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
The Camera Eye (35)
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 Hutchins
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.
Maurice came back one other afternoon before his perme expired bringing a young writer who was working at the Quai d’Orsay, a tall young Frenchman with pink cheeks who looked like an English publicschool boy, whose name was Raoul Lemonnier. He seemed to refer to speak English than French. He’d been at the front for two years in the Chasseurs Alpins and had been reformé on account of his lungs or his uncle who was a minister he couldn’t say which. It was all very boring, he said. He thought tennis was ripping, though, and went out to St. Cloud to row every afternoon. Eleanor discovered
that what she’d been wanting all fall had been a game of tennis. He said he liked English and American women because they liked sport. Here every woman thought you wanted to go to bed with her right away; “Love is very boring,” he said. He and Eveline stood in the window talking about cocktails (he adored American drinks) and looked out at the last purple shreds of dusk settling over Nôtre Dâme and the Seine, while Eleanor and Maurice sat in the dark in the little salon talking about St. Francis of Assisi. She asked him to dinner.
The next morning Eleanor said she thought she was going to become a Catholic. On their way to the office she made Eveline stop into Nôtre Dâme with her to hear mass and they both lit candles for Maurice’s safety at the front before what Eveline thought was a just too tiresomelooking virgin near the main door. But it was impressive all the same, the priests moaning and the lights and the smell of chilled incense. She certainly hoped poor Maurice wouldn’t be killed.
For dinner that night Eveline invited Jerry Burnham, Miss Felton who was back from Amiens and Major Appleton who was in Paris doing something about tanks. It was a fine dinner, duck roasted with oranges, although Jerry, who was sore about how much Eveline talked to Lemonnier, had to get drunk and use a lot of bad language and tell about the retreat at Caporetto and say that the Allies were in a bad way. Major Appleton said he oughtn’t to say it even if it was true and got quite red in the face. Eleanor was pretty indignant and said he ought to be arrested for making such a statement, and after everybody had left she and Eveline had quite a quarrel. “What will that young Frenchman be thinking of us? You’re a darling, Eveline dear, but you have the vulgarest friends. I don’t know where you pick them up, and that Felton woman drank four cocktails, a quart of beaujolais and three cognacs, I kept tabs on her myself;” Eveline started to laugh and they both got to laughing. But Eleanor said that their life was getting much too bohemian and that it wasn’t right with the war on and things going so dreadfully in Italy and Russia and the poor boys in the trenches and all that.
That winter Paris gradually filled up with Americans in uniform, and staffcars, and groceries from the Red Cross supply store; and Major Moorehouse who, it turned out, was an old friend of Eleanor’s, arrived straight from Washington to take charge of the Red Cross publicity. Everybody was talking about him before he came because he’d been one of the best known publicity experts in New York before the war. There was no one who hadn’t heard of J. Ward Moorehouse. There was a lot of scurry around the office when word came around that he’d actually landed in Brest and everybody was nervous worrying where there axe was going to fall.
The morning he arrived the first thing Eveline noticed was that Eleanor had had her hair curled. Then just before noon the whole publicity department was asked into Major Wood’s office to meet Major Moorehouse. He was a biggish man with blue eyes and hair so light it was almost white. His uniform fitted well and his Sam Browne belt and his puttees shone like glass. Eveline thought at once that there was something sincere and appealing about him, like about her father, that she liked. He looked young too, in spite of the thick jowl, and he had a slight southern accent when he talked. He made a little speech about the importance of the work the Red Cross was doing to keep up the morale of civilians and combatants, and that their publicity ought to have two aims, to stimulate giving among the folks back home and to keep people informed of the progress of the work. The trouble now was that people didn’t know enough about what a valuable effort the Red Cross workers were making and were too prone to listen to the criticisms of proGermans working under the mask of pacifism and knockers and slackers always ready to carp and criticize; and that the American people and the warwracked populations of the Allied countries must be made to know the splendid sacrifice the Red Cross workers were making, as splendid in its way as the sacrifice of the dear boys in the trenches.
“Even at this moment, my friends, we are under fire, ready to make the supreme sacrifice that civilization shall not perish from the earth.” Major Wood leaned back in his swivelchair and it let out a squeak that made everybody look up with a start and several people looked out of the window as if they expected to see a shell from big Bertha hurtling right in on them. “You see,” said Major Moorehouse eagerly, his blue eyes snapping, “that is what we must make people feel . . . the catch in the throat, the wrench to steady the nerves, the determination to carry on.”
Eveline felt stirred in spite of herself. She looked a quick sideways look at Eleanor, who looked cool and lilylike as she had when she was listening to Maurice tell about the young Christ of the gasattack. Can’t ever tell what she’s thinking, though, said Eveline to herself.
That afternoon when J.W., as Eleanor called Major Moorehouse, came down to have a cup of tea with them, Eveline felt that she was being narrowly watched and minded her P’s and Q’s as well as she could; it is the financial adviser; she was giggling about inside. He looked a little haggard and didn’t say much, and winced noticeably when they talked about airraids moonlight nights, and how President Poincaré went around in person every morning to visit the ruins and condole with the survivors. He didn’t stay long and went off someplace in a staffcar to confer with some high official or other. Eveline thought he looked nervous and uneasy and would rather have stayed with them. Eleanor went out on the landing of the stairs with him and was gone some time. Eveline watched her narrowly when she came back into the room but her face had its accustomed look of finely chiselled calm. It was on the tip of Eveline’s tongue to ask her if Major Moorehouse was her . . . her . . . but she couldn’t think of a way of putting it.
Eleanor didn’t say anything for some time; then she shook her head and said, “Poor Gertrude.” “Who’s that?” Eleanor’s voice was just a shade tinny, “J.W.’s wife . . . she’s in a sanitarium with a nervous breakdown . . . the strain, darling, this terrible war.”
Major Moorehouse went down to Italy to reorganize the publicity of the American Red Cross there, and a couple of weeks later Eleanor got orders from Washington to join the Rome office. That left Eveline alone with Yvonne in the apartment.
It was a chilly, lonely winter and working with all these relievers was just too tiresome, but Eveline managed to hold her job and to have some fun sometimes in the evening with Raoul, who would come around and take her out to some petite boite or other that he’d always say was very boring. He took her to the Noctambules where you could sometimes get drinks after the legal hour; or up to a little restaurant on the Butte of Montmartre where one cold moonlit January night they stood on the porch of the Sacré Coeur and saw the Zeppelins come over. Paris stretched out cold and dead as if all the tiers of roofs and domes were carved out of snow and the shrapnel sparkled frostily overhead and the searchlights were antennae of great insects moving through the milky darkness. At intervals came red snorting flares of the incendiary 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 forgotten 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 painfully in the faint blue glow of a corner light, while Eveline stood by breathless, feeling her heart pound. The 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 footsteps clacking sharply on the cobbles. She hung on his arm; there was something tight and electric and uncomfortable in the way their hips occasionally touched as they walked.
Her house was one of the few in Paris that didn’t have a concièrge. Sh
e unlocked the door and they climbed shivering 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 embarrassment, 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 Americans. Of course it would be very boring, the contract and all that.” “Oh, no, that wouldn’t be my idea at all,” she whispered giggling and shivering from the bed. Raoul gave her a furious offended look, said good night very formally and left.
When the trees began to bud outside her window and the flower-women in the markets began to sell 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 elaborate 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 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 all. It got so bad that Eveline wasn’t able to stay in the house at all on Sunday and often spent the afternoon in her office reading Anatole France.