U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [309]
the Marne in striped trunks, with a young Texas boy with pink cheeks who wanted to . . . like a string bean . . . with a twitching adamsapple . . .
He woke up with a nightmarish feeling that somebody was choking him. The train had stopped. It was stifling in the compartment. The blue shade was drawn down on the lamp overhead. He stepped over everybody's legs and went out in the passage and opened a window. Cold moun-tain air cut into his nostrils. The hil s were snowy in the moonlight. Beside the track a French sentry was sleepily leaning on his rifle. Dick yawned desperately.
The Near East Relief girl was standing beside him,
looking at him smiling. "Where are we gettin' to, Captain Savage? . . . Is this Italy yet?""I guess it's the Swiss border . . . we'l have a long wait, I guess . . . they take forever at these borders."
"Oh Jimminy," said the girl, jumping up and down,
"it's the first time I ever crossed a border." Dick laughed and settled back into his seat again. The train pul ed into a barny lonelylooking, station, very dimly lit, and the civilian passengers started piling out with their baggage. Dick sent his papers by the sergeant to the mili-tary inspection and settled back to sleep again. He slept soundly and didn't wake up until the Mont
Cenis. Then it was the Italian frontier. Again cold air, snowy mountains, everybody getting out into an empty barn of a station.
Sleepysentimental y remembering the last time he'd
-364-gone into Italy on the Fiat car with Sheldrake, he walked shivering to the station bar and drank a bottle of mineral water and a glass of wine. He took a couple of bottles of mineral water and a fiasco of chianti back to the compart-ment, and offered Mr. Barrow and the girl drinks when they came back from the customs and the police looking very cross and sleepy. The girl said she couldn't drink wine because she'd signed a pledge not to drink or smoke when she joined the N.E.R., but she drank some mineral water and complained that it tickled her nose. Then they al huddled back into their corners to try to sleep some more. By the time they pul ed into the Termi station in Rome they were al cal ing each other by their first names. The Texas girl's name was Anne Elizabeth. She and Dick had spent the day standing in the corridor looking out at the saffronroofed towns and the peasants' houses each with a blue smear on the stucco behind the grapevine over the door, and the olives and the twisted shapes of the vines in their redterraced fields; the pale hil y Italian landscape where the pointed cypresses stood up so dark they were like gashes in a canvas. She'd told him al about trying to get overseas al through the war and how her brother had been kil ed learning to fly at San Antonio, and how nice Mr. Barrow had been on the boat and in Paris but that he would try to make love to her and acted so sil y, which was very inconvenient; Dick said wel maybe it wasn't so sil y. He could see that Anne Elizabeth felt fine about travel ing to Rome with a real army officer who'd been to the front and could talk Italian and everything. From the station he had to rush to the embassy with his despatch cases, but he had time to arrange to cal up Miss Trent at the Near East Relief. Barrow too shook hands with him warmly and said he hoped they'd see
something of each other; he was anxious to establish con-tacts with people who real y knew what it was al about. The only thing Dick thought of that night was to get
-365-through and get to bed. Next morning he cal ed up Ed Schuyler at the Red Cross. They ate a big winey lunch together at an expensive restaurant near the Pincio gardens. Ed had been leading the life of Riley; he had an apart-ment on the Spanish Stairs and took a lot of trips. He'd gotten fat. But now he was in trouble. The husband of an Italian woman he'd been running round with was threaten-ing to chal enge him to a duel and he was afraid there'd be a row and he'd lose his job with the Red Cross. "The war was al right but it's the peace that real y gets you," he said. Anyway he was sick of Italy and the Red Cross and wanted to go home. The only thing was that they were going to have a revolution in Italy and he'd like to stay and see it. "Wel , Dick, for a member of the grenadine guards you seem to have done pretty wel for yourself."