1919 (39 page)

After a few minutes she left him and walked home. She wouldn't let him come with her. As she passed the window where they'd been sitting she looked in; he was ordering another drink.

On the rue de Bussy the market was very jolly under the gaslights. It all smelt of fresh greens, and butter and cheese. She bought some rolls for breakfast and a few little cakes in case somebody came in to tea. It was cosy in her little pink and white salon with the fire of brickettes going in the grate. Eveline wrapped herself up in a steamerrug and lay down on the couch.

She was asleep when her bell jingled. It was Eleanor and J.W. come to inquire how she was. J.W. was free tonight and wanted them to come to the opera with him to see
Castor and Pollux.
Eveline said she was feeling terrible but she thought she'd go just the same. She put on some tea for them and ran into her bedroom to dress. She felt so happy she couldn't help humming as she sat at her dressingtable looking at herself in the glass. Her skin looked very white and her face had a quiet mysterious look she liked. She carefully put on very little lipstick and drew her hair back to a knot behind; her hair worried her, it wasn't curly and didn't have any particular color: for a moment she thought she wouldn't go. Then Eleanor came in with a cup of tea in her hand telling her to hurry because they had to go down and wait while she dressed herself and that the opera started early. Eveline didn't have any real evening wrap so she had to wear an old rabbitfur coat over her eveningdress. At Eleanor's they found Robbins waiting; he wore a tuxedo that looked a little the worse for wear. J.W. was in the uniform of a Red Cross major. Eveline thought he must have been exercising, because his jowl didn't curve out from the tight high collar as much as it had formerly.

They ate in a hurry at Poccardi's and drank a lot of badly made Martinis. Robbins and J.W. were in fine feather, and kept them laughing all the time. Eveline understood now why they worked together so well. At the opera, where they arrived late, it was wonderful, glittering with chandeliers and uniforms. Miss Williams, J.W.'s secretary, was already in the box. Eveline thought how nice he must be to work for, and for a moment bitterly envied Miss Williams, even to her peroxide hair and her brisk chilly manner of talking. Miss Williams leaned back and said they'd missed it, that President and Mrs. Wilson had just come in and had been received with a great ovation, and Marshal Foch was there and she thought President Poincaré.

Between the acts they worked their way as best they could into the crowded lobby. Eveline found herself walking up and down with Robbins, every now and then she'd catch sight of Eleanor with J.W. and feel a little envious.

“They put on a better show out here than they do on the stage,” said Robbins.

“Don't you like the production. . . . I think it's a magnificent production.”

“Well, I suppose looked at from the professional point of view. . . .”

Eveline was watching Eleanor, she was being introduced to a French general in red pants; she looked handsome this evening in her hard chilly way. Robbins tried to pilot them in through the crowd to the little bar, but they gave it up, there were too many people ahead of them. Robbins started all at once to talk about Baku and the oil business. “It's funny as a crutch,” he kept saying, “while we sit here wrangling under schoolmaster Wilson, John Bull's putting his hands on all the world's future supplies of oil . . . just to keep it from bolos. They've got Persia and the messpot and now I'll be damned if they don't want Baku.” Eveline was bored and thinking to herself that Robbins had been in his cups too much again, when the bell rang.

When they got back to their box a leanfaced man who wasn't in evening clothes was sitting in the back talking to J.W. in a low voice. Eleanor leaned over to Eveline and whispered in her ear, “That was General Gouraud.” The lights went out; Eveline found she was forgetting herself in the deep stateliness of the music. At the next intermission she leaned over to J.W. and asked him how he liked it. “Magnificent,” he said, and she saw to her surprise that he had tears in his eyes. She found herself talking about the music with J.W. and the man without a dress suit, whose name was Rasmussen.

It was hot and crowded in the tall overdecorated lobby. Mr. Rasmussen managed to get a window open and they went out on the balcony that opened on the serried lights that dimmed down the avenue into a reddish glow of fog.

“That's the time I'd liked to have lived,” said J.W. dreamily. “The court of the sun king?” asked Mr. Rasmussen. “No, it must have been too chilly in the winter months and I bet the plumbing was terrible.” “Ah, it was a glorious time,” said J.W. as if he hadn't heard. Then he turned to Eveline, “You're sure you're not catching cold . . . you ought to have a wrap, you know.”

“But as I was saying, Moorehouse,” said Rasmussen in a different tone of voice, “I have positive information that they can't hold Baku without heavy reinforcements and there's no one they can get them from except from us.” The bell rang again and they hurried to their box.

After the opera they went to the Café de la Paix to drink a glass of champagne, except for Robbins who went off to take Miss Williams back to her hotel. Eveline and Eleanor sat on the cushioned bench on either side of J.W. and Mr. Rasmussen sat on a chair opposite them. He did most of the talking, taking nervous gulps of champagne between sentences or else running his fingers through his spiky black hair. He was an engineer with Standard Oil. He kept talking about Baku and Mohommarah and Mosul, how the Anglo-Persian and the Royal Dutch were getting ahead of the U.S. in the Near East and trying to foist off Armenia on us for a mandate, which the Turks had pillaged to the last blade of grass, leaving nothing but a lot of starving people to feed. “We'll probably have to feed 'em anyway,” said J.W. “But my gosh, man, something can be done about it, even if the president has so far forgotten American interests to let himself be bulldozed by the British in everything, public opinion can be aroused. We stand to lose our primacy in world oil production.” “Oh, well, the matter of mandates isn't settled yet.” “What's going to happen is that the British are going to present a fait accompli to the Conference . . . findings keepings . . . why it would be better for us for the French to have Baku.” “How about the Russians?” asked Eveline. “According to selfdetermination the Russians have no right to it. The population is mostly Turkish and Armenian,” said Rasmussen. “But, by gorry, I'd rather have the reds have it than the British, of course I don't suppose they'll last long.”

“No, I have reliable information that Lenine and Trotsky have split and the monarchy will be restored in Russia inside of three months.” When they finished the first bottle of champagne, Mr. Rasmussen ordered another. By the time the café closed Eveline's ears were ringing. “Let's make a night of it,” Mr. Rasmussen was saying.

They went in a taxicab up to Montmarte to L'Abbaye where there was dancing and singing and uniforms everywhere and everything was hung with the flags of the Allies. J.W. asked Eveline to dance with him first and Eleanor looked a little sour when she had to go off in the arms of Mr. Rasmussen who danced very badly indeed. Eveline and J.W. talked about the music of Rameau and J.W. said again that he would have liked to have lived in the times of the court at Versailles. But Eveline said what could be more exciting than to be in Paris right now with all the map of Europe being remade right under their noses, and J.W. said perhaps she was right. They agreed that the orchestra was too bad to dance to.

Next dance Eveline danced with Mr. Rasmussen who told her how handsome she was and said he needed a good woman in his life; that he'd spent all his life out in the bush grubbing around for gold or testing specimens of shale and that he was sick of it, and if Wilson now was going to let the British bulldoze him into giving them the world's future supply of oil when we'd won the war for them, he was through. “But can't you do something about it, can't you put your ideas before the public, Mr. Rasmussen?” said Eveline, leaning a little against him; Eveline had a crazy champagneglass spinning in her head.

“That's Moorehouse's job not mine, and there isn't any public since the war. The public'll damn well do what it's told, and besides like God Almighty it's far away . . . what we've got to do is make a few key men understand the situation. Moorehouse is the key to the key men.” “And who's the key to Moorehouse?” asked Eveline recklessly. The music had stopped. “Wish to heaven I knew,” said Rasmussen soberly in a low voice. “You're not, are you?” Eveline shook her head with a tightlipped smile like Eleanor's.

When they'd eaten onion soup and some cold meat J.W. said, “Let's go up to the top of the hill and make Freddy play us some songs.” “I thought you didn't like it up there,” said Eleanor. “I don't, my dear, said J.W., “but I like those old French songs.” Eleanor looked cross and sleepy. Eveline wished she and Mr. Rasmussen would go home; she felt if she could only talk to J.W. alone, he'd be so interesting.

Freddy's was almost empty; it was chilly in there. They didn't have any champagne and nobody drank the liqueurs they ordered. Mr. Rasmussen said Freddy looked like an old prospector he'd known out in the Sangre de Cristo mountains and began to tell a long story about Death Valley that nobody listened to. They were all chilly and sleepy and silent, going back across Paris in the old mouldysmelling twocylinder taxi. J.W. wanted a cup of coffee, but there didn't seem to be anywhere open where he could get it.

Next day Mr. Rasmussen called Eveline up at her office to ask her to eat lunch with him and she was hard put to it to find an excuse not to go. After that Mr. Rasmussen seemed to be everywhere she went, sending her flowers and theatre tickets, coming around with automobiles to take her riding, sending her little blue pneumatiques full of tender messages. Eleanor teased her about her new Romeo.

Then Paul Johnson turned up in Paris, having gotten himself into the Sorbonne detachment, and used to come around to her place on the rue de Bussy in the late afternoons and sit watching her silently and lugubriously. He and Mr. Rasmussen would sit there talking about wheat and the stockyards, while Eveline dressed to go out with somebody else, usually Eleanor and J.W. Eveline could see that J.W. always liked to have her along as well as Eleanor when they went out in the evenings; it was just that welldressed American girls were rare in Paris at the time, she told herself, and that J.W. liked to be seen with them and to have them along when he took important people out to dinner. She and Eleanor treated each other with a stiff nervous sarcasm now, except occasionally when they were alone together, they talked like in the old days, laughing at people and happenings together. Eleanor would never let a chance pass to poke fun at her Romeos.

Her brother George turned up at the office one day with a captain's two silver bars on his shoulders. His whipcord uniform fitted like a glove, his puttees shone and he wore spurs. He'd been in the intelligence service attached to the British and had just come down from Germany where he'd been an interpreter on General McAndrews' staff. He was going to Cambridge for the spring term and called everybody blighters or rotters and said the food at the restaurant where Eveline took him for lunch was simply ripping. After he'd left her, saying her ideas were not cricket, she burst out crying. When she was leaving the office that afternoon, thinking gloomily about how George had grown up to be a horrid little prig of a brasshat, she met Mr. Rasmussen under the arcades of the rue de Rivoli; he was carrying a mechanical canarybird. It was a stuffed canary and you wound it up underneath the cage. Then it fluttered its wings and sang. He made her stop on the corner while he made it sing. “I'm going to send that back home to the kids,” he said. “My wife and I are separated but I'm fond of the kids; they live in Pasadena . . . I've had a very unhappy life.” Then he invited Eveline to step into the Ritz bar and have a cocktail with him. Robbins was there with a redheaded newspaper woman from San Francisco. They sat at a wicker table together and drank Alexanders. The bar was crowded. “What's the use of a league of nations if it's to be dominated by Great Britain and her colonies?” said Mr. Rasmussen sourly. “But don't you think any kind of a league's better than nothing?” said Eveline. “It's not the name you give things, it's who's getting theirs underneath that counts,” said Robbins.

“That's a very cynical remark,” said the California woman. “This isn't any time to be cynical.”

“This is a time,” said Robbins, “when if we weren't cynical we'd shoot ourselves.”

 

In March Eveline's two week leave came around. Eleanor was going to make a trip to Rome to help wind up the affairs of the office there, so they decided they'd go down on the train together and spend a few days in Nice. They needed to get the damp cold of Paris out of their bones. Eveline felt as excited as a child the afternoon when they were all packed and ready to go and had bought wagon lit reservations and gotten their transport orders signed.

Mr. Rasmussen insisted on seeing her off and ordered up a big dinner in the restaurant at the Gare de Lyon that Eveline was too excited to eat, what with the smell of the coalsmoke and the thought of waking up where it would be sunny and warm. Paul Johnson appeared when they were about half through, saying he'd come to help them with their bags. He'd lost one of the buttons off his uniform and he looked gloomy and mussed up. He said he wouldn't eat anything but nervously drank down several glasses of wine. Both he and Mr. Rasmussen looked like thunderclouds when Jerry Burnham appeared drunk as a lord carrying a large bouquet of roses. “Won't that be taking coals to Newcastle, Jerry?” said Eveline. “You don't know Nice . . . you'll probably have skating down there . . . beautiful figure eights on the ice.” “Jerry,” said Eleanor in her chilly little voice, “you're thinking of St. Moritz.” “You'll be thinking of it too,” said Jerry, “when you feel that cold wind.”