Eleanor went out a great deal with Tom Custis who was an elderly redfaced man, fond of music and chorusgirls and drinking, who belonged to all the clubs and for years had been a great admirer of Mary Garden. He had a box at the opera and a Stevens-Duryea and nothing to do except go to tailors and visit specialists and occasionally blackball a Jew or a newcomer applying for membership in some club he belonged to. The Armours had bought out his father’s meatpacking concern when he was still a college athlete and he hadn’t done a stroke of work since. He claimed to be thoroughly sick of social life and enjoyed taking an interest in the girls’ decorating business. He kept in close touch with Wall Street and would occasionally turn over to Eleanor a couple of shares that he was trading in. If they rose it was her gain, if they fell it was his loss. He had a wife in a private sanitarium and he and Eleanor decided they’d be just friends. Sometimes he was a little too affectionate coming home in a taxicab in the evening, but Eleanor would scold him and he’d be very contrite the next day, and send her great boxes of white flowers.
Eveline had several beaux, writers and illustrators and people like that, but they never had any money and ate and drank everything in the house when they came to dinner. One of them, Freddy Seargeant, was an actor and producer temporarily stranded in Chicago. He had friends in the Shubert office and his great ambition was to put on a pantomime like Reinhardt’s Sumurun, only based on Maya Indian stories. He had a lot of photographs of Maya ruins, and Eleanor and Eveline began to design costumes for it and settings. They hoped to get Tom Custis or the Paine Emersons to put up money for a production in Chicago.
The main trouble was with the music. A young pianist whom Tom Custis had sent to Paris to study began to write it and came and played it one night. They had quite a party for him. Sally Emerson came and a lot of fashionable people, but Tom Custis drank too many cocktails to be able to hear a note and Amelia the cook got drunk and spoiled the dinner and Eveline told the young pianist that his music sounded like movie music and he went off in a huff. When everybody had gone Freddy Seargeant and Eveline and Eleanor roamed around the ravaged apartment feeling very bad indeed. Freddy Seargeant twisted his black hair, slightly splotched with gray, in his long hands and said he was going to kill himself, and Eleanor and Eveline quarrelled violently.
“But it did sound like movingpicture music and, after all, why shouldn’t it?” Eveline kept saying. Then Freddy Seargeant got his hat and went out saying, “You women are making life a hell for me,” and Eveline burst out crying and got hysterical and Eleanor had to send for a doctor.
The next day they scraped up fifty dollars to send Freddy back to New York, and Eveline went back to live at the house on Drexel Boulevard, leaving Eleanor to carry on the decorating business all alone.
Next Spring Eleanor and Eveline sold for five hundred some chandeliers that they had picked up in a junk shop on the west side for twentyfive dollars and were just writing out checks for their more pressing debts when a telegram arrived.
SIGNED CONTRACT WITH SHUBERTS PRODUCTION RETURN OF THE NATIVE WILL YOU DO SCENERY COSTUMES HUNDRED FIFTY A WEEK EACH MUST COME ON NEW YORK IMMEDIATELY MUST HAVE YOU WIRE IMMEDIATELY HOTEL DES ARTISTES CENTRAL PARK SOUTH FREDDY
“Eleanor, we’ve got to do it,” said Eveline, taking a cigarette out of her handbag and walking round the room puffing at it furiously. “It’ll be a rush, but let’s make the Twentieth Century this afternoon.” “It’s about noon now,” said Eleanor in a trembly voice. Without answering Eveline went to the phone and called up the Pullman office. That evening they sat in their section looking out of the window at the steelworks of Indiana Harbor, the big cement works belching puttycolored smoke, the flaring furnaces of Gary disappearing in smokeswirling winter dusk. Neither of them could say anything.
The Camera Eye (19)
the methodist minister’s wife was a tall thin woman who sang little songs at the piano in a spindly lost voice who’d heard you liked books and grew flowers and vegetables and was so interested because she’d once been an episcopalian and loved beautiful things and had had stories she had written published in a magazine and she was younger than her husband who was a silent blackhaired man with a mouth like a mousetrap and tobaccojuice on his chin and she wore thin white dresses and used perfume and talked in a bell-like voice about how things were lovely as a lily and the moon was bright as a bubble full to bursting behind the big pine when we walked back along the shore and you felt you ought to put your arm round her and kiss her only you didn’t want to and anyway you wouldn’t have had the nerve walking slow through the sand and the pine needles under the big moon swelled to bursting like an enormous drop of quicksilver and she talked awful sad about the things she had hoped for and you thought it was too bad
you liked books and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Captain Marryat’s novels and wanted to go away and to sea and to foreign cities Carcassonne Marakesh Isfahan and liked things to be beautiful and wished you had the nerve to hug and kiss Martha the colored girl they said was half Indian old Emma’s daughter and little redheaded Mary I taught how to swim if I only had the nerve breathless nights when the moon was full but Oh God not lilies
Newsreel XIV
BOMBARDIER STOPS AUSTRALIAN
colonel says democrats have brought distress to nation I’ll resign when I die Huerta snarls in grim defi and half Mexico will die with me no flames were seen but the vast plume of blackened steam from the crater waved a mile high in the sky and volcanic ash fell on Macomber Flats thirteen miles distant
Eggs Noisy? No Pokerchips.
Way down on the levee
In old Alabamy
There’s daddy and mammy
And Ephram and Sammy
MOONFAIRIES DANCE ON RAVINIA GREENS
WILSON WILL TAKE ADVICE OF BUSINESS
admits he threw bomb policewoman buys drinks after one loses on wheat slain as burglar
On a moonlight night
You can find them all
While they are waiting
Banjoes are syncopating
What’s that they’re all saying
What’s that they’re all singing
recognizing James scrawl the president seized the cracker and pulled out the fuse. A stream of golden gumdrops fell over the desk; then glancing at the paper the Chief Executive read “Don’t eat too many of them because Mama says they’ll make you sick if you do.”
RIDING SEAWOLF IN MEXICAN WATERS
They all keep aswaying
Ahumming and swinging
It’s the good ship Robert E. Lee
That’s come to carry the cotton away
ISADORA DUNCAN’S NEW HAPPINESS
IWW troublemakers overran a Garibaldi birthday celebration at Rosebank Staten Island this afternoon, insulted the Italian flag, pummeled and clubbed members of the Italian Rifle Society and would have thrown the American flag to the dirt if
SIX UNCLAD BATHING GIRLS BLACK
EYES OF HORRID MAN
Indian divers search for drowned boy’s body. Some of the witnesses say they saw a woman in the crowd. She was hit with a brick. The man in gray took refuge behind her skirts to fire. The upper decks and secluded parts of the boat are the spooners’ paradise where liberties are often taken with intoxicated young girls whose mothers should not have permitted them to go on a public boat unescorted.
MIDWEST MAY MAKE OR BREAK WILSON
TELL CAUSES OF UNREST IN LABOR WORLD
“I’m a Swiss admiral proceeding to America,” and the copper called a taxi
See them shuffling along
Hear their music and song
It’s simply great, mate,
Waiting on the levee
Waiting
for
the
Robert
E.
Lee.
Emperor of the Caribbean
When Minor C. Keith died all the newspapers carried his picture, a brighteyed man with a hawknose and a respectable
bay window, and an uneasy look under the eyes.
Minor C. Keith was a rich man’s son, born in a family that liked the smell of money, they could smell money half way round the globe in that family.
His Uncle was Henry Meiggs, the Don Enrique of the West Coast. His father had a big lumber business and handled realestate in Brooklyn;
young Keith was a chip of the old block
(Back in fortynine Don Enrique had been drawn to San Francisco by the gold rush. He didn’t go prospecting in the hills, he didn’t die of thirst sifting alkalidust in Death Valley. He sold outfits to the other guys. He stayed in San Francisco and played politics and high finance until he got in too deep and had to get aboard ship in a hurry.
The vessel took him to Chile. He could smell money in Chile.
He was the capitalista yanqui. He’d build the railroad from Santiago to Valparaiso. There were guano deposits on the Chincha Islands. Meiggs could smell money in guano. He dug himself a fortune out of guano, became a power on the West Coast, juggled figures, railroads, armies, the politics of the local caciques and politicos; they were all chips in a huge pokergame. Behind a big hand he heaped up the dollars.
He financed the unbelievable Andean railroads.)
When Tomas Guardia got to be dictator of Costa Rica he wrote to Don Enrique to build him a railroad;
Meiggs was busy in the Andes, a $75,000 contract was hardly worth his while,
so he sent for his nephew Minor Keith.
They didn’t let grass grow under their feet in that family:
at sixteen Minor Keith had been on his own, selling collars and ties in a clothingstore.
After that he was a lumber surveyor and ran a lumber business.
When his father bought Padre Island off Corpus Christi Texas he sent Minor down to make money out of it.
Minor Keith started raising cattle on Padre Island and seining for fish,
but cattle and fish didn’t turn over money fast enough
so he bought hogs and chopped up the steers and boiled the meat and fed it to the hogs and chopped up the fish and fed it to the hogs,
but hogs didn’t turn over money fast enough,
so he was glad to be off to Limon.
Limon was one of the worst pestholes on the Caribbean, even the Indians died there of malaria, yellow jack, dysentery.
Keith went back up to New Orleans on the steamer John G. Meiggs to hire workers to build the railroad. He offered a dollar a day and grub and hired seven hundred men. Some of them had been down before in the filibustering days of William Walker.
Of that bunch about twentyfive came out alive.
The rest left their whiskyscalded carcases to rot in the swamps.
On another load he shipped down fifteen hundred; they all died to prove that only Jamaica Negroes could live in Limon.
Minor Keith didn’t die.
In 1882 there were twenty miles of railroad built and Keith was a million dollars in the hole;
the railroad had nothing to haul.
Keith made them plant bananas so that the railroad might have something to haul, to market the bananas he had to go into the shipping business;
this was the beginning of the Caribbean fruittrade.
All the while the workers died of whisky, malaria, yellow jack, dysentery.
Minor Keith’s three brothers died.
Minor Keith didn’t die.
He built railroads, opened retail stores up and down the coast in Bluefields, Belize, Limon, bought and sold rubber, vanilla, tortoiseshell, sarsaparilla, anything he could buy cheap he bought, anything he could sell dear he sold.
In 1898 in cooperation with the Boston Fruit Company he formed the United Fruit Company that has since become one of the most powerful industrial units in the world.
In 1912 he incorporated the International Railroads of Central America;
all of it built out of bananas;
in Europe and the United States people had started to eat bananas,
so they cut down the jungles through Central America to plant bananas,
and built railroads to haul the bananas,
and every year more steamboats of the Great White Fleet
steamed north loaded with bananas,
and that is the history of the American empire in the Caribbean, and the Panama canal and the future Nicaragua canal and the marines and the battleships and the bayonets.
Why that uneasy look under the eyes, in the picture of Minor C. Keith the pioneer of the fruit trade, the railroad builder, in all the pictures the newspapers carried of him when he died?
The Camera Eye (20)
when the streetcarmen went out on strike in Lawrence in sympathy with what the hell they were a lot of wops anyway bohunks hunkies that didn’t wash their necks ate garlic with squalling brats and fat oily wives the damn dagoes they put up a notice for volunteers good clean young
to man the streetcars and show the foreign agitators this was still a white man’s
well this fellow lived in Matthews and he’d always wanted to be a streetcar conductor they said Mr. Grover had been a streetcar conductor in Albany and drank and was seen on the street with floosies
well this fellow lived in Matthews and he went over to Lawrence with his roommate and they reported in Lawrence and people yelled at them Blacklegs Scabs but those that weren’t wops were muckers a low element they liked each other a lot this fellow did and his roommate and he got up on the platform and twirled the bright brass handle and clanged the bell
it was in the carbarn his roommate was fiddling with something between the bumpers and this fellow twirled the shiny brass handle and the car started and he ran down his roommate and his head was mashed just like that between the bumpers killed him dead just like that right there in the carbarn and now the fellow’s got to face his roommate’s folks
J. Ward Moorehouse
In Pittsburgh Ward Moorehouse got a job as a reporter on The Times Dispatch and spent six months writing up Italian weddings, local conventions of Elks, obscure deaths, murders and suicides among Lithuanians, Albanians, Croats, Poles, the difficulties over naturalization papers of Greek restaurant keepers, dinners of the Sons of Italy. He lived in a big red frame house, at the lower end of Highland Avenue, kept by a Mrs. Cook, a crotchety old woman from Belfast who had been forced to take lodgers since her husband, who had been a foreman in one of the Homestead mills, had been crushed by a crane dropping a load of pigiron over him. She made Ward his breakfasts and his Sunday dinners and stood over him while he was eating them alone in the stuffy furniture-crowded diningroom telling him about her youth in the north of Ireland and the treachery of papists and the virtues of the defunct Mr. Cook.
It was a bad time for Ward. He had no friends in Pittsburgh and he had colds and sore throats all through the cold grimy sleety winter. He hated the newspaper office and the inclines and the overcast skies and the breakneck wooden stairs he was always scrambling up and down, and the smell of poverty and cabbage and children and washing in the rattletrap tenements where he was always seeking out Mrs. Piretti whose husband had been killed in a rumpus in a saloon on Locust Street or Sam Burkovich who’d been elected president of the Ukrainian singing society, or some woman with sudsy hands whose child had been slashed by a degenerate. He never got home to the house before three or four in the morning and by the time he had breakfasted round noon there never seemed to be any time to do anything before he had to call up the office for assignments again. When he had first gotten to Pittsburgh he had called to see Mr. McGill, whom he’d met with Jarvis Oppenheimer in Paris. Mr. McGill remembered him and took down his address and told him to keep in touch because he hoped to find an opening for him in the new information bureau that was being organized by the Chamber of Commerce, but the weeks went by and he got no word from Mr. McGill. He got an occasional dry note from Annabelle Marie about legal technicalities; she would divorce him charging nonsupport, desertion and cruelty. All he had to do was to refuse to go to Philad
elphia when the papers were served on him. The perfume on the blue notepaper raised a faint rancor of desire for women in him. But he must keep himself clean and think of his career.