U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [217]
Giovanni and Eveline listened holding their breath, Giovanni occasional y looking nervously around the room to see if any of the customers at the other tables looked like detectives. "God damn it, Giovanni, let's have an-other bottle of wine," Don would cry out in the middle of a long analysis of Kuhn, Loeb and Company's foreign holdings. Then suddenly he'd turn to Eveline fil ing up her glass, "Where have you been al these years?
I've so needed a lovely girl like you. Let's have a splendid time tonight, may be the last I've so needed a lovely girl like you. Let's have a splendid time tonight, may be the last good meal we ever get, we may be in jail or shot against a wal a month from now, isn't that so, Giovanni?"
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 ex-cept that he was so funny.
"But it real y 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 go to jail, or to get a job as a war correspondent and see the goddam mess. If
-131-you could rely on anybody to back you up it ud be another thing . . . Oh, hel , let's get out of here."
He charged the cheque, and asked Eveline to lend him half a dol ar 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 chil y 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 bour-geois 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 til 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 ful 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 fil ing 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 final y said he wouldn't decide what to do til he was cal ed 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
-132-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'l 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 goodbys of Margaret and Adelaide and Margaret's husband Bil 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 Aupr