Janey thought what a shame it was he’d had his neck shaved when he had a haircut; his neck was red and had little wrinkles in it and she thought of the rough life he must be leading and when he came back she asked him why he didn’t get a different job. “You mean in a shipyard? They’re making big money in shipyards, but hell, Janey, I’d rather knock around . . . It’s all for the experience, as the feller said when they blew his block off.” “No, but there are boys not half so bright as you are with nice clean jobs right in my office . . . and a future to look forward to.”
“All my future’s behind me,” said Joe with a laugh. “Might go down to Perth Amboy get a job in a munitions factory, but I rather be blowed up in the open, see?”
Janey went on to talk about the war and how she wished we were in it to save civilization and poor little helpless Belgium. “Can that stuff, Janey,” said Joe. He made a cutting gesture with his big red hand above the tablecloth. “You people don’t understand it, see . . . The whole damn war’s crooked from start to finish. Why don’t they torpedo any French Line boats? Because the Frogs have it all set with the Jerries, see, that if the Jerries leave their boats alone they won’t shell the German factories back of the front. What we wanta do’s sit back and sell ’em munitions and let ’em blow ’emselves to hell. An’ those babies are makin’ big money in Bordeaux and Toulouse or Marseilles while their own kin are shootin’ daylight into each other at the front, and it’s the same thing with the limeys . . . I’m tellin’ ye, Janey, this war’s crooked, like every other goddam thing.”
Janey started to cry. “Well, you needn’t curse and swear all the time.” “I’m sorry, sister,” said Joe humbly, “but I’m just a bum an’ that’s about the size of it an’ not fit to associate with a nicedressed girl like you.” “No, I didn’t mean that,” said Janey, wiping her eyes.
“Gee, but I forgot to show you the shawl.” He unwrapped the paper package. Two Spanish shawls spilled out on the table, one of black lace and the other green silk embroidered with big flowers. “Oh, Joe, you oughtn’t to give me both of them . . . You ought to give one to your best girl.” “The kinda girls I go with ain’t fit to have things like that . . . I bought those for you, Janey.” Janey thought the shawls were lovely and decided she’d give one of them to Eliza Tingley.
They went to the Hippodrome but they didn’t have a very good time. Janey didn’t like shows like that much and Joe kept falling asleep. When they came out of the theater it was bitterly cold. Gritty snow was driving hard down Sixth Avenue almost wiping the “L” out of sight. Joe took her home in a taxi and left her at her door with an abrupt, “So long, Janey.” She stood a moment on the step with her key in her hand and watched him walking west towards Tenth Avenue and the wharves, with his head sunk in his peajacket.
That winter the flags flew every day on Fifth Avenue. Janey read the paper eagerly at breakfast; at the office there was talk of German spies and submarines and atrocities and propaganda. One morning a French military mission came to call on J. Ward, handsome pale officers with blue uniforms and red trousers and decorations. The youngest of them was on crutches. They’d all of them been severely wounded at the front. When they’d left, Janey and Gladys almost had words because Gladys said officers were a lot of lazy loafers and she’d rather see a mission of private soldiers. Janey wondered if she oughtn’t to tell J. Ward about Gladys’s pro-Germanism, whether it mightn’t be her patriotic duty. The Comptons might be spies; weren’t they going under an assumed name? Benny was a socialist or worse, she knew that. She decided she’d keep her eyes right open.
The same day G. H. Barrow came in. Janey was in the private office with them all the time. They talked about President Wilson and neutrality and the stockmarket and the delay in transmission in the Lusitania note. G. H. Barrow had had an interview with the president. He was a member of a committee endeavoring to mediate between the railroads and the Brotherhoods that were threatening a strike. Janey liked him better than she had on the private car coming up from Mexico, so that when he met her in the hall just as he was leaving the office she was quite glad to talk to him and when he asked her to come out to dinner with him, she accepted and felt very devilish.
All the time G. H. Barrow was in New York he took Janey out to dinner and the theater. Janey had a good time and she could always kid him about Queenie if he tried to get too friendly going home in a taxi. He couldn’t make out where she’d found out about Queenie and he told her the whole story and how the woman kept hounding him for money, but he said that now he was divorced from his wife and there was nothing she could do. After making Janey swear she’d never tell a soul, he explained that through a legal technicality he’d been married to two women at the same time and that Queenie was one of them and that now he’d divorced them both, and there was nothing on earth Queenie could do but the newspapers were always looking for dirt and particularly liked to get something on a liberal like himself devoted to the cause of labor. Then he talked about the art of life and said American women didn’t understand the art of life; at least women like Queenie didn’t. Janey felt very sorry for him but when he asked her to marry him she laughed and said she really would have to consult counsel before replying. He told her all about his life and how poor he’d been as a boy and then about jobs as stationagent and freightagent and conductor and the enthusiasm with which he’d gone into work for the Brotherhood and how his muckraking articles on conditions in the railroads had made him a name and money so that all his old associates felt he’d sold out, but that, so help me, it wasn’t true. Janey went home and told the Tingleys all about the proposal, only she was careful not to say anything about Queenie or bigamy, and they all laughed and joked about it and it made Janey feel good to have been proposed to by such an important man and she wondered why it was such interesting men always fell for her and regretted they always had that dissipated look, but she didn’t know whether she wanted to marry G. H. Barrow or not.
At the office next morning, she looked him up in Who’s Who and there he was, Barrow, George Henry, publicist . . . but she didn’t think she could ever love him. At the office that day J. Ward looked very worried and sick and Janey felt so sorry for him and quite forgot about G. H. Barrow. She was called into a private conference J. Ward was having with Mr. Robbins and an Irish lawyer named O’Grady, and they said did she mind if they rented a safe deposit box in her name to keep certain securities in and started a private account for her at the Bankers Trust. They were forming a new corporation. There were business reasons why something of the sort might become imperative. Mr. Robbins and J. Ward would own more than half the stock of a new concern and would work for it on a salary basis. Mr. Robbins looked very worried and a little drunk and kept lighting cigarettes and forgetting them on the edge of the desk and kept saying, “You know very well, J.W., that anything you do is O.K. by me.” J. Ward explained to Janey that she’d be an officer of the new corporation but of course would in no way be personally liable. It came out that old Mrs. Staple was suing J. Ward to recover a large sum of money and that his wife had started divorce proceedings in Pennsylvania and that she was refusing to let him go home to see the children and that he was living at the McAlpin.
“Gertrude’s lost her mind,” said Mr. Robbins genially. Then he slapped J. Ward on the back. “Looks like the fat was in the fire now,” he roared. “Well, I’m goin’ out to lunch; a man must eat . . . and drink . . . even if he’s a putative bankrupt.” J. Ward scowled and said nothing and Janey thought it was in very bad taste to talk like that and so loud too.
When she went home that evening she told the Tingleys that she was going to be a director of the new corporation and they thought it was wonderful that she was getting ahead so fast and that she really ought to ask for a raise even if business was in a depressed state. Janey smiled, and said, “All in good time.” On the way home she had stopped in the telegraph office on Twentythird Street and wired G. H. Barrow, who had gone up to Washington: let’s just be fr
iends.
Eddy Tingley brought out a bottle of sherry and at dinner he and Eliza drank a toast, “To the new executive,” and Janey blushed crimson and was very pleased. Afterwards they played a rubber of dummy bridge.
The Camera Eye (26)
the garden was crowded and outside Madison Square was full of cops that made everybody move on and the bombsquad all turned out
we couldn’t get a seat so we ran up the stairs to the top gallery and looked down through the blue air at the faces thick as gravel and above them on the speakers’ stand tiny black figures and a man was speaking and whenever he said war there were hisses and whenever he said Russia there was clapping on account of the revolution I didn’t know who was speaking somebody said Max Eastman and somebody said another guy but we clapped and yelled for the revolution and hissed for Morgan and the capitalist war and there was a dick looking into our faces as if he was trying to remember them
then we went to hear Emma Goldman at the Bronx Casino but the meeting was forbidden and the streets around were very crowded and there were moving vans moving through the crowd and they said the moving vans were full of cops with machineguns and there were little policedepartment Fords with searchlights and they charged the crowd with the Fords and the searchlights everybody talked machineguns revolution civil liberty freedom of speech but occasionally somebody got into the way of a cop and was beaten up and shoved into a patrol wagon and the cops were scared and they said they were calling out the fire department to disperse the crowd and everybody said it was an outrage and what about Washington and Jefferson and Patrick Henry?
afterwards we went to the Brevoort it was much nicer everybody who was anybody was there and there was Emma Goldman eating frankfurters and sauerkraut and everybody looked at Emma Goldman and at everybody else that was anybody and everybody was for peace and the coöperative commonwealth and the Russian revolution and we talked about red flags and barricades and suitable posts for machineguns
and we had several drinks and welsh rabbits and paid our bill and went home, and opened the door with a latchkey and put on pajamas and went to bed and it was comfortable in bed
Newsreel XVIII
Goodby Piccadilly, farewell Leicester Square
It’s a long long way to Tipperary
WOMAN TRAPS HUSBAND WITH GIRL IN HOTEL
to such a task we can dedicate our lives
and our fortunes, everything that we are,
and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know
that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her
blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth
and happiness and the peace that she has treasured. God
helping her she can do no other
It’s a long way to Tipperary
It’s a long way to go
It’s a long way to Tipperary
And the sweetest girl I know
TRAITORS BEWARE
four men in Evanston fined for killing birds
WILSON WILL FORCE DRAFT
food gamblers raise price of canned foods move for dry U S in war files charges when men ignore national air
JOFFRE ASKS TROOPS NOW
Mooney case incentive
Goodby Piccadilly, farewell Leicester Square
It’s a long long way to Tipperary
But my heart’s right there.
HOUSE REFUSES TO ALLOW T R TO RAISE TROOPS
the American Embassy was threatened today with an attack by a mob of radical socialists led by Nicolai Lenin an exile who recently returned from Switzerland via Germany
ALLIES TWINE FLAGS ON TOMB OF WASHINGTON
Eleanor Stoddard
Eleanor thought that things were very exciting that winter. She and J.W. went out a great deal together, to all the French operas and to first nights. There was a little French restaurant where they ate hors d’œuvres way east in Fiftysixth Street. They went to see French paintings in the galleries up Madison Avenue. J.W. began to get interested in art, and Eleanor loved going round with him because he had such a romantic manner about everything and he used to tell her she was his inspiration and that he always got good ideas when he’d been talking to her. They often talked about how silly people were who said that a man and a woman couldn’t have a platonic friendship. They wrote each other little notes in French every day. Eleanor often thought it was a shame J.W. had such a stupid wife who was an invalid too, but she thought that the children were lovely and it was nice that they both had lovely blue eyes like their father.
She had an office now all by herself and had two girls working with her to learn the business and had quite a lot of work to do. The office was in the first block above Madison Square on Madison Avenue and she just had her own name on it. Eveline Hutchins didn’t have anything to do with it any more as Dr. Hutchins had retired and the Hutchinses had all moved out to Santa Fe. Eveline sent her an occasional box of Indian curios or pottery and the watercolors the Indian children did in the schools, and Eleanor found they sold very well. In the afternoon she’d ride downtown in a taxi and look up at the Metropolitan Life tower and the Flatiron Building and the lights against the steely Manhattan sky and think of crystals and artificial flowers and gilt patterns on indigo and claretcolored brocade.
The maid would have tea ready for her and often there would be friends waiting for her, young architects or painters. There’d always be flowers, calla lilies with the texture of icecream or a bowl of freesias. She’d talk a while before slipping off to dress for dinner. When J.W. phoned that he couldn’t come she’d feel very bad. If there was still anybody there who’d come to tea she’d ask him to stay and have potluck with her.
The sight of the French flag excited her always or when a band played Tipperary; and one evening when they were going to see The Yellow Jacket for the third time, she had on a new fur coat that she was wondering how she was going to pay for, and she thought of all the bills at her office and the house on Sutton Place she was remodeling on a speculation and wanted to ask J.W. about a thousand he’d said he’d invested for her and wondered if there’d been any turnover yet. They’d been talking about the air raids and poison gas and the effect of the war news downtown and the Bowmen of Mons and the Maid of Orleans and she said she believed in the supernatural, and J.W. was hinting something about reverses on the Street and his face looked drawn and worried; but they were crossing Times Square through the eight o’clock crowds and the skysigns flashing on and off. The fine little triangular men were doing exercises on the Wrigley sign and suddenly a grindorgan began to play The Marseillaise and it was too beautiful; she burst into tears and they talked about Sacrifice and Dedication and J.W. held her arm tight through the fur coat and gave the organgrinder man a dollar. When they got to the theater Eleanor hurried down to the ladies’ room to see if her eyes had got red. But when she looked in the mirror they weren’t red at all and there was a flash of heartfelt feeling in her eyes, so she just freshened up her face and went back up to the lobby, where J.W. was waiting for her with the tickets in his hand; her gray eyes were flashing and had tears in them.
Then one evening J.W. looked very worried indeed and said when he was taking her home from the opera where they’d seen Manon that his wife didn’t understand their relations and was making scenes and threatening to divorce him. Eleanor was indignant and said she must have a very coarse nature not to understand that their relations were pure as driven snow. J.W. said she had and that he was very worried and he explained that most of the capital invested in his agency was his mother-in-law’s and that she could bankrupt him if she wanted to, which was much worse than a divorce. At that Eleanor felt very cold and crisp and said that she would rather go out of his life entirely than break up his home and that he owed something to his lovely children. J.W. said she was his inspiration and he had to have her in his life and when they got back to Eighth Street they walked back and forth in Eleanor’s white glittering drawingroom in the heavy sme
ll of lilies wondering what could be done. They smoked many cigarettes but they couldn’t seem to come to any decision. When J.W. left he said with a sigh, “She may have detectives shadowing me this very minute,” and he went away very despondent.
After he’d gone Eleanor walked back and forth in front of the long Venetian mirror between the windows. She didn’t know what to do. The decorating business was barely breaking even. She had the amortization to pay off on the house on Sutton Place. The rent of her apartment was two months overdue and there was her fur coat to pay for. She’d counted on the thousand dollars’ worth of shares J.W. had said would be hers if he made the killing he expected in that Venezuela Oil stock. Something must have gone wrong or else he would have spoken of it. When Eleanor went to bed she didn’t sleep. She felt very miserable and lonely. She’d have to go back to the drudgery of a department store. She was losing her looks and her friends and now if she had to give up J.W. it would be terrible. She thought of her colored maid Augustine with her unfortunate loves that she always told Eleanor about and she wished she’d been like that. Maybe she’d been wrong from the start to want everything so justright and beautiful. She didn’t cry but she lay all night with her eyes wide and smarting staring at the flowered molding round the ceiling that she could see in the light that filtered in from the street through her lavender tulle curtains.