U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [400]
-207-of pats on the back as he went into the crowded room. There were some very pretty girls, and young men of dif-ferent shapes and sizes, cocktailglasses, trays of little things to eat on crackers, cigarettesmoke. Everybody was talking and screeching like a lot of lathes in a turningplant. At the back of the room Eveline, looking tal and pale and beautiful, sat on a marbletopped table beside a smal man with a long yel ow nose and pouches under his eyes. "Oh, Char-ley, how prosperous you look. . . . Meet Charles Edward Holden . . . Holdy, this is Charley Anderson; he's in flyingmachines. . . . Why, Charley, you look filthy rich."
"Not yet," said Charley. He was trying to keep from laughing. "Wel , what are you looking so pleased about?
Everybody is just too dreary about everything this after-noon."
"I'm not dreary," said Holden. "Now don't tel me I'm dreary."
"Of course, Holdy, you're never dreary but your re-marks tend towards murder and suicide." Everybody laughed a great deal. Charley found him-self pushed away from Eveline by people trying to listen to what Charles Edward Holden was saying. He found himself talking to a plain young woman in a shiny grey hat that had a big buckle set in it like a headlight. "Do tel me what you do," she said. "How do you mean?"
"Oh, I mean almost everybody here does something, writes or paints or something.""Me? No, I don't do any-thing like that . . . I'm in airplane motors.""A flyer, oh, my, how thril ing. . . . I always love to come to Eve-line's, you never can tel who you'l meet. . . . Why, last time I was here Houdini had just left. She's wonder-ful on celebrities. But I think it's hard on Paul, don't you? . . . Paul's such a sweet boy. She and Mr. Holden
. . . it's al so public. He writes about her al the time in his column. . . . Of course I'm very oldfashioned. Most people don't seem to think anything of it. . . . Of course
-208-it's grand to be honest. . . . Of course he's such a celeb-rity too. . . . I certainly think people ought to be honest about their sexlife, don't you? It avoids al those dreadful complexes and things. . . . But it's too bad about Paul, such a nice cleancut young fel ow.
. . ."
When the guests had thinned out a little a Frenchspeak-ing colored maid served a dinner of curry and rice with lots of little fixings. Mr. Holden and Eveline did al the talk-ing. It was al about people Charley hadn't ever heard of. He tried to break it up by tel ing about how he'd been taken for Charles Edward Holden in that saloon that time, but nobody listened, and he guessed it was just as wel anyway. They had just come to the salad when Holden got up and said, "My dear, my only morals con-sist in never being late to the theater, we must run." He and Eveline went out in a hurry leaving Charley and Paul to talk to a quarrelsome middleaged man and his wife that Charley had never been introduced to. It wasn't much use trying to talk to them because the man was too tight to listen to anything anybody said and the woman was set on some kind of a private row with him and couldn't be got off it. When they staggered out Charley and Paul were left alone. They went out to a movingpicture house for a while but the film was lousy so Charley went uptown glum and tumbled into bed.
Next day Charley went by early for Andy Merritt and sat with him in the big antisepticlooking diningroom at the Yale Club while he ate his breakfast. "Wil it be bumpy?" was the first thing he asked. "Weather report was fine yesterday.""What does Joe say?""He said for us to keep our goddam traps shut an' let the other guys do the talkin'."
Merritt was drinking his last cup of coffee in little sips.
"You know Joe's a little overcautious sometimes. . . . He wants to have a jerkwater plant to run himself and hand down to his grandchildren. Now that was al very wel in
-209-upstate New York in the old days . . . but now if a busi-ness isn't expanding it's on the shelf.""Oh, we're ex-pandin' al right," said Charley, getting to his feet to fol-low Merritt's broadshouldered tweed suit to the door of the diningroom. "If we weren't expandin', we wouldn't be at al ."