John Passos - 1919

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?”