John Passos - 1919

“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.”

For the Peace Conference, J.W. had a suite at the Crillon, with his blonde secretary Miss Williams at a desk in a little anteroom, and Morton his English valet serving tea in the late afternoon. Eveline looked dropping into the Crillon late in the afternoon after walking up the arcades of the rue de Rivoli from her office. The antiquated corridors of the hotel were crowded with Americans coming and going. In J.W.’s big salon there’d be Morton stealthily handing around tea, and people in uniform and in frock coats and the cigarettesmoky air would be full of halftold anecdotes. J.W. fascinated her, dressed in grey Scotch tweeds that always had a crease on the trousers (he’d given up wearing his Red Cross major’s uniform), with such an aloof agreeable manner, tempered by the preoccupied look of a very busy man always being called up on the phone, receiving telegrams or notes from his secretary, disappearing into the embrasure of one of the windows that looked out on the place de la Concorde with someone for a whispered conversation, or being asked to step in to see Colonel House for a moment; and still when he handed her a champagne cocktail just before they all went out to dinner on nights he didn’t have to go to some official function, or asked if she wanted another cup of tea, she’d feel for a second in her eyes the direct glance of two boyish blue eyes with a funny candid partly humorous look that teased her. She wanted to know him better; Eleanor, she felt, watched them like a cat watching a mouse. After all, Eveline kept saying to herself, she hadn’t any right. It wasn’t as if there was anything really between them.

When J.W. was busy they often went out with Edgar Robbins who seemed to be a sort of assistant of J.W.’s. Eleanor couldn’t abide him, said there was something insulting in his cynicism, but Eveline liked to hear him talk. He said the peace was going to be ghastlier than the war, said it was a good thing nobody ever asked his opinion about anything because he’d certainly land in jail if he gave it. Robbins’ favorite hangout was Freddy’s up back of Montmartre. They’d sit there all evening in the small smokycrowded rooms while Freddy, who had a big white beard like Walt Whitman, would play on the guitar and sing. Sometimes he’d get drunk and set the company up to drinks on the house. Then his wife, a cross woman who looked like a gypsy, would come out of the back room and curse and scream at him. People at the tables would get up and recite long poems about La Grand’ route, La Misère, L’Assassinat or sing old French songs like Les Filles de Nantes. If it went over everybody present would clap hands in unison. They called that giving a bon. Freddy got to know them and would make a great fuss when they arrived, “Ah, les belles Américaines.” Robbins would sit there moodily drinking calvados after calvados, now and then letting out a crack about the day’s happenings at the peace conference. He said that the place was a fake that the calvados was wretched and that Freddy was a dirty old bum, but for some reason he always wanted to go back.

J.W. went there a couple of times, and occasionally they’d take some delegate from the peace conference who’d be mightily impressed by their knowledge of the inner life of Paris. J.W. was enchanted by the old French songs, but he said the place made him feel itchy and that he thought there were fleas there. Eveline liked to watch him when he was listening to a song with his eyes half closed and his head thrown back. She felt that Robbins didn’t appreciate the rich potentialities of his nature and always shut him up when he started to say something sarcastic about the big cheese, as he called him. She thought it was disagreeable of Eleanor to laugh at things like that, especially when J.W. seemed so devoted to her.

When Jerry Burnham came back from Armenia and found that Eveline was going around with J. Ward Moorehouse all the time he was terribly upset. He took her out to lunch at the Medicis Grill on the left bank and talked and talked about it.

“Why, Eveline, I thought of you as a person who wouldn’t be taken in by a big bluff like that. The guys nothing but a goddam megaphone…. Honestly, Eveline, it’s not that I expect you to fall for me, I know very well you don’t give a damn about me and why should you?… But Christ, a damn publicity agent.”

“Now, Jerry,” said Eveline with her mouth full of hors dœuvres, “you know very well I’m fond of you… It’s just too tiresome of you to talk like that.”

“You don’t like me the way I’d like you to… but to hell with that… Have wine or beer?”