John Passos - The 42nd Parallel

Eveline had several beaux, writers and illustrators and people like that, but they never had any money and ate and drank everything in the house when they came to dinner. One of them, Freddy Seargeant, was an actor and producer temporarily stranded in Chicago. He had friends in the Shubert office and his great ambition was to put on a pantomime like Reinhardt’s Sumurun , only based on Maya Indian stories. He had a lot of photographs of Maya ruins, and Eleanor and Eveline began to design costumes for it and settings. They hoped to get Tom Custis or the Paine Emersons to put up money for a production in Chicago.

The main trouble was with the music. A young pianist whom Tom Custis had sent to Paris to study began to write it and came and played it one night. They had quite a party for him. Sally Emerson came and a lot of fashionable people, but Tom Custis drank too many cocktails to be able to hear a note and Amelia the cook got drunk and spoiled the dinner and Eveline told the young pianist that his music sounded like movie music and he went off in a huff. When everybody had gone Freddy Seargeant and Eveline and Eleanor roamed around the ravaged apartment feeling very bad indeed. Freddy Seargeant twisted his black hair, slightly splotched with gray, in his long hands and said he was going to kill himself, and Eleanor and Eveline quarrelled violently.

“But it did sound like movingpicture music and, after all, why shouldn’t it?” Eveline kept saying. Then Freddy Seargeant got his hat and went out saying, “You women are making life a hell for me,” and Eveline burst out crying and got hysterical and Eleanor had to send for a doctor.

The next day they scraped up fifty dollars to send Freddy back to New York, and Eveline went back to live at the house on Drexel Boulevard, leaving Eleanor to carry on the decorating business all alone.

Next Spring Eleanor and Eveline sold for five hundred some chandeliers that they had picked up in a junk shop on the west side for twentyfive dollars and were just writing out checks for their more pressing debts when a telegram arrived.

SIGNED CONTRACT WITH SHUBERTS PRODUCTION RETURN OF THE NATIVE WILL YOU DO SCENERY COSTUMES HUNDRED FIFTY A WEEK EACH MUST COME ON NEW YORK IMMEDIATELY MUST HAVE YOU WIRE IMMEDIATELY HOTEL DES ARTISTES CENTRAL PARK SOUTH FREDDY

“Eleanor, we’ve got to do it,” said Eveline, taking a cigarette out of her handbag and walking round the room puffing at it furiously. “It’ll be a rush, but let’s make the Twentieth Century this afternoon.” “It’s about noon now,” said Eleanor in a trembly voice. Without answering Eveline went to the phone and called up the Pullman office. That evening they sat in their section looking out of the window at the steelworks of Indiana Harbor, the big cement works belching puttycolored smoke, the flaring furnaces of Gary disappearing in smokeswirling winter dusk. Neither of them could say anything.

the methodist minister’s wife was a tall thin woman who sang little songs at the piano in a spindly lost voice who’d heard you liked books and grew flowers and vegetables and was so interested because she’d once been an episcopalian and loved beautiful things and had had stories she had written published in a magazine and she was younger than her husband who was a silent blackhaired man with a mouth like a mousetrap and tobaccojuice on his chin and she wore thin white dresses and used perfume and talked in a bell-like voice about how things were lovely as a lily and the moon was bright as a bubble full to bursting behind the big pine when we walked back along the shore and you felt you ought to put your arm round her and kiss her only you didn’t want to and anyway you wouldn’t have had the nerve walking slow through the sand and the pine needles under the big moon swelled to bursting like an enormous drop of quicksilver and she talked awful sad about the things she had hoped for and you thought it was too bad

you liked books and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Captain Marryat’s novels and wanted to go away and to sea and to foreign cities Carcassonne Marakesh Isfahan and liked things to be beautiful and wished you had the nerve to hug and kiss Martha the colored girl they said was half Indian old Emma’s daughter and little redheaded Mary I taught how to swim if I only had the nerve breathless nights when the moon was full but Oh God not lilies

BOMBARDIER STOPS AUSTRALIAN

colonel says democrats have brought distress to nation I’ll resign when I die Huerta snarls in grim defi and half Mexico will die with me no flames were seen but the vast plume of blackened steam from the crater waved a mile high in the sky and volcanic ash fell on Macomber Flats thirteen miles distant

Eggs Noisy? No Pokerchips.

Way down on the levee

In old Alabamy

There’s daddy and mammy

And Ephram and Sammy

MOONFAIRIES DANCE ON RAVINIA GREENS

WILSON WILL TAKE ADVICE OF BUSINESS

admits he threw bomb policewoman buys drinks after one loses on wheat slain as burglar

On a moonlight night

You can find them all

While they are waiting

Banjoes are syncopating

What’s that they’re all saying

What’s that they’re all singing

recognizing James scrawl the president seized the cracker and pulled out the fuse. A stream of golden gumdrops fell over the desk; then glancing at the paper the Chief Executive read “Don’t eat too many of them because Mama says they’ll make you sick if you do.”

RIDING SEAWOLF IN MEXICAN WATERS

They all keep aswaying

Ahumming and swinging

It’s the good ship Robert E. Lee

That’s come to carry the cotton away

ISADORA DUNCAN’S NEW HAPPINESS

IWW troublemakers overran a Garibaldi birthday celebration at Rosebank Staten Island this afternoon, insulted the Italian flag, pummeled and clubbed members of the Italian Rifle Society and would have thrown the American flag to the dirt if

SIX UNCLAD BATHING GIRLS BLACK

EYES OF HORRID MAN

Indian divers search for drowned boy’s body. Some of the witnesses say they saw a woman in the crowd. She was hit with a brick. The man in gray took refuge behind her skirts to fire. The upper decks and secluded parts of the boat are the spooners’ paradise where liberties are often taken with intoxicated young girls whose mothers should not have permitted them to go on a public boat unescorted.

MIDWEST MAY MAKE OR BREAK WILSON

TELL CAUSES OF UNREST IN LABOR WORLD

“I’m a Swiss admiral proceeding to America,” and the copper called a taxi

See them shuffling along

Hear their music and song

It’s simply great, mate ,

Waiting on the levee

Waiting

for

the

Robert

E.

Lee.

When Minor C. Keith died all the newspapers carried his picture, a brighteyed man with a hawknose and a respectable bay window, and an uneasy look under the eyes.

Minor C. Keith was a rich man’s son, born in a family that liked the smell of money, they could smell money half way round the globe in that family.

His Uncle was Henry Meiggs, the Don Enrique of the West Coast. His father had a big lumber business and handled realestate in Brooklyn;

young Keith was a chip of the old block

(Back in fortynine Don Enrique had been drawn to San Francisco by the gold rush. He didn’t go prospecting in the hills, he didn’t die of thirst sifting alkalidust in Death Valley. He sold outfits to the other guys. He stayed in San Francisco and played politics and high finance until he got in too deep and had to get aboard ship in a hurry.