1919 (40 page)

Meanwhile Paul and Mr. Rasmussen had picked up their bags. “Honestly, we'd better make tracks,” said Paul, nervously jiggling Eveline's suitcase. “It's about traintime.” They all scampered through the station. Jerry Burnham had forgotten to buy a ticket and couldn't go out on the platform; they left him arguing with the officials and searching his pockets for his presscard. Paul put the bags in the compartment and shook hands hurriedly with Eleanor. Eveline found his eyes in hers serious and hurt like a dog's eyes.

“You won't stay too long, will you? There's not much time left,” he said. Eveline felt she'd like to kiss him, but the train was starting. Paul scrambled off. All Mr. Rasmussen could do was hand some papers and Jerry's roses through the window and wave his hat mournfully from the platform. It was a relief the train had started. Eleanor was leaning back against the cushions laughing and laughing.

“I declare, Eveline. You're too funny with your Romeos.” Eveline couldn't help laughing herself. She leaned over and patted Eleanor on the shoulder. “Let's just have a wonderful time,” she said.

Next morning early when Eveline woke up and looked out they were in the station at Marseilles. It gave her a funny feeling because she'd wanted to stop off there and see the town, but Eleanor had insisted on going straight to Nice, she hated the sordidness of seaports she'd said. But later when they had their coffee in the diner, looking out at the pines and the dry hills and headlands cutting out blue patches of the Mediterranean, Eveline felt excited and happy again.

They got a good room in a hotel and walked through the streets in the cool sunshine among the wounded soldiers and officers of all the allied armies and strolled along the Promenade des Anglais under the grey palmtrees and gradually Eveline began to feel a chilly feeling of disappointment coming over her. Here was her two weeks leave and she was going to waste it at Nice. Eleanor kept on being crisp and cheerful and suggested they sit down in the big café on the square where a brass band was playing and have a little dubonnet before lunch. After they'd sat there for some time, looking at the uniforms and the quantities of overdressed women who were no better than they should be, Eveline leaned back in her chair and said, “And now that we're here, darling, what on earth shall we do?”

The next morning Eveline woke late; she almost hated to get up as she couldn't imagine how she was going to pass the time all day. As she lay there looking at the stripes of sunlight on the wall that came through the shutters, she heard a man's voice in the adjoining room, that was Eleanor's. Eveline stiffened and listened. It was J.W.'s voice. When she got up and dressed she found her heart was pounding. She was pulling on her best pair of transparent black silk stockings when Eleanor came in, “Who do you think's turned up? J.W. just motored down to see me off to Italy . . . He said it was getting too stuffy for him around the Peace Conference and he had to get a change of air . . . Come on in, Eveline, dear, and have some coffee with us.”

She can't keep the triumph out of her voice, aren't women silly, thought Eveline. “That's lovely, I'll be right in, darling,” she said in he most musical tones.

J.W. had on a light grey flannel suit and a bright blue necktie and his face was pink from the long ride. He was in fine spirits. He'd driven down from Paris in fifteen hours with only four hours sleep after dinner in Lyons. They all drank a great deal of bitter coffee with hot milk and planned out a ride.

It was a fine day. The big Packard car rolled them smoothly along the Corniche. They lunched at Monte Carlo, took a look at the casino in the afternoon and went on and had tea in an English tearoom in Mentone. Next day they went up to Grasse and saw the perfume factories, and the day after they put Eleanor on the rapide for Rome. J.W. was to leave immediately afterwards to go back to Paris. Eleanor's thin white face looked a little forlorn Eveline thought, looking out at them through the window of the wagonlit. When the train pulled out Eveline and J.W. stood on the platform in the empty station with the smoke swirling milky with sunlight under the glass roof overhead and looked at each other with a certain amount of constraint. “She's a great little girl,” said J.W. “I'm very fond of her,” said Eveline. Her voice rang false in her ears. “I wish we were going with her.”

They walked back out to the car. “Where can I take you, Eveline, before I pull out, back to the hotel?” Eveline's heart was pounding again. “Suppose we have a little lunch before you go, let me invite you to lunch.” “That's very nice of you . . . well, I suppose I might as well, I've got to lunch somewhere. And there's no place fit for a white man between here and Lyons.”

They lunched at the casino over the water. The sea was very blue. Outside there were three sailboats with lateen sails making for the entrance to the port. It was warm and jolly, smelt of wine and food sizzled in butter in the glassedin restaurant. Eveline began to like it in Nice.

J.W. drank more wine than he usually did. He began to talk about his boyhood in Wilmington and even hummed a little of a song he'd written in the old days. Eveline was thrilled. Then he began to tell her about Pittsburgh and his ideas about capital and labor. For dessert they had peaches flambé with rum; Eveline recklessly ordered a bottle of champagne. They were getting along famously.

They began to talk about Eleanor. Eveline told about how she'd met Eleanor in the Art Institute and how Eleanor had meant everything to her in Chicago, the only girl she'd ever met who was really interested in the things she was interested in, and how much talent Eleanor had, and how much business ability. J.W. told about how much she'd meant to him during the trying years with his second wife Gertrude in New York, and how people had misunderstood their beautiful friendship that had been always free from the sensual and the degrading.

“Really,” said Eveline, looking J.W. suddenly straight in the eye, “I'd always thought you and Eleanor were lovers.” J.W. blushed. For a second Eveline was afraid she'd shocked him. He wrinkled up the skin around his eyes in a comical boyish way. “No, honestly not . . . I've been too busy working all my life ever to develop that side of my nature . . . People think differently about those things than they did.” Eveline nodded. The deep flush on his face seemed to have set her cheeks on fire. “And now,” J.W. went on, shaking his head gloomily, “I'm in my forties and it's too late.”

“Why too late?”

Eveline sat looking at him with her lips a little apart, her cheeks blazing. “Maybe it's taken the war to teach us how to live,” he said. “We've been too much interested in money and material things, it's taken the French to show us how to live. Where back home in the States could you find a beautiful atmosphere like this?” J.W. waved his arm to include in a sweeping gesture the sea, the tables crowded with women dressed in bright colors and men in their best uniforms, the bright glint of blue light on glasses and cutlery. The waiter mistook his gesture and slyly substituted a full bottle for the empty bottle in the champagnepail.

“By golly, Eveline, you've been so charming, you've made me forget the time and going back to Paris and everything. This is the sort of thing I've missed all my life until I met you and Eleanor . . . of course with Eleanor it's been all on the higher plane . . . Let's take a drink to Eleanor . . . beautiful talented Eleanor . . . Eveline, women have been a great inspiration to me all my life, lovely charming delicate women. Many of my best ideas have come from women, not directly, you understand, but through the mental stimulation . . . People don't understand me, Eveline, some of the newspaper boys particularly have written some very hard things about me . . . why, I'm an old newspaper man myself . . . Eveline, permit me to say that you look so charming and understanding . . . this illness of my wife . . . poor Gertrude . . . I'm afraid she'll never be herself again. . . . You see, it's put me in a most disagreeable position, if some member of her family is appointed guardian it might mean that the considerable sum of money invested by the Staple family in my business, would be withdrawn . . . that would leave me with very grave embarrassments . . . then I've had to abandon my Mexican affairs . . . what the oil business down there needs is just somebody to explain its point of view to the Mexican public, to the American public, my aim was to get the big interests to take the public in . . .” Eveline filled his glass. Her head was swimming a little, but she felt wonderful. She wanted to lean over and kiss him, to make him feel how she admired and understood him. He went on talking with the glass in his hand, almost as if he were speaking to a whole rotary club. “. . . to take the public into its confidence . . . I had to throw overboard all that . . . when I felt the government of my country needed me. My position is very difficult in Paris, Eveline. . . . They've got the President surrounded by a Chinese wall . . . I fear that his advisers don't realize the importance of publicity, of taking the public into their confidence at every move. This is a great historical moment, America stands at the parting of the ways . . . without us the war would have ended in a German victory or a negotiated peace . . . And now our very allies are trying to monopolize the natural resources of the world behind our backs. . . . You remember what Rasmussen said . . . well, he's quite right. The President is surrounded by sinister intrigues. Why, even the presidents of the great corporations don't realize that now is the time to spend money, to spend it like water. I could have the French press in my pocket in a week with the proper resources, even in England I have a hunch that something could be done if it was handled the right way. And then the people are fully behind us everywhere, they are sick of autocracy and secret diplomacy, they are ready to greet American democracy, American democratic business methods with open arms. The only way for you to secure the benefits of the peace to the world is for us to dominate it. Mr. Wilson doesn't realize the power of a modern campaign of scientific publicity . . . Why, for three weeks I've been trying to get an interview with him, and back in Washington I was calling him Woodrow, almost . . . It was at his personal request that I dropped everything in New York at great personal sacrifice, brought over a large part of my office staff . . . and now . . . but Eveline, my dear girl, I'm afraid I'm talking you to death.”

Eveline leaned over and patted his hand that lay on the edge of the table. Her eyes were shining, “Oh, it's wonderful,” she said. “Isn't this fun, J.W.?”

“Ah, Eveline, I wish I was free to fall in love with you.”

“Aren't we pretty free, J.W.? and it's wartime . . . I think all the conventional rubbish about marriage and everything is just too tiresome, don't you?”

“Ah, Eveline, if I was only free . . . let's go out and take a little air . . . Why, we've been here all afternoon.”

Eveline insisted on paying for the lunch although it took all the money she had on her. They both staggered a little as they left the restaurant, Eveline felt giddy and leaned against J.W.'s shoulder. He kept patting her hand and saying, “There, there, we'll take a little ride.”

Towards sunset they were riding around the end of the bay into Cannes. “Well, well, we must pull ourselves together,” said J.W. “You don't want to stay down here all alone, do you, little girl? Suppose you drive back to Paris with me, we'll stop off in some picturesque villages, make a trip of it. Too likely to meet people we know around here. I'll send back the staff car and hire a French car . . . take no chances.” “All right, I think Nice is just too tiresome anyway.”

J.W. called to the chauffeur to go back to Nice. He dropped her at her hotel and saying he'd call for her at ninethirty in the morning and that she must get a good night's sleep. She felt terribly let down after he'd gone; had a cup of tea that was cold and tasted of soap sent to her room; and went to bed. She lay in bed thinking that she was acting like a nasty little bitch; but it was too late to go back now. She couldn't sleep, her whole body felt jangled and twitching. This way she'd look like a wreck tomorrow, she got up and rustled around in her bag until she found some aspirin. She took a lot of the aspirin and got back in bed again and lay perfectly still but she kept seeing faces that would grow clear out of the blur of a halfdream and then fade again, and her ears buzzed with long cadences of senseless talk. Sometimes it was Jerry Burnham's face that would bud out of the mists changing slowly into Mr. Rasmussen's or Edgar Robbins' or Paul Johnson's or Freddy Seargeant's. She got up and walked shivering up and down the room for a long time. Then she got into bed again and fell asleep and didn't wake up until the chambermaid knocked on the door saying that a gentleman was waiting for her.

When she got down J.W. was pacing up and down in the sun outside the hotel door. A long lowslung Italian car was standing under the palms beside the geranium bed. They had coffee together without saying much at a little iron table outside the hotel. J.W. said he'd had a miserable room in a hotel where the service was poor.

As soon as Eveline got her bag down they started off at sixty miles an hour. The chauffeur drove like a fiend through a howling north wind that increased as they went down the coast. They were in Marseilles stiff and dustcaked in time for a late lunch at a fish restaurant on the edge of the old harbor. Eveline's head was whirling again, with speed and lashing wind and dust and vines and olivetrees and grey rock mountains whirling past and now and then a piece of slateblue sea cut out with a jigsaw.

“After all, J.W., the war was terrible,” said Eveline. “But it's a great time to be alive. Things are happening at last.” J.W. muttered something about a surge of idealism between his teeth and went on eating his bouillabaisse. He didn't seem to be very talkative today. “Now at home,” he said, “they wouldn't have left all the bones in the fish this way.” “Well, what do you think is going to happen about the oil situation?” Eveline started again. “Blamed if I know,” said J.W. “We'd better be starting if we're going to make that place before nightfall.”