U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [350]
two weeks. After the newspapermen had gone off to make their cable deadline, J.W. yawned and asked Dick to make his excuses to Eleanor, that he was real y too tired to get down to her place tonight. When Dick got out on the streets again there was stil a little of the violet of dusk in the sky. He hailed a taxi; goddam it, he could take a taxi whenever he wanted to now.
It was pretty stiff at Eleanor's, people were sitting around in the parlor and in one bedroom that had been fitted up as a sort of boudoir with a tal mirror draped with lace, talking uncomfortably and intermittently. The bridegroom looked as if he had ants under his col ar. Eveline and Eleanor were standing in the window talking with a gauntfaced man who turned out to be Don Stevens who'd been arrested in Germany by the Army of Occupa-tion and for whom Eveline had made everybody scamper around so. "And any time I get in a jam," he was saying,
"I always find a little Jew who helps get me out. . . this time he was a tailor."
"Wel , Eveline isn't a little Jew or a tailor," said Eleanor icily, "but I can tel you she did a great deal." Stevens walked across the room to Dick and asked him what sort of a man Moorehouse was. Dick found himself blushing. He wished Stevens wouldn't talk so loud.
"Why, he's a man of extraordinary ability," he stammered.
-464-"I thought he was a stuffed shirt. . . I didn't see what those damn fools of the bourgeois press thought they were getting for a story. . . I was there for the D.H."
"Yes, I saw you," said Dick.
"I thought maybe, from what Steve Warner said, you were the sort of guy who'd be boring from within."
"Boring in another sense, I guess, boring and bored." Stevens stood over him glaring at him as if he was going to hit him. "Wel , we'l know soon enough which side a man's on. We'l al have to show our faces, as they say in Russia, before long." Eleanor interrupted with a fresh smoking bottle of
champagne. Stevens went back to talk to Eveline in the window. "Why, I'd as soon have a Baptist preacher in the house," Eleanor tittered.
"Damn it, I hate people who get their pleasure by making other people feel uncomfortable," grumbled Dick under his breath. Eleanor smiled a quick V-shaped smile and gave his arm a pat with her thin white hand, that was tipped by long nails pointed and pink and marked with halfmoons. "So do I, Dick, so do I." When Dick whispered that he had a headache and
thought he'd go home and turn in, she gripped his arm and pul ed him into the hal . "Don't you dare go home and leave me alone with this frost." Dick made a face and fol owed her back into the salon. She poured him a glass of champagne from the bottle she stil held in her hand:
"Cheer up Eveline," she whispered squeakily. "She's about ready to go down for the third time."
Dick stood around for hours talking to Mrs. Johnson about books, plays, the opera. Neither of them seemed to be able to keep track of what the other was saying. Eveline couldn't keep her eyes off her husband. He had a young cubbish look Dick couldn't help liking; he was standing by the sideboard getting tight with Stevens, who kept making ugly audible remarks about parasites and the
-465-lahdedah boys of the bourgeoisie. It went on for a long time. Paul Johnson got sick and Dick had to help him find the bathroom. When he came back into the salon he almost had a fight with Stevens, who, after an argument about the Peace Conference, suddenly hauled off with his fists clenched and cal ed him a goddam fairy. The Johnsons hustled Stevens out. Eleanor came up to Dick and put her arm around his neck and said he'd been magnificent. Paul Johnson came back upstairs after they'd gone to get the parakeets. He looked pale as a sheet. One of the birds had died and was lying on its back stiff with his claws in the air at the bottom of the cage.
At about three o'clock Dick rode home to his hotel in a taxi.
NEWSREEL XLIII
the placards borne by the radicals were taken away from them, their clothing torn and eyes blackened before the service and ex-service men had finished with them 34 Die After Drinking Wood Alcohol Trains in France May Soon Stop