At the office Dick found two letters. One was from Mr. Wigglesworth saying that Blake had died of tuberculosis at Saranac the week before, and the other was from Anne Elizabeth:
DARLING:
I’m working at a desk in this miserable dump that’s nothing but a collection of old cats that make me tired. Darling, I love you so much. We must see each other soon. I wonder what Dad and Buster would say if I brought a goodlooking husband home from overseas. They’d be hopping mad at first but I reckon they’d get over it. Gol darn it, I don’t want to work at a desk, I want to travel around Europe and see the sights. The only thing I like here is a little bunch of cyclamens on my desk. Do you remember the cute little pink cyclamens? I’ve got a bad cold and I’m lonely as the dickens. This Methodist Board of Temperance and Public Morals are the meanest people I’ve ever seen. Ever been homesick, Dick? I don’t believe you ever have. Do get yourself sent right back to Rome. I wish I hadn’t been such a prissy silly little girl up there where the cyclamens bloomed. It’s hard to be a woman, Dick. Do anything you like but don’t forget me. I love you so.
ANNE ELIZABETH.
When Dick got back to his hotel room with the two letters in the inside pocket of his tunic he threw himself down on the bed and lay a long time staring at the ceiling. A little before midnight Henry knocked on the door. He was just in from Brussels. “Why, what’s the matter, Dick, you look all grey . . . are you sick or something?”
Dick got to his feet and washed his face at the washbasin. “Nothing the matter,” he spluttered through the water. “I’m fed up with this man’s army, I guess.”
“You look like you’d been crying.”
“Crying over spilt milk,” said Dick, and cleared his throat with a little laugh.
“Say, Dick, I’m in trouble, you’ve got to help me out. . . . You remember that girl Olga, the one who threw the teapot at me?” Dick nodded. “Well, she says she’s going to have a baby and that I’m the proud parent. . . . It’s ridiculous.”
“Well, things like that happen,” said Dick sourly.
“No, but Christ, man, I don’t want to marry the bitch . . . or support the offspring . . . it’s too silly. Even if she is going to have a baby it’s probably not mine . . . She says she’ll write to General Pershing. Some of those poor devils of enlisted men they sent up for twenty years for rape . . . it’s the same story.”
“They shot a couple. . . . Thank God I wasn’t on that courtmartial.”
“But think of how it ud upset mother. . . . Look here, you can parleyvoo better’n I can . . . I want you to come and talk to her.”
“All right . . . but I’m dead tired and feel lousy . . .” Dick put on his tunic. “Say, Henry, how are you off for jack? The franc’s dropping all the time. We might be able to give her a little money, and we’ll be going home soon, we’ll be too far away for blackmail.” Henry looked low. “It’s a hell of a thing to have to admit to your kid brother,” he said, “but I played poker the other night and got cleaned out . . . I’m S.O.L. all down the line.”
They went around to the place on Montmartre where Olga was hatcheck girl. There was nobody there yet, so she was able to come out and have a drink with them at the bar. Dick rather liked her. She was a bleached blonde with a small, hard, impudent face and big brown eyes. Dick talked her around, saying that his brother couldn’t marry a foreigner on account of la famille and not having a situation and that he would soon be out of the army and back at a drafting desk . . . did she know how little a draftsman in an architect’s office was paid en Amerique? Nothing at all, and with la vie chère and la chute du franc and le dollar would go next maybe and la revolution mondiale would be coming on, and the best thing she could do was to be a good little girl and not have the baby. She began to cry . . . she so wanted to get married and have children and as for an avortment . . . mais non, puis non. She stamped her foot and went back to her hatcheck booth. Dick followed her and consoled her and patted her cheek and said que voulez vous it was la vie and wouldn’t she consider a present of five hundred francs? She shook her head but when he mentioned a thousand she began to brighten up and to admit that que voulez vous it was la vie. Dick left her and Henry cheerfully making a date to go home together after the boite closed. “Well, I had a couple of hundred bucks saved up, I guess it’ll have to go . . . try to hold her off until we can get a good exchange . . . and Henry, the next time you play poker, for goodness’ sake watch yourself.”
The day before the first plenary session of the Peace Conference Dick was running into the Crillon to go up to see Mr. Moorehouse who had promised to get cards for him and Colonel Edgecombe, when he saw a familiar face in a French uniform. It was Ripley, just discharged from the French artillery school at Fontainebleau. He said he was in there trying to find an old friend of his father’s to see if he could get a job connected with the peace delegations. He was broke and Marianne the Third Republic wasn’t keeping him any more unless he enlisted in the foreign legion and that was the last thing he wanted to do. After Dick had phoned Major Edgecombe that Mr. Moorehouse had been unable to get them cards and that they must try again through military channels they went and had a drink together at the Ritz bar.
“Big time stuff,” said Ripley, looking around at the decorations on the uniforms and the jewels on the women, “How are you goin’ to keep ’em down on the farm . . . After they’ve see Paree?” Dick grunted. “I wish to hell I knew what I was going to do after I got out of this man’s army.” “Ask me something easy . . . oh, I guess I can get a job somewhere . . . if the worst comes to the worst I’ll have to go back and finish Columbia . . . I wish the revolution ud come. I don’t want to go back to the States . . . hell, I dunno what I want to do.” This kind of talk made Dick feel uneasy: “Mefiez vous,” he quoted. “Les oreilles enemies vous écoutent.” “And that’s not the half of it.”
“Say, have you heard anything from Steve Warner?” Dick asked in a low voice. “I got a letter from Boston . . . I think he got a year’s sentence for refusing to register . . . He’s lucky . . . A lot of those poor devils got twenty years.” “Well, that comes of monkeying with the buzzsaw,” said Dick outloud. Ripley looked at him hard with narrowed eyes for a second; then they went on talking about other things.
That afternoon Dick took Miss Stoddard to tea at Rumpelmeyers, and afterwards walked up to the Crillon with her to call on Mr. Moorehouse. The corridors of the Crillon were lively as an anthill with scuttling khaki uniforms, marine yeomen, messenger boys, civilians; a gust of typewriter clicking came out from every open door. At every landing groups of civilian experts stood talking in low voices, exchanging glances with passersby, scribbling notes on scratchpads. Miss Stoddard grabbed Dick’s arm with her sharp white fingers. “Listen . . . it’s like a dynamo . . . what do you think it means?” “Not peace,” said Dick.
In the vestibule of Mr. Moorehouse’s suite, she introduced him to Miss Williams, the tiredlooking sharpfaced blonde who was his secretary. “She’s a treasure,” Miss Stoddard whispered as they went through into the drawingroom, “does more work than anybody in the whole place.”
There were a great many people standing around in the blue light that filtered in through the long windows. A waiter was making his way among the groups with a tray of glasses and a valetlooking person was tiptoeing around with a bottle of port. Some people had teacups and others had glasses in their hands but nobody was paying much attention to them. Dick noticed at once from the way Miss Stoddard walked into the room and the way Mr. Moorehouse came forward a little to meet her, that she was used to running the show in that room. He was introduced to various people and stood around for a while with his mouth shut and his ears open. Mr. Moorehouse spoke to him and remembered his name, but at that moment a message came that Colonel House was on the phone and Dick had no further chance to talk to him. As he was leaving Miss Williams, the secretary, said; “Captain Savage, excuse me a moment . . . You’re a friend of Mr. Robbins’, aren’t you?” Dick smi
led at her and said, “Well, rather an acquaintance, I’d say. He seems a very interesting fellow.” “He’s a very brilliant man,” said Miss Williams, “but I’m afraid he’s losing his grip . . . as I look at it it’s very demoralizing over here . . . for a man. How can anybody expect to get through their work in a place where they take three hours for lunch and sit around drinking in those miserable cafés the rest of the time?”
“You don’t like Paris, Miss Williams.”
“I should say not.”
“Robbins does,” said Dick maliciously. “Too well,” said Miss Williams. “I thought if you were a friend of his you might help us straighten him out. We’re very worried over him. He hasn’t been here for two days at a most important time, very important contacts to be made. J.W.’s working himself to the bone. I’m so afraid he’ll break down under the strain . . . And you can’t get a reliable stenographer or an extra typewriter . . . I have to do all the typing beside my secretarial duties.” “Oh, it’s a busy time for all of us,” said Dick. “Goodby, Miss Williams.” She gave him a smile as he left.
In late February he came back from a long dismal run to Vienna to find another letter from Anne Elizabeth:
DICK DARLING:
Thanks for the fine postcards. I’m still at this desk job and so lonely. Try to come to Rome if you can. Something is happening that is going to make a great change in our lives. I’m terribly worried about it but I have every confidence in you. I know you’re straight, Dicky boy. Oh, I’ve got to see you. If you don’t come in a day or two I may throw up everything and come to Paris. Your girl,
ANNE ELIZABETH.
Dick went cold all over when he read the letter in the Brasserie Weber where he’d gone to have a beer with an artillery 2nd lieutenant named Staunton Wills who was studying at the Sorbonne. Then he read a letter from his mother complaining about her lonely old age and one from Mr. Cooper offering him a job. Wills was talking bout a girl he’d seen at the Theatre Caumartin he wanted to get to know, and was asking Dick in his capacity of an expert in these matters, how he ought to go about it. Dick tried to keep talking about how he could certainly get to see her by sending her a note through the ouvreuse, tried to keep looking at the people with umbrellas passing up and down the rue Royale and the wet taxis and shiny staffcars, but his mind was in a panic; she was going to have a baby; she expected him to marry her; I’m damned if I will. After they’d had their beer, he and Wills went walking down the left bank of the Seine, looking at old books and engravings in the secondhand bookstalls and ended up having tea with Eleanor Stoddard.
“Why are you looking so doleful, Richard?” asked Eleanor. They had gone into the window with their teacups. At the table Wills was sitting talking with Eveline Hutchins and a newspaper man. Dick took a gulp of tea. “Talking to you’s a great pleasure to me, Eleanor,” he said.
“Well, then it’s not that that’s making you pull such a long face?”
“You know . . . some days you feel as if you were stagnating . . . I guess I’m tired of wearing a uniform . . . I want to be a private individual for a change.”
“You don’t want to go home, do you?”
“Oh, no, I’ve got to go, I guess, to do something about mother, that is if Henry doesn’t go . . . Colonel Edgecombe says he can get me re-leased from the service over here, that is, if I waive my right to transportation home. God knows I’m willing to do that.”
“Why don’t you stay over here . . . We might get J.W. to fix up something for you . . . How would you like to be one of his bright young men?”
“It ud be better than ward politics in Joisey . . . I’d like to get a job that sent me traveling . . . It’s ridiculous because I spend my life on the train in this service, but I’m not fed up with it yet.”
She patted the back of his hand: “That’s what I like about you, Richard, the appetite you have for everything . . . J.W. spoke several times about that keen look you have . . . he’s like that, he’s never lost his appetite, that’s why he’s getting to be a power in the world . . . you know Colonel House consults him all the time . . . You see, I’ve lost my appetite.” They went back to the teatable.
Next day orders came around to send a man to Rome; Dick jumped at the job. When he heard Anne Elizabeth’s voice over the phone, chilly panic went through him again, but he made his voice as agreeable as he could. “Oh, you were a darling to come, Dicky boy,” she was saying. He met her at a café at the corner of the Piazza Venezia. It made him feel embarrassed the uncontrolled way she ran up to him and threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. “It’s all right,” she said laughing, “they’ll just think we’re a couple of crazy Americans . . . Oh, Dick, lemme look at you . . . Oh, Dickybody, I’ve been so lonesome for you.”
Dick’s throat was tight. “We can have supper together, can’t we?” he managed to say. “I thought we might get hold of Ed Schuyler.”
She’d picked out a small hotel on a back street for them to go to. Dick let himself be carried away by her; after all, she was quite pretty today with her cheeks so flushed and the smell of her hair made him think of the smell of the little cyclamens on the hill above Tivoli; but all the time he was making love to her, sweating and straining in her arms, wheels were going round in his head: what can I do, can I do, can I do?
They were so late getting to Ed’s place that he had given them up. He was all packed up to leave Rome for Paris and home the next day. “That’s fine,” said Dick, “we’ll go on the same train.” “This is my last night in Rome, ladies and gentlemen,” said Ed, “let’s go and have a bangup supper and to hell with the Red Cross.”
They ate an elaborate supper with first class wines, at a place in front of Trajan’s column, but Dick couldn’t taste anything. His own voice sounded tinnily in his ears. He could see that Ed was making mighty efforts to cheer things up, ordering fresh bottles, kidding the waiter, telling funny stories about his misadventures with Roman ladies. Anne Elizabeth drank a lot of wine, said that the N.E.R. dragons weren’t as bad as she had painted them, that they’d given her a latchkey when she’d told them her fiancé was in Rome for just that evening. She kept nudging Dick’s knee with hers under the table and wanted them to sing Auld Lang Syne. After dinner they rode around in a cab and stopped to drop coins in the Trevi fountain. They ended up at Ed’s place sitting on packing boxes, finishing up a bottle of champagne Ed suddenly remembered and singing Auprès de ma blonde.
All the time Dick felt sober and cold inside. It was a relief when Ed announced drunkenly that he was going to visit some lovely Roman ladies of his acquaintance for the last time and leave his flat to I promessi sposi for the night. After he’d gone Anne Elizabeth threw her arms around Dick: “Give me one kiss, Dickyboy, and then you must take be back to the Methodist Board of Temperance and Public Morals . . . after all, it’s private morals that count. Oh, I love our private morals.” Dick kissed her, then he went and looked out of the window. It had started to rain again. Frail ribbons of light from a streetlamp shot along the stone threads of the corner of the Spanish Stairs he could see between the houses. She came and rested her head on his shoulder:
“What you thinking about, Dickyboy?”
“Look, Anne Elizabeth, I’ve been wanting to talk about it . . . do you really think that. . . ?”
“It’s more than two months now . . . It couldn’t be anything else, and I have a little morning sickness now and then. I’d been feeling terrible today, only I declare seeing you’s made me forgot all about it.”
“But you must realize . . . it worries me terribly. There must be something you can do about it.”
“I tried castor oil and quinine . . . that’s all I know . . . you see I’m just a simple country girl.”
“Oh, do be serious . . . you’ve got to do something. There are plenty of doctors would attend to it . . . I can raise the money somehow . . . It’s hellish, I’ve got to go back tomorrow . . . I wish I was out of this goddam uniform.”
“But I declar
e I think I’d kinda like a husband and a baby . . . if you were the husband and the baby was yours.”
“I can’t do it . . . I couldn’t afford it . . . They won’t let you get married in the army.”
“That’s not so, Dick,” she said slowly.
They stood a long time side by side without looking at each other, looking at the rain over the dark roofs and the faint phosphorescent streaks of the streets. She spoke in a trembly frail voice, “You mean you don’t love me anymore.”
“Of course I do, I don’t know what love is . . . I suppose I love any lovely girl . . . and especially you, sweetheart.” Dick heard his own voice, like somebody else’s voice in his ears. “We’ve had some fine times together.” She was kissing him all around his neck above the stiff collar of the tunic. “But, darling, can’t you understand I can’t support a child until I have some definite career, and I’ve got my mother to support; Henry’s so irresponsible I can’t expect anything from him. But I’ve got to take you home; it’s getting late.”
When they got down into the street the rain had let up again. All the waterspouts were gurgling and water glinted in the gutters under the street lamps. She suddenly slapped him, shouted you’re it, and ran down the street. He had to chase her, swearing under his breath. He lost her in a small square and was getting ready to give her up and go home when she jumped out at him from behind a stone phoenix on the edge of a fountain. He grabbed her by the arm, “Don’t be so damn kittenish,” he said nastily. “Can’t you see I’m worried sick.” She began to cry.