1919 (28 page)

The kingdoms are less by three.

 

By gum, he must write some verse: what people needed was stirring poems to nerve them for revolt against their cannibal governments. Sitting in the secondclass compartment he was so busy building a daydream of himself living in a sunscorched Spanish town, sending out flaming poems and manifestoes, calling young men to revolt against their butchers, poems that would be published by secret presses all over the world, that he hardly saw the suburbs of Paris or the bluegreen summer farmlands sliding by.

 

Let our flag run out straight in the wind

   
The old red shall be floated again

When the ranks that are thin shall be thinned

   
When the names that were twenty are ten

 

Even the rumblebump rumblebump of the French railroad train seemed to be chanting as if the words were muttered low in unison by a marching crowd:

 

While three men hold together

The kingdoms are less by three.

 

At noon Dick got hungry and went to the diner to eat a last deluxe meal. He sat down at a table opposite a goodlooking young man in a French officer's uniform. “Good God, Ned, is that you?” Blake Wigglesworth threw back his head in the funny way he had and laughed. “Garçon,” he shouted, “un verre pour le monsieur.”

“But how long were you in the Lafayette Escadrille?” stammered Dick.

“Not long . . . they wouldn't have me.”

“And how about the Navy?”

“Threw me out too, the damn fools think I've got T.B. . . . garçon, une bouteille de champagne. . . . Where are you going?”

“I'll explain.”

“Well, I'm going home on the
Touraine
.” Ned threw back his head laughing again and his lips formed the syllables blahblahblahblah. Dick noticed that although his face was very pale and thin his skin under his eyes and up onto the temples was flushed and his eyes looked a little too bright. “Well, so am I,” he heard himself say.

“I got into hot water,” said Ned.

“Me too,” said Dick. “Very.”

They lifted their glasses and looked into each other's eyes and laughed. They sat in the diner all afternoon talking and drinking and got to Bordeaux boiled as owls. Ned had spent all his money in Paris and Dick had very little left, so they had to sell their bedrolls and equipment to a couple of American lieutenants just arrived they met in the Café de Bordeaux. It was almost like old days in Boston going around from bar to bar and looking for places to get drinks after closing. They spent most of the night in an elegant maison publique all upholstered in pink satin, talking to the madam, a driedup woman with a long upper lip like a llama's wearing a black spangled evening dress, who took a fancy to them and made them stay and eat onion soup with her. They were so busy talking they forgot about the girls. She'd been in the Transvaal during the Boer War and spoke a curious brand of South African English. “Vous comprennez ve had very fine clientele, every man jack officers, very much elegance, decorum. These johnnies off the veldt . . . get the hell outen here . . . bloody select don't you know. Ve had two salons, one salon English officers, one salon Boer officers, very select, never in all the war make any bloody row, no fight. . . . Vos compatriotes les Americains ce n'est pas comme ça, mes amis. Beaucoup sonofabeetch, make drunk, make bloody row, make sick, naturellement il y a aussi des gentils garçons comme vous, mes mignons, des veritables gentlemens,” and she patted them both on the cheeks with her horny ringed hands. When they left she wanted to kiss them and went with them to the door saying, “Bonsoi mes jolis petits gentlemens.”

All the crossing they were never sober after eleven in the morning; it was calm misty weather; they were very happy. One night when he was standing alone in the stern beside the small gun, Dick was searching his pocket for a cigarette when his fingers felt something hard in the lining of his coat. It was the little compass he had bought to help him across the Spanish border. Guiltily, he fished it out and dropped it overboard.

HER WOUNDED HERO OF WAR A FRAUD
SAYS WIFE IN SUIT

 

Mid the wars great coise

   
Stands the red cross noise

She's the rose of no man's land

 

according to the thousands who had assembled to see the launching and were eyewitnesses of the disaster the scaffold simply seemed to turn over like a gigantic turtle precipitating its occupants into twentyfive feet of water. This was exactly four minutes before the launching was scheduled

 

Oh that battle of Paree

  
It's making a bum out of me

 

BRITISH BEGIN OPERATION ON AFGHAN FRONTIER

 

the leading part in world trade which the U.S. is now confidently expected to take, will depend to a very great extent upon the intelligence and success with which its harbors are utilized and developed

 

I wanta go home I wanta go home

The bullets they whistle the cannons they roar

I dont want to go to the trenches no more

Oh ship me over the sea

Where the Allemand cant get at me

 

you have begun a crusade against toys, but if all the German toys were commandeered and destroyed the end of German importations would not yet have been reached

 

HOLDS UP 20 DINERS IN CAFE

 

LAWHATING GATHERINGS NOT TO BE ALLOWED IN
CRITICAL TIME THREATENING SOCIAL UPHEAVAL

 

Oh my      I'm too young to die

I wanta go home

 

Nancy Enjoys Nightlife Despite Raids

 

TATTOOED WOMAN SOUGHT BY POLICE
IN TRUNK MURDER

 

ARMY WIFE SLASHED BY ADMIRER

 

Young Man Alleged to Have Taken Money to Aid in Promotion of a Reserve Office. It appears that these men were Chinese merchants from Irkutsk, Chita and elsewhere who were proceeding homeward to Harbin carrying their profits for investment in new stocks

 

Oh that battle of Paree

   
Its making a bum out of me

Toujours lafemme et combien

 

300,000 RUSSIAN NOBLES SLAIN BY BOLSHEVIKI

 

Bankers of This Country, Britain and France to Safeguard Foreign Investors

 

these three girls came to France thirteen months ago and were the first concertparty to entertain at the front. They staged a show for the American troops from a flatcar base of a large naval gun three kilometers behind the line on the day of the evening of the drive at Chateau Thierry. After that they were assigned to the Aix-les-Bains leave area where they acted during the day as canteen girls and entertained and danced at night

 

You never knew a place that was so short of men

  
Beaucoup rum      beaucoup fun

    
Mother'd never know her loving son

Oh, if you want to see      that statue of Libertee

  
Keep away from that battle of Paree

there were always two cats the color of hot milk with a little coffee in it with aquamarine eyes and sootblack faces in the window of the laundry opposite the little creamery where we ate breakfast on the Montagne St. Geneviève huddled between the old squeezedup slategrey houses of the Latin Quarter leaning over steep small streets cosy under the fog      minute streets lit with different-colored chalks cluttered with infinitesimal bars restaurants paintships and old prints beds bidets faded perfumery microscopic sizzle of frying butter

the Bertha made a snapping noise no louder than a cannon-cracker near the hotel where Oscar Wilde died we all ran up stairs to see if the house was on fire but the old woman whose lard was burning was sore as a crutch

all the big new quarters near the Arc de Triomphe were deserted but in the dogeared yellowbacked Paris of the Carmagnole the Faubourg St Antoine the Commune we were singing

 

'suis dans l'axe

  
'suis dans l'axe

    
'suis dans l'axe du gros canon

 

when the Bertha dropped in the Seine there was a concours de pêche in the little brightgreen skiffs among all the old whiskery fishermen scooping up in nets the minnows the concussion had stunned

Eveline went to live with Eleanor in a fine apartment Eleanor had gotten hold of somehow on the quai de la Tournelle. It was the mansard floor of a grey peelingfaced house built at the time of Richelieu and done over under Louis Quinze. Eveline never tired of looking out the window, through the delicate tracing of the wroughtiron balcony, at the Seine where toy steamboats bucked the current, towing shinyvarnished barges that had lace curtains and geraniums in the windows of their deckhouses painted green and red, and at the island opposite where the rocketing curves of the flying buttresses shoved the apse of Nôtre Dâme dizzily upwards out of the trees of a little park. They had tea at a small Buhl table in the window almost every evening when they got home from the office on the Rue de Rivoli, after spending the day pasting pictures of ruined French farms and orphaned children and starving warbabies into scrapbooks to be sent home for use in Red Cross drives.

After tea she'd go out in the kitchen and watch Yvonne cook. With the groceries and sugar they drew at the Red Cross commissary, Yvonne operated a system of barter so that their food hardly cost them anything. At first Eveline tried to stop her but she'd answer with a torrent of argument: did Mademoiselle think that President Poincaré or the generals or the cabinet ministers, ces salots de profiteurs, ces salots d'embusqués, went without their brioches? It was the systme D, ils's'en fichent des particuliers, des pauvres gens . . . very well her ladies would eat as well as any old camels of generals, if she had her way she'd have all the generals line up before a firingsquad and the embusqué ministers and the ronds de cuir too. Eleanor said her sufferings had made the old woman a little cracked but Jerry Burnham said it was the rest of the world that was cracked.

Jerry Burnham was the little redfaced man who'd been such a help with the colonel the first night Eveline got to Paris. They often laughed about it afterwards. He was working for the U.P. and appeared every few days in her office on his rounds covering Red Cross activities. He knew all the Paris restaurants and would take Eveline out to dinner at the Tour d'Argent or to lunch at the Taverne Nicholas Flamel and they'd walk around the old streets of the Marais afternoons and get late to their work together. When they'd settle in the evening at a good quiet table in a café where they couldn't be overheard (all the waiters were spies he said), he'd drink a lot of cognac and soda and pour out his feelings, how his work disgusted him, how a correspondent couldn't get to see anything anymore, how he had three or four censorships on his neck all the time and had to send out prepared stuff that was all a pack of dirty lies every word of it, how a man lost his selfrespect doing things like that year after year, how a newspaperman had been little better than a skunk before the war, but that now there wasn't anything low enough you could call him. Eveline would try to cheer him up telling him that when the war was over he ought to write a book like
Le Feu
and really tell the truth about it. “But the war won't ever be over . . . too damn profitable, do you get me? Back home they're coining money, the British are coining money; even the French, look at Bordeaux and Toulouse and Marseilles coining money and the goddam politicians, all of 'em got bank accounts in Amsterdam or Barcelona, the sons of bitches.” Then he'd take her hand and get a crying jag and promise that if it did end he'd get back his selfrespect and write the great novel he felt he had in him.

Late that fall Eveline came home one evening tramping through the mud and the foggy dusk to find that Eleanor had a French soldier to tea. She was glad to see him, because she was always complaining that she wasn't getting to know any French people, nothing but professional relievers and Red Cross women who were just too tiresome; but it was some moments before she realized it was Maurice Millet. She wondered how she could have fallen for him even when she was a kid, he looked so middleaged and pasty and oldmaidish in his stained blue uniform. His large eyes with their girlish long lashes had heavy violet rings under them. Eleanor evidently thought he was wonderful still, and drank up his talk about l'élan suprème du sacrifice and l'harmonie mysterieuse de la mort. He was a stretcherbearer in a basehospital at Nancy, had become very religious and had almost forgotten his English. When they asked him about his painting he shrugged his shoulders and wouldn't answer. At supper he ate very little and drank only water. He stayed till late in the evening telling them about miraculous conversions of unbelievers, extreme unction on the firing line, a vision of the young Christ he'd seen walking among the wounded in a dressingstation during a gasattack. Après la guerre he was going into a monastery. Trappist perhaps. After he left Eleanor said it had been the most inspiring evening she'd ever had in her life; Eveline didn't argue with her.