U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [88]
sparkled frostily overhead and the searchlights were an-tennae of great insects moving through the milky dark-ness. At intervals came red snorting flares of the incen-diary bombs. Just once they caught sight of two tiny silver cigars overhead. They looked higher than the moon. Eveline found that Raoul's arm that had been around her waist had slipped up and that he had his hand over her breast. "C'est fou tu sais . . . c'est fou tu sais," he was saying in a singsong voice, he seemed to have forgot-ten his English. After that they talked French and Eveline thought she loved him terribly much. After the breloque had gone through the streets they walked home across dark silent Paris. At one corner a gendarme came up and asked Lemonnier for his papers. He read them through painful y in the faint blue glow of a corner light, while Eveline stood by breathless, feeling her heart pound. The
-223-gendarme handed back the papers, saluted, apologized profusely and walked off. Neither of them said anything about it, but Raoul seemed to be taking it for granted he was going to sleep with her at her apartment. They walked home briskly through the cold black streets, their foot-steps clacking sharply on the cobbles. She hung on his arm; there was something tight and electric and uncom-fortable in the way their hips occasional y touched as they walked.
Her house was one of the few in Paris that didn't have a concièrge. She unlocked the door and they climbed shiv-ering together up the cold stone stairs. She whispered to him to be quiet, because of her maid. "It is very boring," he whispered; his lips brushed warm against her ear. "I hope you won't think it's too boring."
While he was combing his hair at her dressingtable, taking little connoisseur's sniffs at her bottles of perfume, preening himself in the mirror without haste and embar-rassment, he said, " Charmante Eveline, would you like to be my wife? It could be arranged, don't you know. My uncle who is the head of the family is very fond of Ameri-cans. Of course it would be very boring, the contract and al that.""Oh, no, that wouldn't be my idea at al ," she whispered giggling and shivering from the bed. Raoul gave her a furious offended look, said good night very formal y and left.
When the trees, began to bud outside her window and the flowerwomen in the markets began to sel narcissuses and daffodils, the feeling that it was spring made her long months alone in Paris seem drearier than ever. Jerry Burnham had gone to Palestine; Raoul Lemonnier had
never come to see her again; whenever he was in town Major Appleton came around and paid her rather elab-orate attentions, but he was just too tiresome. Eliza Felton was driving an ambulance attached to a U. S. basehospital on the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne and would come
-224-around those Sundays when she was off duty and make Eveline's life miserable with her complaints that Eveline was not the free pagan soul she'd thought at first. She said that nobody loved her and that she was praying for the Bertha with her number on it that would end it al . It got so bad that Eveline wasn't able to stay in the house at al on Sunday and often spent the afternoon in her office reading Anatole France. Then Yvonne's crotchets were pretty trying; she tried to run Eveline's life with her tightlipped comments. When Don Stevens turned up for a leave, looking more haggard than ever in the grey uniform of the Quaker out-fit, it was a godsend, and Eveline decided maybe she'd been in love with him after al . She told Yvonne he was her cousin and that they'd been brought up like brother and sister and put him up in Eleanor's room. Don was in a tremendous state of excitement about the success of the Bolsheviki in Russia, ate enormously, drank al the wine in the house, and was ful of mysterious references to underground forces he was in touch with. He said al the armies were mutinous and that what had hap-pened at Caporetto would happen on the whole front, the German soldiers were ready for revolt too and that would be the beginning of the world revolution. He told her about the mutinies at Verdun, about long trainloads of soldiers he'd seen going up to an attack crying, "A bas la guerre," and shooting at the gendarmes as they went.