Chairs scraped and squeaked, pencils scratched on pads, everybody was very attentive. Everybody got it down that J.W. was sailing for New York on the Rochambeau in two weeks. After the newspapermen had gone off to make their cable deadline, J.W. yawned and asked Dick to make his excuses to Eleanor, that he was really too tired to get down to her place tonight. When Dick got out on the streets again there was still a little of the violet of dusk in the sky. He hailed a taxi; goddam it, he could take a taxi whenever he wanted to now.
It was pretty stiff at Eleanor’s, people were sitting around in the parlor and in one bedroom that had been fitted up as a sort of boudoir with a tall mirror draped with lace, talking uncomfortably and intermittently. The bridegroom looked as if he had ants under his collar. Eveline and Eleanor were standing in the window talking with a gauntfaced man who turned out to be Don Stevens who’d been arrested in Germany by the Army of Occupation and for whom Eveline had made everybody scamper around so. “And any time I get in a jam,” he was saying, “I always find a little Jew who helps get me out… this time he was a tailor.”
“Well, Eveline isn’t a little Jew or a tailor,” said Eleanor icily, “but I can tell you she did a great deal.”
Stevens walked across the room to Dick and asked him what sort of a man Moorehouse was. Dick found himself blushing. He wished Stevens wouldn’t talk so loud. “Why, he’s a man of extraordinary ability,” he stammered.
“I thought he was a stuffed shirt… I didn’t see what those damn fools of the bourgeois press thought they were getting for a story… I was there for the D.H.”
“Yes, I saw you,” said Dick.
“I thought maybe, from what Steve Warner said, you were the sort of guy who’d be boring from within.”
“Boring in another sense, I guess, boring and bored.”
Stevens stood over him glaring at him as if he was going to hit him. “Well, we’ll know soon enough which side a man’s on. We’ll all have to show our faces, as they say in Russia, before long.”
Eleanor interrupted with a fresh smoking bottle of champagne. Stevens went back to talk to Eveline in the window. “Why, I’d as soon have a Baptist preacher in the house,” Eleanor tittered.
“Damn it, I hate people who get their pleasure by making other people feel uncomfortable,” grumbled Dick under his breath. Eleanor smiled a quick V-shaped smile and gave his arm a pat with her thin white hand, that was tipped by long nails pointed and pink and marked with halfmoons. “So do I, Dick, so do I.”
When Dick whispered that he had a headache and thought he’d go home and turn in, she gripped his arm and pulled him into the hall. “Don’t you dare go home and leave me alone with this frost.” Dick made a face and followed her back into the salon. She poured him a glass of champagne from the bottle she still held in her hand: “Cheer up Eveline,” she whispered squeakily. “She’s about ready to go down for the third time.”
Dick stood around for hours talking to Mrs. Johnson about books, plays, the opera. Neither of them seemed to be able to keep track of what the other was saying. Eveline couldn’t keep her eyes off her husband. He had a young cubbish look Dick couldn’t help liking; he was standing by the sideboard getting tight with Stevens, who kept making ugly audible remarks about parasites and the lahdedah boys of the bourgeoisie. It went on for a long time. Paul Johnson got sick and Dick had to help him find the bathroom. When he came back into the salon he almost had a fight with Stevens, who, after an argument about the Peace Conference, suddenly hauled off with his fists clenched and called him a goddam fairy. The Johnsons hustled Stevens out. Eleanor came up to Dick and put her arm around his neck and said he’d been magnificent.
Paul Johnson came back upstairs after they’d gone to get the parakeets. He looked pale as a sheet. One of the birds had died and was lying on its back stiff with his claws in the air at the bottom of the cage.
At about three o’clock Dick rode home to his hotel in a taxi.
Newsreel XLIII
the placards borne by the radicals were taken away from them, their clothing torn and eyes blackened before the service and ex-service men had finished with them
34 Die After Drinking Wood Alcohol Trains in France May Soon Stop
Gerard Throws His Hat into the Ring
SUPREME COURT DASHES LAST HOPE OF
MOIST MOUTH
LIFE BOAT CALLED BY ROCKET SIGNALS SEARCHES IN
VAIN FOR SIXTEEN HOURS
America I love you
You’re like a sweetheart of mine
LES GENS SAGES FUIENT LES REUNIONS POLITIQUES
WALLSTREET CLOSES WEAK: FEARS
TIGHT MONEY
From ocean to ocean
For you my devotion
Is touching each boundary line
LITTLE CARUSO EXPECTED
his mother, Mrs. W.D. McGillicudy said: “My first husband was killed while crossing tracks in front of a train, my second husband was killed in the same way and now it is my son
Just like a little baby
Climbing its mother’s knee
MACHINEGUNS MOW DOWN MOBS
IN KNOXVILLE
America I love you
Aviators Lived for Six Days on Shellfish
the police compelled the demonstrators to lower these flags and ordered the convention not to exhibit any red emblems save the red in the starry banner of the United States; it may not be indiscreet to state, however, in any case it cannot dim his glory, that General Pershing was confined to his stateroom through seasickness when the message arrived. Old Fellow of 89 Treasures Chewinggum as Precious Souvenir Couldn’t Maintain His Serenity In Closing League Debates
And there’s a hundred million others like me
The Body of an American
Whereasthe Congressoftheunitedstates byaconcurrentresolutionadoptedon the4thdayofmarch lastauthorizedthe Secretaryofwar to cause to be brought to theunitedstatesthe body of an American whowasamemberoftheamericanexpeditionaryforcesineuropewholosthis lifeduringtheworldwarandwhoseidentityhasnot beenestablished for burial inthememorialamphitheatreofthe nationalcemeteryatarlingtonvirginia
In the tarpaper morgue at Chalons-sur-Marne in the reek of chloride of lime and the dead, they picked out the pine box that held all that was left of
enie menie minie moe plenty other pine boxes stacked up there containing what they’d scraped up of Richard Roe
and other person or persons unknown. Only one can go. How did they pick John Doe?
Make sure he aint a dinge, boys,
make sure he aint a guinea or a kike,
how can you tell a guy’s a hundredpercent when all you’ve got’s a gunnysack full of bones, bronze buttons stamped with the screaming eagle and a pair of roll puttees?
… and the gagging chloride and the puky dirtstench of the yearold dead…