1919 (29 page)

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. She 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.

Then Yvonne's crotchets were pretty trying; she tried to run Eveline's life with her tightlipped comments. When Don Stevens turned up for a leave, looking more haggard than ever in the grey uniform of the Quaker outfit, it was a godsend, and Eveline decided maybe she'd been in love with him after all. She told Yvonne he was her cousin and that they'd been brought up like brother and sister and put him up in Eleanor's room.

Don was in a tremendous state of excitement about the success of the Bolsheviki in Russia, ate enormously, drank all the wine in the house, and was full of mysterious references to underground forces he was in touch with. He said all the armies were mutinous and that what had happened at Caporetto would happen on the whole front, the German soldiers were ready for revolt too and that would be the beginning of the world revolution. He told her about the mutinies at Verdun, about long trainloads of soldiers he'd seen going up to an attack crying, “A bas la guerre,” and shooting at the gendarmes as they went.

“Eveline, we're on the edge of gigantic events. . . . The working classes of the world won't stand for this nonsense any longer . . . damn it, the war will have been almost worth while if we get a new socialist civilization out of it.” He leaned across the table and kissed her right under the thin nose of Yvonne who was bringing in pancakes with burning brandy on them. He wagged his finger at Yvonne and almost got a smile out of her by the way he said, “Après la guerre finie.”

That spring and summer things certainly did seem shaky, almost as if Don were right. At night she could hear the gigantic surf of the guns in continuous barrage on the crumbling front. The office was full of crazy rumors: the British Fifth army had turned and run, the Canadians had mutinied and seized Amiens, spies were disabling all the American planes, the Austrians were breaking through in Italy again. Three times the Red Cross office had orders to pack up their records and be ready to move out of Paris. In the face of all that it was hard for the publicity department to keep up the proper cheerful attitude in their releases, but Paris kept on filling up reassuringly with American faces, American M.P.s, Sam Browne belts and canned goods; and in July Major Moorehouse, who had just arrived back from the States, came into the office with a firsthand account of Château Thierry and announced that the war would be over in a year.

The same evening he asked Eveline to dine with him at the Café de la Paix and to do it she broke a date she had with Jerry Burnham who had gotten back from the Near East and the Balkans and was full of stories of cholera and calamity. J.W. ordered a magnificent dinner, he said Eleanor had told him to see if Eveline didn't need a little cheering up. He talked about the gigantic era of expansion that would dawn for America after the war. America the good samaritan healing the wounds of wartorn Europe. It was as if he was rehearsing a speech, when he got to the end of it he looked at Eveline with a funny deprecatory smile and said, “And the joke of it is, it's true,” and Eveline laughed and suddenly found that she liked J.W. very much indeed.

She had on a new dress she'd bought at Paquin's with some money her father had sent her for her birthday, and it was a relief after the uniform. They were through eating before they had really gotten started talking. Eveline wanted to try to get him to talk about himself. After dinner they went to Maxim's, but that was full up with brawling drunken aviators, and the rumpus seemed to scare J.W. so that Eveline suggested to him that they go down to her place and have a glass of wine. When they got to the quai de la Tournelle, just as they were stepping out of J.W.'s staffcar she caught sight of Don Stevens walking down the street. For a second she hoped he wouldn't see them, but he turned around and ran back. He had a young fellow with him in a private's uniform whose name was Johnson. They all went up and sat around glumly in her parlor. She and J.W. couldn't seem to talk about anything but Eleanor, and the other two sat glumly in their chairs looking embarrassed until J.W. got to his feet, went down to his staffcar, and left.