1919 (47 page)

He went back to his room feeling happy and sleepy and saying to himself: what's the matter with my life is I haven't got a woman of my own. He had just time to wash and shave and put on a clean shirt and to rush down to headquarters in order to be there when Colonel Edgecombe, who was a damnably early riser, got in. He found orders to leave for Rome that night.

By the time he got on the train his eyes were stinging with sleepiness. He and the sergeant who went with him had a compartment reserved at the end of a first class coach marked Paris-Brindisi. Outside of their compartment the train was packed; people were standing in the aisles. Dick had taken off his coat and Sam Browne belt and was loosening his puttees, planning to stretch out on one of the seats and go to sleep even before the train left, when he saw a skinny American face in the door of the compartment. “I beg your pardon, is this Ca-ca-captain Savage?” Dick sat up and nodded yawning. “Captain Savage, my name is Barrow, G. H. Barrow, attached to the American delegation. . . . I have to go to Rome tonight and there's not a seat on the train. The transport officer in the station very kindly said that . . . er . . . er although it wasn't according to Hoyle you might stretch a point and allow us to ride with you . . . I have with me a very charming young lady member of the Near East Relief . . .” “Captain Savage, it certainly is mighty nice of you to let us ride with you,” came a drawling Texas voice, and a pinkcheeked girl in a dark grey uniform brushed past the man who said his name was Barrow and climbed up into the car. Mr. Barrow, who was shaped like a string bean and had a prominent twitching Adam's apple and popeyes, began tossing up satchels and suitcases. Dick was sore and began to say stiffly, “I suppose you know that it's entirely against my orders . . .” but he heard his own voice saying it and suddenly grinned and said, “All right, Sergeant Wilson and I will probably be shot at sunrise, but go ahead.” At that moment the train started.

Dick reluctantly scraped his things together into one corner and settled down there and immediately closed his eyes. He was much too sleepy to make the effort of talking to any damn relievers. The sergeant sat in the other corner and Mr. Barrow and the girl occupied the other seat. Through his doze Dick could hear Mr. Barrow's voice chugging along, now and then drowned out by the rattle of the express train. He had a stuttery way of talking like a badly running motorboat engine. The girl didn't say much except, “Oh my,” and “I declare,” now and then. It was the European situation: President Wilson says . . . new diplomacy . . . new Europe . . . permanent peace without annexations or indemnities. President Wilson says . . . new understanding between capital and labor . . . President Wilson appeals to . . . industrial democracy . . . plain people all over the world behind the president. Covenant. League of Nations . . . Dick was asleep dreaming of a girl rubbing her breasts against him purring like a kitten, of a popeyed man making a speech, of William Jennings Wilson speaking before the Baltimore conflagration, of industrial democracy in a bathhouse on the Marne in striped trunks, with a young Texas boy with pink cheeks who wanted to . . . like a string bean . . . with a twitching adamsapple . . .

He woke up with a nightmarish feeling that somebody was choking him. The train had stopped. It was stifling in the compartment. The blue shade was drawn down on the lamp overhead. He stepped over everybody's legs and went out in the passage and opened a window. Cold mountain air cut into his nostrils. The hills were snowy in the moonlight. Beside the track a French sentry was sleepily leaning on his rifle. Dick yawned desperately.

The Near East Relief girl was standing beside him, looking at him smiling. “Where are we gettin' to, Captain Savage? . . . Is this Italy yet?” “I guess it's the Swiss Border . . . we'll have a long wait, I guess . . . they take forever at these borders.”

“Oh Jimminy,” said the girl, jumping up and down, “it's the first time I ever crossed a border.”

Dick laughed and settled back into his seat again. The train pulled into a barny lonelylooking station, very dimly lit, and the civilian passengers started piling out with their baggage. Dick sent his papers by the sergeant to the military inspection and settled back to sleep again.

He slept soundly and didn't wake up until the Mont Cenis. Then it was the Italian frontier. Again cold air, snowy mountains, everybody getting out into an empty barn of a station.

Sleepysentimentally remembering the last time he'd gone into Italy on the Fiat car with Sheldrake, he walked shivering to the station bar and drank a bottle of mineral water and a glass of wine. He took a couple of bottles of mineral water and a fiasco of chianti back to the compartment, and offered Mr. Barrow and the girl drinks when they came back from the customs and the police looking very cross and sleepy. The girl said she couldn't drink wine because she'd signed a pledge not to drink or smoke when she joined the N.E.R., but she drank some mineral water and complained that it tickled her nose. Then they all huddled back into their corners to try to sleep some more. By the time they pulled into the Termi station in Rome they were all calling each other by their first names. The Texas girl's name was Anne Elizabeth. She and Dick had spent the day standing in the corridor looking out at the saffronroofed towns and the peasants' houses each with a blue smear on the stucco behind the grapevine over the door, and the olives and the twisted shapes of the vines in their redterraced fields; the pale hilly Italian landscape where the pointed cypresses stood up so dark they were like gashes in a canvas. She'd told him all about trying to get overseas all through the war and how her brother had been killed learning to fly at San Antonio, and how nice Mr. Barrow had been on the boat and in Paris but that he would try to make love to her and acted so silly, which was very inconvenient; Dick said well maybe it wasn't so silly. He could see that Anne Elizabeth felt fine about travelling to Rome with a real army officer who'd been to the front and could talk Italian and everything.

From the station he had to rush to the embassy with his despatch cases, but he had time to arrange to call up Miss Trent at the Near East Relief. Barrow too shook hands with him warmly and said he hoped they'd see something of each other; he was anxious to establish contacts with people who really knew what it was all about.

The only thing Dick thought of that night was to get through and get to bed. Next morning he called up Ed Schuyler at the Red Cross. They ate a big winey lunch together at an expensive restaurant near the Pincio gardens. Ed had been leading the life of Riley; he had an apartment on the Spanish Stairs and took a lot of trips. He'd gotten fat. But now he was in trouble. The husband of an Italian woman he'd been running round with was threatening to challenge him to a duel and he was afraid there'd be a row and he'd lose his job with the Red Cross. “The war was all right but it's the peace that really gets you,” he said. Anyway he was sick of Italy and the Red Cross and wanted to go home. The only thing was that they were going to have a revolution in Italy and he'd like to stay and see it. “Well, Dick, for a member of the grenadine guards you seem to have done pretty well for yourself.”

“All a series of accidents,” said Dick, wrinkling up his nose. “Things are funny, do you know it?” “Don't I know it . . . I wonder what happened to poor old Steve? Fred Summers was joining the Polish Legion, last I heard of him.” “Steve's probably in jail,” said Dick, “where we ought to be.” “But it's not every day you get a chance to see a show like this.”

It was four o'clock when they left the restaurant. They went to Ed's room and sat drinking cognac in his window looking out over the yellow and verdigris roofs of the city and the baroque domes sparkling in the last sunlight, remembering how tremendously they'd felt Rome the last time they'd been there together, talking about what they'd be doing now that the war was over. Ed Schuyler said he wanted to get a foreign correspondent job that would take him out east; he couldn't imagine going back home to upstate New York; he had to see Persia and Afghanistan. Talking about what he was going to do made Dick feel hellishly miserable. He started walking back and forth across the tiled floor.

The bell rang and Schuyler went out in the hall. Dick heard whispering and a woman's voice talking Italian in a thin treble. After a moment Ed pushed a little longnosed woman with huge black eyes into the room. “This is Magda,” he said, “Signora Sculpi, meet Captain Savage.” After that they had to talk in mixed French and Italian. “I don't think it's going to rain,” said Dick. “Suppose I get hold of a girl for you and we take a drive and eat supper at Caesar's palace . . . maybe it won't be too cold.”

Dick remembered Anne Elizabeth and called up the N.E.R. The Texas voice was delighted, said the relievers were awful and that she'd made a date with Mr. Barrow but would get out of it. Yes, she'd be ready if they called for her in half an hour. After a lot of bargaining between Signora Sculpi and a cabman they hired a twohorse landau, considerably elegant and decrepit. Anne Elizabeth was waiting for them at her door. “Those old hens make me tired,” she said, jumping into the cab. “Tell him to hurry or Mr. Barrow'll catch us. . . . Those old hens say I have to be in by nine o'clock. I declare it worse'n Sundayschool in there. . . . It was mighty nice of you to ask me out to meet your friends, Captain Savage. . . . I was just dying to get out and see the town. . . . Isn't it wonderful? Say, where does the Pope live?”

The sun had set and it had begun to get chilly. The Palazzo dei Cesari was empty and chilly, so they merely had a vermouth there and went back into town for dinner. After dinner they went to a show at the Apollo. “My, I'll ketch it,” said Anne Elizabeth, “but I don't care. I want to see the town.”

She took Dick's arm as they went into the theatre. “Do you know, Dick . . . all these foreigners make me feel kinder lonesome . . . I'm glad I got a white man with me. . . . When I was at school in New York I used to go out to Jersey to see a textile strike . . . I used to be interested in things like that. I used to feel like I do now then. But I wouldn't miss any of it. Maybe it's the way you feel when you're having a really interesting time.” Dick felt a little drunk and very affectionate. He squeezed her arm and leaned over her. “Bad mans shan't hurt lil' Texas girl,” he crooned. “I guess you think I haven't got good sense,” said Anne Elizabeth, suddenly changing her tone. “But oh lawsie, how'm I going to get along with that Methodist Board of Temperance and Public Morals I've got to live with! I don't mean I don't think their work's fine . . . It's awful to think of poor little children starving everywhere. . . . We've won the war, now it's up to us to help patch things up in Europe just like the President says.” The curtain was going up and all the Italians around started shushing. Anne Elizabeth subsided. When Dick tried to get hold of her hand she pulled it away and flicked his with her fingers. “Say, I thought you were out of highschool,” she said.

The show wasn't much, and Anne Elizabeth who couldn't understand a word, kept letting her head drop on Dick's shoulder and going to sleep. In the intermission when they all went to the bar for drinks, Anne Elizabeth dutifully took lemonade. Going upstairs again to their seats, there was suddenly a scuffle. A little Italian with eyeglasses and a bald head had run at Ed Schuyler screaming, “Traditore.” He ran at him so hard that they both lost their balance and rolled down the redcarpeted steps, the little Italian punching and kicking and Ed holding him off at arm's length as best he could. Dick and Anne Elizabeth, who turned out to be very strong, grabbed the little Italian, picked him up off the ground and locked his arms behind him while Signora Sculpi fell on his neck sobbing. It was the husband.

Ed meanwhile got to his feet looking very red and sheepish. By the time the Italian police appeared everything had quieted down and the manager was nervously brushing the dust off Ed's uniform. Anne Elizabeth found the little Italian his eyeglasses, that were badly bent, and he led his wife out, who was sobbing. He looked so funny, when he stopped in the door with his bent eyeglasses trembling on the end of his nose to shake his fist at Ed, that Dick couldn't help laughing. Ed was apologizing profusely to the manager, who seemed to take his side, explaining to the policemen in their shiny hats that the husband was pazzo. The bell rang and they all went back to their seats. “Why, Anne Elizabeth, you're a jujutsu expert,” Dick whispered, his lips touching her ear. They got to giggling so they couldn't pay attention to the show and had to go out to a café.

“Now I suppose all the wops'll think I'm a coward if I don't challenge the poor little bugger to a duel.” “Sure, it'll be cappistols at thirty paces now . . . or eggplants at five yards.” Dick was laughing so hard he was crying. Ed began to get sore. “It isn't funny,” he said, “it's hell of a thing to have happen . . . a guy never seems to be able to have any fun without making other people miserable .. poor Magda . . . it's hellish for her. . . . Miss Trent, I hope you'll excuse this ridiculous exhibition.” Ed got up and went home.

“Well, what on earth was that about, Dick?” asked Anne Elizabeth, when they'd gotten out in the street and were walking towards the N.E.R. boarding house. “Well, I suppose Signore husband was jealous on account of Ed's running around with Magda . . . or else it's a pretty little blackmail plot . . . poor Ed seems all cut up about it.” “People sure do things over here they wouldn't do at home . . . I declare it's peculiar.” “Oh, Ed gets in trouble everywhere . . . He's got a special knack.” “I guess it's the war and continental standards and everything loosens up people's morals. . . . I never was prissy, but my goodness, I was surprised when Mr. Barrow asked me to go to his hotel the first day we landed . . . I'd only spoken to him three or four times before on the boat. . . . Now at home he wouldn't have done that, not in a thousand years.” Dick looked searchingly into Anne Elizabeth's face. “In Rome do as the Romans do,” he said with a funny smirk. She laughed, looking hard into his eyes as if trying to guess what he meant. “Oh, well, I guess it's all part of life,” she said. In the shadow of the doorway he wanted to do some heavy kissing, but she gave him a quick peck in the mouth and shook her head. Then she grabbed his hand and squeezed it hard and said, “Let's us be good friends.” Dick walked home with his head swimming with the scent of her sandy hair.