U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [122]
to talk about his boyhood in Wilmington and even
hummed a little of a song he'd written in the old days. Eveline was thril ed. Then he began to tel her about Pittsburgh and his ideas about capital and labor. For des-sert 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 real y 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.
"Real y," 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 al my life ever to develop that side of my nature . . . People think differently about those things than they did." Eveline nodded. The deep
-310-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 sub-stituted a ful bottle for the empty bottle in the cham-pagnepail.
"By gol y, 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 al my life until I met you and Eleanor . . . of course with Eleanor it's been al on the higher plane . . . Let's take a drink to Eleanor . . . beautiful talented Eleanor . . . Eveline, women have been a great inspiration to me al 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 news-paper 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 il ness of my wife . . . poor Gertrude . . . I'm afraid she'l 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
-311-make the customers dance and then using the place for a shooting gal ery. "The shooting gal ery, that's what they cal congress here," said Mac. Barrow said he was going to a meeting of the Union Nacional de Trabajadores that afternoon and would they mind going with him to inter-pret for him. It was Mac's day off so they said, "Al right." He said he'd been instructed to try to make con-tacts with stable labor elements in Mexico with the hope of joining them up with the Pan-American Federation of Labor. Gompers would come down himself if something could be lined up. He said he'd been a shipping clerk and a Pul man conductor and had been in the office of the Railroad Brotherhood, but now he was working for the A. F. of L. He wished American workers had more ideas about the art of life. He'd been at the Second International meetings at Amsterdam and felt the European workers understood the art of life. When Mac asked him why the hel the Second International hadn't done something to stop the World War, he said the time wasn't ripe yet and spoke about German atrocities.