1919 (15 page)

He didn't live to see the big circus of the Peace of Versailles or the purplish normalcy of the Ohio Gang.

Six weeks after the armistice he died planning an essay on the foundations of future radicalism in America.

 

If any man has a ghost

Bourne has a ghost,

a tiny twisted unscared ghost in a black cloak

hopping along the grimy old brick and brownstone streets still left in downtown New York,

crying out in a shrill soundless giggle:

War is the health of the state.

If you dont like your Uncle Sammy

If you dont like the red white and blue

 

smiles of patriotic Essex County will be concentrated and recorded at Branch Brook Park, Newark, N.J., tomorrow afternoon. Bands will play while a vast throng marches happily to the rhythm of wartime anthems and airs. Mothers of the nation's sons will be there; wives, many of them carrying babes born after their fathers sailed for the front, will occupy a place in Essex County's graphic pageant; relatives and friends of the heroes who are carrying on the message of Freedom will file past a battery of cameras and all will smile a message recording installment no. 7 of Smiles Across the Sea. The hour for these folks to start smiling is 2:30.

 

MOBS PLUNDER CITIES

 

NEWSPAPERMAN LEADS THROUGH BARRAGE

 

it was a pitiful sight at dusk every evening when the whole population evacuated the city, going to sleep in the fields until daylight. Old women and tiny children, cripples drawn in carts or wheeled in barrows men carrying chairs bring those too feeble and old to walk

 

JERSEY TROOPS TAKE WOMAN GUNNERS

 

the trouble had its origin with the demand of the marine workers for an eight hour day

 

If you dont like the stars in Old Glory

Then go back to your land across the sea

To the land from which you came

Whatever be its name

 

G.O.P. LEADER ACCUSED OF DRAFT FRAUDS

 

If you dont like the red white and blue

Then dont act like the cur in the story

Dont bite the hand that's feeding you

Little Eveline and Arget and Lade and Gogo lived on the top floor of a yellowbrick house on the North Shore Drive. Arget and Lade were little Eveline's sisters. Gogo was her little brother littler than Eveline; he had such nice blue eyes but Miss Mathilda had horrid blue eyes. On the floor below was Dr. Hutchins' study where Yourfather mustn't be disturbed, and Dearmother's room where she stayed all morning painting dressed in a lavender smock. On the groundfloor was the drawingroom and the diningroom, where parishioners came and little children must be seen and not heard, and at dinnertime you could smell good things to eat and hear knives and forks and tinkly companyvoices and Yourfather's booming scary voice and when Yourfather's voice was going all the companyvoices were quiet. Yourfather was Dr. Hutchins but Our Father art in heaven. When Yourfather stood beside the bed at night to see that little girls said their prayers Eveline would close her eyes tightscared. It was only when she'd hopped into bed and snuggled way down so that the covers were right across her nose that she felt cosy.

George was a dear although Adelaide and Margaret teased him and said he was their Assistant like Mr. Blessington was Father's assistant. George always caught things first and then they all had them. It was lovely when they had the measles and the mumps all at once. They stayed in bed and had hyacinths in pots and guinea pigs and Dearmother used to come up and read the Jungle Book and do funny pictures and Yourfather would come up and make funny birdbeaks that opened out of paper and tell stories he made up right out of his head and Dearmother said he had said prayers for you children in church and that made them feel fine and grownup.

When they were all up and playing in the nursery George caught something again and had monia on account of getting cold on his chest and Yourfather was every solemn and said not to grieve if God called little brother away. But God brought little George back to them only he was delicate after that and had to wear glasses, and when Dearmother let Eveline help bathe him because Miss Mathilda was having the measles too Eveline noticed he had something funny there where she didn't have anything. She asked Dearmother if it was a mump, but Dearmother scolded her and said she was a vulgar little girl to have looked. “Hush, child, don't ask questions.” Eveline got red all over and cried and Adelaide and Margaret wouldn't speak to her for days on account of her being a vulgar little girl.

Summers they all went to Maine with Miss Mathilda in a drawingroom. George and Eveline slept in the upper and Adelaide and Margaret slept in the lower; Miss Mathilda was trainsick and didn't close her eyes all night on the sofa opposite. The train went rumblebump chug chug and the trees and houses ran by, the front ones fast and those way off very slow and at night the engine wailed and the children couldn't make out why the strong nice tall conductor was so nice to Miss Mathilda who was so hateful and trainsick. Maine smelt all woodsy and mother and father were there to meet them and they all put on khaki jumpers and went camping with Father and the guides. It was Eveline who learned to swim quicker than anybody.

Going back to Chicago it would be autumn and Mother loved the lovely autumn foliage that made Miss Mathilda feel so traurig on account of winter coming on, and the frost on the grass beyond the shadows of the cars out of the trainwindow in the morning. At home Sam would be scrubbing the enamel paint and Phoebe and Miss Mathilda would be putting up curtains and the nursery would smell traurig of mothballs. One fall Father started to read aloud a little of the
Ideals of the King
every night after they were all tucked into bed. All that winter Adelaide and Margaret were King Arthur and Queen Whenever. Eveline wanted to be Elaine the Fair, but Adelaide said she couldn't because her hair was mousy and she had a face like a pie, so she had to be the Maiden Evelina.

The Maiden Evelina used to go into Miss Mathilda's room when she was out and look at herself for a long time in the lookingglass. Her hair wasn't mousy, it was quite fair if only they would let her have it curly instead of in pigtails and even if her eyes weren't blue like George's they had little green specks in them. Her forehead was noble. Miss Mathilda caught her staring like that into the mirror one day.

“Look at yourself too much and you'll find you're looking at the devil,” said Miss Mathilda in her nasty stiff German way.

When Eveline was twelve years old they moved to a bigger house over on Drexel Boulevard. Adelaide and Margaret went east to boardingschool at New Hope and Mother had to go spend the winter with friends at Santa Fé on account of her health. It was fun eating breakfast every morning with just Dad and George and Miss Mathilda, who was getting elderly and paid more attention to running the house and to reading Sir Gilbert Parker's novels than to the children. Eveline didn't like school but she liked having Dad help her with her Latin evenings and do algebra equations for her. She thought he was wonderful when he preached so kind and good from the pulpit and was proud of being the minister's daughter at Sunday afternoon bibleclass. She thought a great deal about the fatherhood of God and the woman of Samaria and Joseph of Arimathea and Baldur the beautiful and the Brotherhood of Man and the apostle that Jesus loved. That Christmas she took around a lot of baskets to poor people's houses. Poverty was dreadful and the poor were so scary and why didn't God do something about the problems and evils of Chicago, and the conditions, she'd ask her father. He'd smile and say she was too young to worry about those things yet. She called him Dad now and was his Pal.

On her birthday Mother sent her a beautiful illustrated book of the Blessed Damosel by Dante Gabriel Rossetti with colored illustrations from his paintings and those of Burne Jones. She used to say the name Dante Gabriel Rossetti over and over to herself like traurig she loved it so. She started painting and writing little verses about choirs of angels and little poor children at Christmastime. The first picture she did in oils was a portrait of Elaine, the Fair, that she sent her mother for Christmas. Everybody said it showed great talent. When friends of Dad's came to dinner they'd say when they were introduced to her, “So this is the talented one, is it?”

Adelaide and Margaret were pretty scornful about all that when they came home from school. They said the house looked dowdy and nothing had any style to it in Chicago, and wasn't it awful being ministers' daughters, but of course Dad wasn't like an ordinary minister in a white tie, he was a Unitarian and very broad and more like a prominent author or scientist. George was getting to be a sulky little boy with dirty fingernails who never could keep his necktie straight and was always breaking his glasses. Eveline was working on a portrait of him the way he had been when he was little with blue eyes and gamboge curls. She used to cry over her paints she loved him so and little poor children she saw on the street. Everybody said she ought to study art.

It was Adelaide who first met Sally Emerson. One Easter they were going to put on
Aglavaine and Selizette
at the church for charity. Miss Rodgers the French teacher at Dr. Grant's school was going to coach them and said that they ought to ask Mrs. Philip Payne Emerson, who had seen the original production abroad, about the scenery and costumes; and that besides her interest would be invaluable to make it
go;
everything that Sally Emerson was interested in
went.
The Hutchins girls were all excited when Dr. Hutchins called up Mrs. Emerson on the telephone and asked if Adelaide might come over some morning and ask her advice about some amateur theatricals. They'd already sat down to lunch when Adelaide came back, her eyes shining. She wouldn't say much except that Mrs. Philip Payne Emerson knew Matterlink intimately and that she was coming to tea, but kept declaring, “She's the most stylish woman I ever met.”

Aglavaine and Selizette
didn't turn out quite as the Hutchins girls and Miss Rodgers had hoped, though everybody said the scenery and costumes Eveline designed showed real ability, but the week after the performance, Eveline got a message one morning that Mrs. Emerson had asked her to lunch that day and only her. Adelaide and Margaret were so mad they wouldn't speak to her. She felt pretty shaky when she set off into the icybright dusty day. At the last minute Adelaide had lent her a hat and Margaret her fur neckpiece, so that she wouldn't disgrace them they said. By the time she got to the Emersons' house she was chilled to the bone. She was ushered into a little dressing room with all kinds of brushes and combs and silver jars with powder and even rouge and toiletwaters in purple, green and pink bottles and left to take off her things. When she saw herself in the big mirror she almost screamed she looked so young and piefaced and her dress was so horrid. The only thing that looked any good was the foxfur so she kept that on when she went into the big upstairs lounge with its deep grey carpet soft underfoot and the sunlight pouring in through French windows onto bright colors and the black polished grandpiano. There were big bowls of freezias on every table and yellow and pink French and German books of reproductions of paintings. Even the sootbitten blocks of Chicago houses flattened under the wind and the zero sunlight looked faintly exciting and foreign through the big pattern of the yellow lace curtains. In the rich smell of the freezias there was a little expensive whisp of cigarettesmoke.

Sally Emerson came in smoking a cigarette and said, “Excuse me, my dear,” some wretched woman had had her impaled on the telephone like a butterfly on a pin for the last halfhour. They ate lunch at a little table the elderly colored man brought in all set and Eveline was treated just like a grownup woman and a glass of port poured out for her. She only dared take a sip but it was delicious and the lunch was all crispy and creamy with cheese grated on things and she would have eaten a lot if she hadn't felt so shy. Sally Emerson talked about how clever Eveline's costumes had been for the show and said she must keep up her drawing and talked about how there were as many people with artistic ability in Chicago as anywhere in the world and what was lacking was the milieu, the atmosphere my dear, and that the social leaders were all vicious numbskulls and that it was up to the few people who cared about art to stick together and create the rich beautiful milieu they needed, and about Paris, and about Mary Garden, and Debussy. Eveline went home with her head reeling with names and pictures, little snatches out of operas and in her nose the tickling smell of the freezias mixed with toasted cheese and cigarettesmoke. When she got home everything looked so cluttered and bare and ugly she burst out crying and wouldn't answer any of her sisters' questions; that made them madder than ever.

That June after school was over, they all went out to Santa Fé to see her mother. She was awfully depressed out at Santa Fé, the sun was so hot and the eroded hills were so dry and dusty and Mother had gotten so washedout looking and was reading theosophy and talking about God and the beauty of soul of the Indians and Mexicans in a way that made the children uncomfortable. Eveline read a great many books that summer and hated going out. She read Scott and Thackeray and W. J. Locke and Dumas and when she found an old copy of
Trilby
in the house she read it three times running. That started her seeing things in Du Maurier illustrations instead of in knights and ladies.