John Passos - 1919

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: