opened his pocketknife. He strained his eyes till the tears came but he couldn’t make out anything but the leaves stirring in the wind.

“You come outa there… come up here… talk… you son of a bitch,” yelled Nick.

There was no answer.

“What do you think?” whispered Nick over his shoulder to Ben.

Ben didn’t say anything; he was trying to keep his teeth from chattering. Nick pushed him back in and pulled the door to. They piled the dusty benches against the door and blocked up the lower part of the window with boards out of the floor.

“Break in. I keell one of him anyhow,” said Nick. “You don’t believe in speerits?”

“Naw, no such thing,” said Ben. They sat down side by side on the floor with their backs to the cracked plaster and listened. Nick had put the knife down between them. He took Ben’s fingers and made him feel the catch that held the blade steady. “Good knife… sailor knife,” he whispered. Ben strained his ears. Only the spattering sound of the wind in the trees and the steady grind of the river. No more stones came.

Next morning they left the schoolhouse at first day. Neither of them had had any sleep. Ben’s eyes were stinging. When the sun came up they found a man who was patching up a broken spring on a truck. They helped him jack it up with a block of wood and he gave them a lift into Scranton where they got jobs washing dishes in a hashjoint run by a Greek.

in British Colonial Office quarters it is believed that Australian irritation will diminish as soon as it is realized that the substance is more important than the shadow. It may be stated that press representatives who are expeditious in sending their telegrams at an early hour, suffer because their telegrams are thrown into baskets. Others which come later are heaped on top of them and in the end the messages on top of the basket are dealt with first. But this must not be taken as an insult. Count von Brochdorf-Ranzau was very weak and it was only his physical condition that kept him from rising

four hours we casuals pile up scrapiron in the flatcars and four hours we drag the scrapiron off the flatcars and pile it on the side of the track KEEP THE BOYS FIT TO GO HOME is the slogan of the YMCA in the morning the shadows of the poplars point west and in the afternoon they point out east where Persia is the jagged bits of old iron cut into our hands through the canvas gloves a kind of grey slagdust plugs our noses and ears stings eyes four hunkies a couple of wops a bohunk dagoes guineas two little dark guys with blue chins nobody can talk to

spare parts no outfit wanted to use

mashed mudguards busted springs old spades and shovels entrenching tools twisted hospital cots a mountain of nuts and bolts of all sizes four million miles of barbedwire chickenwire rabbitfence acres of tin roofing square miles of parked trucks long parades of locomotives strung along the yellow rails of the sidings

KEEP THE BOYS FIT TO GO up in the office the grumpy sergeants doing the paperwork dont know where home is lost our outfits our service records our aluminum numberplates no spika de Engliss no entiendo comprend pas no capisco nyeh panimayoo

day after day the shadows of the poplars point west northwest north northeast east When they desoit they always heads south the corporal said Pretty tough but if he aint got a soivice record how can we make out his discharge KEEP OUR BOYS FIT for whatthehell the war’s over

scrap

it was a gala day for Seattle. Enormous crowds not only filled the streets on the line of march from the pier but finally later in the evening machineguns were placed in position, the guardsmen withstanding a shower of missles until their inaction so endangered them the officers gave the order to fire. WOULD CUT OFF LIGHT. President Lowell of Harvard University has urged the students to serve as strikebreakers. “In accordance with its tradition of public service, the university desires at this time of crisis to maintain order and support the laws of the Commonwealth.”

When Wesley Everest came home from overseas and got his discharge from the army he went back to his old job of logging. His folks were of the old Kentucky and Tennessee stock of woodsmen and squirrelhunters who followed the trail blazed by Lewis and Clark into the rainy giant forests of the Pacific slope. In the army Everest was a sharpshooter, won a medal for a crack shot.

(Since the days of the homesteaders the western promoters and the politicians and lobbyists in Washington had been busy with the rainy giant forests of the Pacific slope, with the result that:

The pinnacles and buttresses of the apse of Nôtre Dâme looked crumbly as cigarash in the late afternoon sunshine. “But you’ve got to stay, Richard,” Eleanor was saying as she went about the room collecting the teathings on a tray for the maid to take out. “I had to do something about Eveline and her husband before they sailed… after all, she’s one of my oldest friends… and I’ve invited all her wildeyed hangerson to come in afterwards.” A fleet of big drays loaded with winebarrels rumbled along the quay outside. Dick was staring out into the grey ash of the afternoon. “Do close that window, Richard, the dust is pouring in…. Of course, I realize that you’ll have to leave early to go to J.W.’s meeting with the press…. If it hadn’t been for that he’d have had to come, poor dear, but you know how busy he is.” “Well, I don’t exactly find the time hanging on my hands… but I’ll stay and greet the happy pair. In the army I’d forgotten about work.” He got to his feet and walked back into the room to light a cigarette.

“Well, you needn’t be so mournful about it.”

“I don’t see you dancing in the streets yourself.”

“I think Eveline’s made a very grave mistake… Americans are just too incredibly frivolous about marriage.”

Dick’s throat got tight. He found himself noticing how stiffly he put the cigarette to his mouth, inhaled the smoke and blew it out. Eleanor’s eyes were on his face, cool and searching. Dick didn’t say anything, he tried to keep his face stiff.

“Were you in love with that poor girl, Richard?”

Dick blushed and shook his head.

“Well, you needn’t pretend to be hard about it… it’s just young to pretend to be hard about things.”

“Jilted by army officer, Texas belle killed in a plane wreck… but most of the correspondents know me and did their best to kill that story…. What did you expect me to do, jump into the grave like Hamlet? The Hon. Mr. Barrow did all of that that was necessary. It was a frightfully tough break…” He let himself drop into a chair. “I wish I was hard enough so that I didn’t give a damn about anything. When history’s walking on all our faces is no time for pretty sentiments.” He made a funny face and started talking out of the corner of his mouth. “All I asked sister is to see de woild with Uncle Woodrow… le beau monde sans blague tu sais.” Eleanor was laughing her little shrill laugh when they heard Eveline’s and Paul Johnson’s voices outside on the landing.

Eleanor had bought them a pair of little blue parakeets in a cage. They drank Montracher and ate roast duck cooked with oranges. In the middle of the meal Dick had to go up to the Crillon. It was a relief to be out in the air, sitting in an open taxi, running past the Louvre made enormous by the late twilight under which the Paris streets seemed empty and very long ago like the Roman forum. All the way up past the Tuileries he played with an impulse to tell the taxidriver to take him to the opera, to the circus, to the fortifications, anywhere to hell and gone. He set his pokerface as he walked past the doorman at the Crillon.

Miss Williams gave him a relieved smile when he appeared in the door. “Oh, I was afraid you’d be late, Captain Savage.” Dick shook his head and grinned. “Anybody come?” “Oh, they’re coming in swarms. It’ll make the front pages,” she whispered. Then she had to answer the phone.

The big room was already filling up with newspaper men. Jerry Burnham whispered as he shook hands, “Say, Dick, if it’s a typewritten statement you won’t leave the room alive.” “Don’t worry,” said Dick with a grin. “Say, where’s Robbins?” “He’s out of the picture,” said Dick dryly, “I think he’s in Nice drinking up the last of his liver.”

J.W. had come in by the other door and was moving around the room shaking hands with men he knew, being introduced to others. A young fellow with untidy hair and his necktie crooked put a paper in Dick’s hand. “Say, ask him if he’d answer some of these questions.” “Is he going home to campaign for the League of Nations?” somebody asked in his other ear.

Everybody was settled in chairs; J.W. leaned over the back of his and said that this was going to be an informal chat, after all, he was an old newspaper man himself. There was a pause. Dick glanced around at J.W.’s pale slightly jowly face just in time to catch a flash of his blue eyes around the faces of the correspondents. An elderly man asked in a grave voice if Mr. Moorehouse cared to say anything about the differences of opinion between the President and Colonel House. Dick settled himself back to be bored. J.W. answered with a cool smile that they’d better ask Colonel House himself about that. When somebody spoke the word oil everybody sat up in their chairs. Yes, he could say definitely an accord, a working agreement had been reached between certain American oil producers and perhaps the Royal Dutch-Shell, oh, no, of course not to set prices but as proof of a new era of international cooperation that was dawning in which great aggregations of capital would work together for peace and democracy, against reactionaries and militarists on the one hand and against the bloody forces of bolshevism on the other. And what about the League of Nations? “A new era,” went on J.W. in a confidential tone, “is dawning.”

Chairs scraped and squeaked, pencils scratched on pads, everybody was very attentive. Everybody got it down that J.W. was sailing for New York on the Rochambeau in two weeks. After the newspapermen had gone off to make their cable deadline, J.W. yawned and asked Dick to make his excuses to Eleanor, that he was really too tired to get down to her place tonight. When Dick got out on the streets again there was still a little of the violet of dusk in the sky. He hailed a taxi; goddam it, he could take a taxi whenever he wanted to now.

It was pretty stiff at Eleanor’s, people were sitting around in the parlor and in one bedroom that had been fitted up as a sort of boudoir with a tall mirror draped with lace, talking uncomfortably and intermittently. The bridegroom looked as if he had ants under his collar. Eveline and Eleanor were standing in the window talking with a gauntfaced man who turned out to be Don Stevens who’d been arrested in Germany by the Army of Occupation and for whom Eveline had made everybody scamper around so. “And any time I get in a jam,” he was saying, “I always find a little Jew who helps get me out… this time he was a tailor.”

“Well, Eveline isn’t a little Jew or a tailor,” said Eleanor icily, “but I can tell you she did a great deal.”

Stevens walked across the room to Dick and asked him what sort of a man Moorehouse was. Dick found himself blushing. He wished Stevens wouldn’t talk so loud. “Why, he’s a man of extraordinary ability,” he stammered.

“I thought he was a stuffed shirt… I didn’t see what those damn fools of the bourgeois press thought they were getting for a story… I was there for the D.H.”

“Yes, I saw you,” said Dick.

“I thought maybe, from what Steve Warner said, you were the sort of guy who’d be boring from within.”

“Boring in another sense, I guess, boring and bored.”

Stevens stood over him glaring at him as if he was going to hit him. “Well, we’ll know soon enough which side a man’s on. We’ll all have to show our faces, as they say in Russia, before long.”

Eleanor interrupted with a fresh smoking bottle of champagne. Stevens went back to talk to Eveline in the window. “Why, I’d as soon have a Baptist preacher in the house,” Eleanor tittered.

“Damn it, I hate people who get their pleasure by making other people feel uncomfortable,” grumbled Dick under his breath. Eleanor smiled a quick V-shaped smile and gave his arm a pat with her thin white hand, that was tipped by long nails pointed and pink and marked with halfmoons. “So do I, Dick, so do I.”

When Dick whispered that he had a headache and thought he’d go home and turn in, she gripped his arm and pulled him into the hall. “Don’t you dare go home and leave me alone with this frost.” Dick made a face and followed her back into the salon. She poured him a glass of champagne from the bottle she still held in her hand: “Cheer up Eveline,” she whispered squeakily. “She’s about ready to go down for the third time.”

Dick stood around for hours talking to Mrs. Johnson about books, plays, the opera. Neither of them seemed to be able to keep track of what the other was saying. Eveline couldn’t keep her eyes off her husband. He had a young cubbish look Dick couldn’t help liking; he was standing by the sideboard getting tight with Stevens, who kept making ugly audible remarks about parasites and the lahdedah boys of the bourgeoisie. It went on for a long time. Paul Johnson got sick and Dick had to help him find the bathroom. When he came back into the salon he almost had a fight with Stevens, who, after an argument about the Peace Conference, suddenly hauled off with his fists clenched and called him a goddam fairy. The Johnsons hustled Stevens out. Eleanor came up to Dick and put her arm around his neck and said he’d been magnificent.

Paul Johnson came back upstairs after they’d gone to get the parakeets. He looked pale as a sheet. One of the birds had died and was lying on its back stiff with his claws in the air at the bottom of the cage.

At about three o’clock Dick rode home to his hotel in a taxi.

the placards borne by the radicals were taken away from them, their clothing torn and eyes blackened before the service and ex-service men had finished with them

34 Die After Drinking Wood Alcohol Trains in France May Soon Stop

Gerard Throws His Hat into the Ring

Whereasthe Congressoftheunitedstates byaconcurrentresolutionadoptedon the4thdayofmarch lastauthorizedthe Secretaryofwar to cause to be brought to theunitedstatesthe body of an American whowasamemberoftheamericanexpeditionaryforcesineuropewholosthis lifeduringtheworldwarandwhoseidentityhasnot beenestablished for burial inthememorialamphitheatreofthe nationalcemeteryatarlingtonvirginia

Born in Chicago on January 14, 1896, JOHN DOS PASSOS is one of the most well known writers of our time. He graduated cum laude from Harvard College in 1916 and went on to serve in the United States Medical Corps during the remainder of World War I. Upon his return Dos Passos began writing for several newspapers and magazines. His first novel, One Man’s Initiation, published in 1920, was inspired by his involvement in World War I. Dos Passos went on to publish more than forty books, fiction and nonfiction, focusing on social and political issues and customarily taking an extreme leftist approach. He was one of the most adept chroniclers in the twentieth century of the difficulties of the American working class and the decadence of the well-to-do. While his political views eventually grew more conservative, in his writing he still strove to create an accurate reflection of American culture throughout his career. Some consider Dos Passos’s most important work to be the U.S.A. trilogy. Among his other well-known titles are Three Soldiers, Manhattan Transfer, and District of Columbia. In his later years he made his home with his wife on a Westmoreland County, Virginia, property previously owned by his father. John Dos Passos died in 1970 at the age of seventy-four.