John Passos - 1919

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.