1919

Richard Ellsworth Savage

Dick and Ned felt pretty rocky the morning they sighted Fire Island lightship. Dick wasn’t looking forward to landing in God’s Country with no money and the draft board to face, and he was worried about how his mother was going to make out. All Ned was complaining about was wartime prohibition. They were both a little jumpy from all the cognac they’d drunk on the trip over. They were already in the slategreen shallow seas off Long Island; no help for it now. The heavy haze to the west and then the low boxlike houses that looked as if they were drowned in the water and then the white strip of beach of the Rockaways; the scenicrailways of Coney Island; the full green summer trees and the grey framehouses with their white trim on Staten Island; it was all heartbreakingly like home. When the immigration tug came alongside Dick was surprised to see Hiram Halsey Cooper, in khaki uniform and puttees, clambering up the steps. Dick lit a cigarette and tried to look sober.

“My boy, it’s a great relief to see you…. Your mother and I have been… er…” Dick interrupted to introduce him to Ned. Mr. Cooper, who was in the uniform of a major, took him by the sleeve and drew him up the deck. “Better put on your uniform to land.” “All right, sir, I thought it looked rather shabby.” “All the better…. Well, I suppose it’s hell over there… and no chance for courting the muse, eh?… You’re coming up to Washington with me tonight. We’ve been very uneasy about you, but that’s all over now… made me realize what a lonely old man I am. Look here, my boy, your mother was the daughter of Major General Ellsworth, isn’t that so?” Dick nodded. “Of course she must have been because my dear wife was his niece…. Well, hurry and put your uniform on and remember… leave all the talking to me.”

While he was changing into the old Norton-Harjes uniform Dick was thinking how suddenly Mr. Cooper had aged and wondering just how he could ask him to lend him fifteen dollars to pay the bill he’d run up at the bar.

New York had a funny lonely empty look in the summer afternoon sunlight; well here he was home. At the Pennsylvania station there were policemen and plainclothes men at all the entrances demanding the registration cards of all the young men who were not in uniform. As he and Mr. Cooper ran for the train he caught sight of a dejectedlooking group of men herded together in a corner hemmed by a cordon of sweating cops. When they got in their seats in the parlorcar on the Congressional Mr. Cooper mopped his face with a handkerchief. “You understand why I said to put your uniform on. Well, I suppose it was hell?”

“Some of it was pretty bad,” said Dick casually. “I hated to come back though.”

“I know you did, my boy…. You didn’t expect to find your old mentor in the uniform of a major… well, we must all put our shoulders to the wheel. I’m in the purchasing department of Ordnance. You see the chief of our bureau of personnel is General Sykes; he turns out to have served with your grandfather. I’ve told him about you, your experience on two fronts, your knowledge of languages and… well… naturally he’s very much interested…. I think we can get you a commission right away.”

“Mr. Cooper, it’s…” stammered Dick, “it’s extraordinarily decent… damn kind of you to interest yourself in me this way.”

“My boy, I didn’t realize how I missed you… our chats about the muse and the ancients… until you had gone.” Mr. Cooper’s voice was drowned out by the roar of the train. Well, here I am home, something inside Dick’s head kept saying to him.

When the train stopped at the West Philadelphia station the only sound was the quiet droning of the electric fans; Mr. Cooper leaned over and tapped Dick’s knee, “Only one thing you must promise… no more peace talk till we win the war. When peace comes we can put some in our poems…. Then’ll be the time for us all to work for a lasting peace…. As for the little incident in Italy… it’s nothing… forget it… nobody ever heard of it.” Dick nodded; it made him sore to feel that he was blushing. They neither of them said anything until the waiter came through calling, “Dinner now being served in the dining car forward.”

In Washington (now you are home, something kept saying in Dick’s head) Mr. Cooper had a room in the Willard where he put Dick up on the couch as the hotel was full and it was impossible to get another room anywhere. After he’d rolled up in the sheet Dick heard Mr. Cooper tiptoe over and stand beside the couch breathing hard. He opened his eyes and grinned. “Well, my boy,” said Mr. Cooper, “it’s nice to have you home… sleep well,” and he went back to bed.

Next morning he was introduced to General Sykes: “This is the young man who wants to serve his country,” said Mr. Cooper with aflourish, “as his grandfather served it…. In fact he was so impatient that he went to war before his country did, and enlisted in the volunteer ambulance service with the French and afterwards with the Italians.” General Sykes was a little old man with bright eyes and a hawk nose and extremely deaf. “Yes, Ellsworth was a great fellow, we campaigned against Hieronimo together… Ah, the old west… I was only fourteen at Gettysburg and damme I don’t think he was there at all. We went through West Point in the same class after the war, poor old Ellsworth…. So you’ve smelled powder have you, my boy?” Dick colored and nodded.

“You see, General,” shouted Mr. Cooper, “he feels he wants some more… er… responsible work than was possible in the ambulance service.”

“Yessiree, no place for a highspirited young fellow…. You know Andrews, Major…” The General was scribbling on a pad. “Take him to see Colonel Andrews with this memorandum and he’ll fix him up, has to decide on qualifications etc…. You understand… good luck, my boy.” Dick managed a passable salute and they were out in the corridor; Mr. Cooper was smiling broadly. “Well, that’s done. I must be getting back to my office. You go and fill out the forms and take your medical examination… or perhaps that’ll be at the camp… Anyway come and lunch with me at the Willard at one. Come up to the room.” Dick saluted smiling.

He spent the rest of the morning filling out blanks. After lunch he went down to Atlantic City to see his mother. She looked just the same. She was staying in a boarding house at the Chelsea end and was very much exercised about spies. Henry had enlisted as a private in the infantry and was somewhere in France. Mother said it made her blood boil to think of the grandson of General Ellsworth being a mere private, but that she felt confident he’d soon rise from the ranks. Dick hadn’t heard her speak of her father since she used to talk about him when he was a child, and asked her about him. He had died when she was quite a little girl leaving the family not too well off considering their station in life. All she remembered was a tall man in blue with a floppy felt hat caught up on one side and a white goatee; when she’d first seen a cartoon of Uncle Sam she’d thought it was her father. He always had hoarhound drops in a little silver bonbonnière in his pocket, she’d been so excited about the military funeral and a nice kind army officer giving her his handkerchief. She’d kept the bonbonnière for many years but it had had to go with everything else when your poor father… er… failed.

A week later Dick received a war department envelope addressed to Savage, Richard Ellsworth, 2nd Lieut. Ord. Dept., enclosing his commission and ordering him to proceed to Camp Merritt, N.J., within 24 hours. Dick found himself in charge of a casuals company at Camp Merritt and wouldn’t have known what on earth to do if it hadn’t been for the sergeant. Once they were on the transport it was better; he had what had been a first class cabin with two other 2nd Lieutenants and a Major; Dick had the drop on them all because he’d been at the front. The transport was the Leviathan; Dick began to feel himself again when he saw the last of Sandy Hook; he wrote Ned a long letter in doggerel that began:

His father was a jailbird and his mother had no kale

He was much too fond of cognac and he drank it by the pail

But now he’s a Second Lieut and supported by the State.

Sports a handsome uniform and a military gait

And this is the most terrific fate that ever can befall

A boy whose grandpa was a Major-General.

The other two shavetails in the cabin were nondescript youngsters from Leland Stanford, but Major Thompson was a Westpointer and stiff as a ramrod. He was a middleaged man with a yellow round face, thin lips and noseglasses. Dick thawed him out a little by getting him a pint of whiskey through his sergeant who’d gotten chummy with the stewards, when he got seasick two days out, and discovered that he was a passionate admirer of Kipling and had heard Copeland read Danny Deever and been very much impressed. Furthermore he was an expert on mules and horseflesh and the author of a monograph: The Spanish Horse. Dick admitted that he’d studied with Copeland and somehow it came out that he was the grandson of the late General Ellsworth. Major Thompson began to take an interest in him and to ask him questions about the donkeys the French used to carry ammunition in the trenches, Italian cavalry horses and the works of Rudyard Kipling. The night before they reached Brest when everybody was flustered and the decks were all dark and silent for the zone, Dick went into a toilet and reread the long kidding letter he’d written Ned first day out. He tore it up into small bits, dropped them in the can and then flushed it carefully: no more letters.

In Brest Dick took three majors downtown and ordered them a meal and good wine at the hotel; during the evening Major Thompson told stories about the Philippines and the Spanish war; after the fourth bottle Dick taught them all to sing Mademoiselle from Armentiéres. A few days later he was detached from his casuals company and set to Tours; Major Thompson, who felt he needed somebody to speak French for him and to talk about Kipling with, had gotten him transferred to his office. It was a relief to see the last of Brest, where everybody was in a continual grouch from the drizzle and the mud and the discipline and the saluting and the formations and the fear of getting in wrong with the brasshats.

Tours was full of lovely creamystone buildings buried in dense masses of bluegreen late summer foliage. Dick was on commutation of rations and boarded with an agreeable old woman who brought him up his café au lait in bed every morning. He got to know a fellow in the Personnel Department through whom he began to work to get Henry transferred out of the infantry. He and Major Thompson and old Colonel Edgecombe and several other offices dined together very often; they got so they couldn’t do without Dick who knew how to order a meal comme il faut, and the proper vintages of wines and could parleyvoo with the French girls and make up limericks and was the grandson of the late General Ellsworth.

When the Post Despatch Service was organized as a separate outfit, Colonel Edgecombe who headed it, got him away from Major Thompson and his horsedealers; Dick became one of his assistants with the rank of Captain. Immediately he managed to get Henry transferred from the officers’ school to Tours. It was too late though to get him more than a first lieutenancy.

When Lieutenant Savage reported to Captain Savage in his office he looked brown and skinny and sore. That evening they drank a bottle of white wine together in Dick’s room. The first thing Henry said when the door closed behind them was, “Well, of all the goddam lousy grafts… I don’t know whether to be proud of the little kid brother or to sock him in the eye.”

Dick poured him a drink. “It must have been Mother’s doing,” he said. “Honestly, I’d forgotten that granpa was a general.”

“If you knew what us guys at the front used to say about the S.O.S.”

“But somebody’s got to handle the supplies and the ordnance and…”

“And the mademosels and the vin blanc,” broke in Henry.

“Sure, but I’ve been very virtuous… Your little brother’s minding his p’s and q’s, and honestly I’ve been working like a nigger.”

“Writing loveletters for ordnance majors, I bet…. Hell, you can’t beat it. He lands with his nose in the butter every time…. Anyway I’m glad there’s one successful member of the family to carry on the name of the late General Ellsworth.”

“Have a disagreeable time in the Argonne?”

“Lousy… until they sent me back to officers’ school.”

“We had a swell time there in the ambulance service in ’17.”

“Oh, you would.”

Henry drank some more wine and mellowed up a little. Every now and then he’d look around the big room with its lace curtains and its scrubbed tile floor and it’s big fourposter bed and make a popping sound with his lips and mutter: “Pretty soft.” Dick took him out and set him up to a fine dinner at his favorite bistro and then went around and fixed him up with Minette, who was the bestlooking girl at Madame Patou’s.

After Henry had gone upstairs, Dick sat in the parlor a few minutes with a girl they called Dirty Gertie who had hair dyed red and a big floppy painted mouth, drinking the bad cognac and feeling blue. “Vous triste?” she said, and put her clammy hand on his forehead. He nodded. “Fièvre… trop penser… penser no good… moi aussi.” Then she said she’d kill herself but she was afraid, not that she believed in God, but that she was afraid of how quiet it would be after she was dead. Dick cheered her up, “Bientot guerre finee. Tout le monde content go back home.” The girl burst out crying and Madame Patou came running in screaming and clawing like a seagull. She was a heavy woman with an ugly jaw. She grabbed the girl by the hair and began shaking her. Dick was flustered. He managed to make the woman let the girl go back to her room, left some money and walked out. He felt terrible. When he got home he felt like writing some verse. He tried to recapture the sweet and heavy pulsing of feelings he used to have when he sat down to write a poem. But all he could do was just feel miserable so he went to bed. All night half thinking half dreaming he couldn’t get Dirty Gertie’s face out of his head. Then he began remembering the times he used to have with Hilda at Bay Head and had a long conversation with himself about love: Everything’s so hellishly sordid… I’m sick of whores and chastity, I want to have love affairs. He began planning what he’d do after the war, probably go home and get a political job in Jersey; a pretty sordid prospect.

He was lying on his back staring at the ceiling that was livid with dawn when he heard Henry’s voice calling his name down in the street outside; he tiptoed down the cold tiled stairs and let him in.

“Why the hell did you let me go with that girl, Dick? I feel like a louse… Oh Christ… mind if I have half this bed, Dick? I’ll get me a room in the morning.” Dick found him a pair of pyjamas and made himself small on his side of the bed. “The trouble with you, Henry,” he said, yawning, “is that you’re just an old Puritan… you ought to be more continental.”

“I notice you didn’t go with any of those bitches yourself.”

“I haven’t got any morals but I’m finnicky, my dear, Epicurus’ owne sonne,” Dick drawled sleepily.

“S — t, I feel like a dirty dishrag,” whispered Henry. Dick closed his eyes and went to sleep.

Early in October Dick was sent to Brest with a despatch case that the Colonel said was too important to entrust to an enlisted man. At Rennes he had to wait two hours for the train, and was sitting eating in the restaurant when a doughboy with his arm in a sling came up to him saying, “Hello, Dick, for crying out loud.” It was Skinny Murray. “By gosh, Skinny, I’m glad to see you… it must be five or six years… Gee, we’re getting old. Look, sit down… no, I can’t do that.”

“I suppose I ought to have saluted, sir,” said Skinny stiffly.

“Can that, Skinny… but we’ve got to find a place to talk… got any time before your train? You see it’s me the M.P.’s would arrest if they saw me eating and drinking with an enlisted man…. Wait around till I’ve finished my lunch and we’ll find a ginmill across from the station. I’ll risk it.” “I’ve got an hour… I’m going to the Grenoble leave area.”

“Lucky bastard… were you badly wounded, Skinny?” “Piece of shrapnel in the wing, captain,” said Skinny, coming to attention as a sergeant of M.P.’s stalked stiffly through the station restaurant. “Those birds gimme the willies.”

Dick hurried through his lunch, paid, and walked across the square outside the station. One of the cafés had a back room that looked dark and quiet. They were just settling down to chat over two beers when Dick remembered the despatch case. He’d left it at the table. Whispering breathlessly that he’d be back he ran across the square and into the station restaurant. Three French officers were at the table. “Pardon, messieurs.” It was still where he’d left it under the table. “If I’d lost that I’d have had to shoot myself,” he told Skinny. They chatted about Trenton and Philadelphia and Bay Head and Dr. Atwood. Skinny was married and had a good job in a Philadelphia bank. He had volunteered for the tanks and was winged by a bit of shrapnel before the attack started, damn lucky of him, because his gang had been wiped out by a black Maria. He was just out of hospital today and felt pretty weak on his pins. Dick took down his service data and said he’d get him transferred to Tours; just the kind of fellow they needed for a courier. Then Skinny had to run for his train, and Dick, with the despatch case tightly wedged under his arm, went out to stroll around the town daintily colored and faintly gay under the autumn drizzle.

The rumor of the fake armistice set Tours humming like a swarm of bees; there was a lot of drinking and backslapping and officers and enlisted men danced snakedances in and out of the officebuildings. When it turned out to be a false alarm Dick felt almost relieved. The days that followed everybody round the headquarters of the Despatch Service wore a mysterious expression of knowing more than they were willing to tell. The night of the real armistice Dick ate supper a little deliriously with Colonel Edgecombe and some other officers. After dinner Dick happened to meet the colonel in the courtyard out back. The colonel’s face was red and his moustache bristled. “Well, Savage, it’s a great day for the race,” he said, and laughed a great deal. “What race?” said Dick shyly. “The human race,” roared the colonel.

Then he drew Dick aside: “How would you like to go to Paris, my boy? It seems that there’s to be a peace conference in Paris and that President Wilson is going to attend it in person… seems incredible… and I’ve been ordered to put this outfit at the disposal of the American delegation that’s coming soon to dictate the peace, so we’ll be Peace Conference couriers. Of course I suppose if you feel you have to go home it could be arranged.”

“Oh, no, sir,” broke in Dick hurriedly. “I was just beginning to worry about having to go home and look for a job…. The Peace Conference will be a circus and any chance to travel around Europe suits me.” The colonel looked at him with narrowed eyes. “I wouldn’t put it just that way… service should be our first thought… naturally what I said is strictly confidential.” “Oh, strictly,” said Dick, but he couldn’t help wearing a grin on his face when he went back to join the others at the table.

Paris again; and this time in a new whipcord uniform with silver bars at his shoulders and with money in his pockets. One of the first things he did was to go back to look at the little street behind the Pantheon where he’d lived with Steve Warner the year before. The tall chalkgrey houses, the stores, the little bars, the bigeyed children in the black smocks, the youngsters in caps with silk handkerchiefs around their necks, the Parisian drawl of the argot; it all made him feel vaguely unhappy; he was wondering what had happened to Steve. It was a relief to get back to the office where the enlisted men were moving in newly arrived American rolltop desks and yellow varnished card index cases.

The hub of this Paris was the hôtel de Crillon on the place de la Concorde, its artery the rue Royale where arriving dignitaries, President Wilson, Lloyd George and the King and Queen of the Belgians were constantly parading escorted by the garde republicaine in their plumed helmets; Dick began living in a delirium of trips to Brussels on the night express, lobster cardinal washed down with Beaune on the red plush settees at Larue’s, champagne cocktails at the Ritz bar, talk full of the lowdown over a demie at the Café Weber; it was like the old days of the Baltimore convention, only he didn’t give a damn any more; it all hit him cockeyed funny.

One night soon after Christmas, Colonel Edgecombe took Dick to dinner at Voisin’s with a famous New York publicity man who was said to be very near to Colonel House. They stood a moment on the pavement outside the restaurant to look at the tubby domed church opposite. “You see, Savage, this fellow’s the husband of a relative of mine, one of the Pittsburgh Staples… smooth… it seems to me. You look him over. For a youngster you seem to have a keen eye for character.”

Mr. Moorehouse turned out to be a large quietspoken blueeyed jowly man with occasionally a touch of the southern senator in his way of talking. With him were a man named Robbins and a Miss Stoddard, a fraillooking woman with very transparent alabaster skin and a sharp chirpy voice; Dick noticed that she was stunningly welldressed. The restaurant was a little too much like an Episcopal church; Dick said very little, was very polite to Miss Stoddard and kept his eyes and ears open, eating the grandducal food and carefully tasting the mellow wine that nobody else seemed to pay any attention to. Miss Stoddard kept everybody talking, but nobody seemed to want to commit themselves to saying anything about the peace conference. Miss Stoddard told with considerable malice about the furnishings of the hôtel de Mûrat and the Wilsons’ colored maid and what kind of clothes the President’s wife, whom she insisted on calling Mrs. Galt, was wearing. It was a relief when they got to the cigars and liqueurs. After dinner Colonel Edgecombe offered to drop Mr. Moorehouse at the Crillon, as he staffcar had come for him. Dick and Mr. Robbins took Miss Stoddard home in a taxicab to her apartment opposite Nôtre Dâme on the left bank. They left her at her door. “Perhaps you’ll come around some afternoon to tea, Captain Savage,” she said.

The taximan refused to take them any further, said it was late and that he was bound home to Noisy-le-sec and drove off. Robbins took hold of Dick’s arm. “Now for crissake let’s go and have a decent drink…. Boy, I’m sick of the bigwigs.” “All right,” said Dick, “where’ll we go?” Walking along the foggy quay, past the shadowly bulk of Nôtre Dâme, they talked scatteringly about Paris and how cold it was. Robbins was a short man with an impudent bossy look on his red face. In the café it was only a little less chilly than in the street. “This climate’s going to be the death of me,” said Robbins, snuggling his chin down in his overcoat. “Woolly underwear’s the only answer, that’s one thing I’ve learned in the army,” said Dick laughing.

They settled on a plush bench near the stove at the end of the cigarsmoky giltornamented room. Robbins ordered a bottle of Scotch whiskey, glasses, lemon, sugar and a lot of hot water. It took a long time to get the hot water, so Robbins poured them each a quarter of a tumbler of the whiskey straight. When he’d drunk his, his face that had been sagging and tired, smoothed out so that he looked ten years younger. “Only way to keep warm in this goddam town’s to keep stewed.” “Still I’m glad to be back in little old Paree,” said Dick, smiling and stretching his legs out under the table. “Only place in the world to be right at present,” said Robbins. “Paris is the hub of the world… unless it’s Moscow.”

At the word Moscow a Frenchman playing checkers at the next table brought his eyes up from the board and stared at the two Americans. Dick couldn’t make out what there was in his stare; it made him uneasy. The waiter came with the hot water. It wasn’t hot enough, so Robbins made a scene and sent it back. He poured out a couple of halftumblers of straight whiskey to drink while they were waiting. “Is the President going to recognize the soviets?” Dick found himself asking in a low voice.

“I’m betting on it… I believe he’s sending an unofficial mission. Depends a little on oil and manganese… it used to be King Coal, but now it’s Emperor Petroleum and Miss Manganese, queen consort of steel. That’s all in the pink republic of Georgia… I hope to get there soon, they say that they have the finest wine and the most beautiful women in the world. By God, I got to get there…. But the oil… God damn it, that’s what this damned idealist Wilson can’t understand, while they’re setting him up to big feeds at Buckingham palace the jolly old British army is occupying Mosul, the Karun River, Persia… now the latrine news has it that they’re in Baku… the future oil metropolis of the world.”

“I thought the Baku fields were running dry.”

“Don’t you believe it… I just talked to a fellow who’d been there… a funny fellow, Rasmussen, you ought to meet him.” Dick said hadn’t we got plenty of oil at home. Robbins banged his fist on the table.

“You never can have plenty of anything… that’s the first law of thermodynamics. I never have plenty of whiskey…. You’re a young fellow, do you ever have plenty of tail? Well, neither Standard Oil or the Royal Dutch-Shell can ever have plenty of crude oil.”

Dick blushed and laughed a little forcedly. He didn’t like this fellow Robbins. The waiter finally came back with boiling water and Robbins made them each a toddy. For a while neither of them said anything. The checkerplayers had gone. Suddenly Robbins turned to Dick and looked in his face with his hazy blue drunkard’s eyes: “Well, what do you boys think about it all? What do the fellers in the trenches think?”

“How do you mean?”

“Oh, hell, I don’t mean anything…. But if they thought the war was lousy wait till they see the peace… Oh, boy, wait till they see the peace.”

“Down at Tours I don’t think anybody thought much about it either way… however, I don’t think that anybody that’s seen it considers war the prize way of settling international difficulties… I don’t think Blackjack Pershing himself thinks that.”

“Oh, listen to him… can’t be more than twentyfive and he talks like a book by Woodrow Wilson… I’m a son of a bitch and I know it, but when I’m drunk I say what I goddam please.”

“I don’t see any good a lot of loud talk’s going to do. It’s a magnificent tragic show… the Paris fog smells of strawberries… the gods don’t love us but we’ll die young just the same…. Who said I was sober?”

They finished up a bottle. Dick taught Robbins a rhyme in French:

Les marionettes font font font

Trois petit tours etpuis’s’en vont

and when the café closed they went out arm in arm. Robbins was humming,

Cheer up, Napoleon, you’ll soon be dead

A short life and a gay one

and stopping to talk with all the petite femmes they met on the Boul’ Mich’. Dick finally left him talking to a cowlike woman in a flappy hat in front of the fountain on the Place St. Michel, and began the long walk home to his hotel that was opposite the Gare St. Lazare.

The broad asphalt streets were deserted under the pink arclights but here and there on benches along the quais, under the bare dripping trees along the bank of the Seine, in spite of the raw night couples were still sitting huddled together in the strangleholds of l’amour. At the corner of the boulevard Sébastopol a whitefaced young man who was walking the other way looked quickly into his face and stopped. Dick slackened his pace for a moment, but walked on past the string of marketcarts rumbling down the rue de Rivoli, taking deep breaths to clear the reek of whiskey out of his head. The long brightlylighted avenue that led to the opera was empty. In front of the opera there were a few people, a girl with a lovely complexion who was hanging on the arm of a poilu gave him a long smile. Almost at his hotel he ran face to face into a girl who seemed remarkably pretty, before he knew it he was asking her what she was doing out so late. She laughed, charmingly he thought, and said she was doing the same thing he was. He took her to a little hotel on the back street behind his own. They were shown into a chilly room that smelt of furniture polish. There was a big bed, a bidet, and a lot of heavy claretcolored hangings. The girl was older than he’d thought and very tired, but she had a beautiful figure and very pale skin; he was glad to see how clean her underwear was, with a pretty lace edging. They sat a little while on the edge of the bed talking low.

When he asked her what her name was, she shook her head and smiled, “Qu’est-ce que ça vous fait?”

“L’homme sans nom et la femme sans nom, vont faire l’amour a l’hotel du néant,” he said. “Oh qu’il est rigolo, celui-là,” she giggled. “Dis, tu n’est pas malade?” He shook his head. “Moi non plus,” she said, and started rubbing up against him like a kitten.

When they left the hotel they roamed around the dark streets until they found an earlymorning coffeebar. They ate coffee and croissants together in drowsy intimate quiet, leaning very close to each other as they stood against the bar. She left him to go up the hill towards Montmartre. He asked her if he couldn’t see her again sometime. She shrugged her shoulders. He gave her thirty francs and kissed her and whispered in her ear a parody of his little rhyme:

Les petites marionettes font font font

Un P’tit peu d’amour et puis s’en vont

She laughed and pinched his cheek and the last he heard of her was her gruff giggle and “Oh qu’il est rigolo, celui-là.”

He went back to his room feeling happy and sleepy and saying to himself: what’s the matter with my life is I haven’t got a woman of my own. He had just time to wash and shave and put on a clean shirt and to rush down to headquarters in order to be there when Colonel Edgecombe, who was a damnably early riser, got in. He found orders to leave for Rome that night.

By the time he got on the train his eyes were stinging with sleepiness. He and the sergeant who went with him had a compartment reserved at the end of a first class coach marked Paris-Brindisi. Outside of their compartment the train was packed; people were standing in the aisles. Dick had taken off his coat and Sam Browne belt and was loosening his puttees, planning to stretch out on one of the seats and go to sleep even before the train left, when he saw a skinny American face in the door of the compartment. “I beg your pardon, is this Ca-ca-captain Savage?” Dick sat up and nodded yawning. “Captain Savage, my name is Barrow, G. H. Barrow, attached to the American delegation…. I have to go to Rome tonight and there’s not a seat on the train. The transport officer in the station very kindly said that… er… er although it wasn’t according to Hoyle you might stretch a point and allow us to ride with you… I have with me a very charming young lady member of the Near East Relief…” “Captain Savage, it certainly is mighty nice of you to let us ride with you,” came a drawling Texas voice, and a pinkcheeked girl in a dark grey uniform brushed past the man who said his name was Barrow and climbed up into the car. Mr. Barrow, who was shaped like a string bean and had a prominent twitching Adam’s apple and popeyes, began tossing up satchels and suitcases. Dick was sore and began to say stiffly, “I suppose you know that it’s entirely against my orders…” but he heard his own voice saying it and suddenly grinned and said, “All right, Sergeant Wilson and I will probably be shot at sunrise, but go ahead.” At that moment the train started.

Dick reluctantly scraped his things together into one corner and settled down there and immediately closed his eyes. He was much too sleepy to make the effort of talking to any damn relievers. The sergeant sat in the other corner and Mr. Barrow and the girl occupied the other seat. Through his doze Dick could hear Mr. Barrow’s voice chugging along, now and then drowned out by the rattle of the express train. He had a stuttery way of talking like a badly running motorboat engine. The girl didn’t say much except, “Oh my,” and “I declare,” now and then. It was the European situation: President Wilson says… new diplomacy… new Europe… permanent peace without annexations or indemnities. President Wilson says… new understanding between capital and labor… President Wilson appeals to… industrial democracy… plain people all over the world behind the president. Covenant. League of Nations… Dick was asleep dreaming of a girl rubbing her breasts against him purring like a kitten, of a popeyed man making a speech, of William Jennings Wilson speaking before the Baltimore conflagration, of industrial democracy in a bathhouse on the Marne in striped trunks, with a young Texas boy with pink cheeks who wanted to… like a string bean… with a twitching adamsapple…

He woke up with a nightmarish feeling that somebody was choking him. The train had stopped. It was stifling in the compartment. The blue shade was drawn down on the lamp overhead. He stepped over everybody’s legs and went out in the passage and opened a window. Cold mountain air cut into his nostrils. The hills were snowy in the moonlight. Beside the track a French sentry was sleepily leaning on his rifle. Dick yawned desperately.

The Near East Relief girl was standing beside him, looking at him smiling. “Where are we gettin’ to, Captain Savage?… Is this Italy yet?” “I guess it’s the Swiss Border… we’ll have a long wait, I guess… they take forever at these borders.”

“Oh Jimminy,” said the girl, jumping up and down, “it’s the first time I ever crossed a border.”

Dick laughed and settled back into his seat again. The train pulled into a barny lonelylooking station, very dimly lit, and the civilian passengers started piling out with their baggage. Dick sent his papers by the sergeant to the military inspection and settled back to sleep again.

He slept soundly and didn’t wake up until the Mont Cenis. Then it was the Italian frontier. Again cold air, snowy mountains, everybody getting out into an empty barn of a station.

Sleepysentimentally remembering the last time he’d gone into Italy on the Fiat car with Sheldrake, he walked shivering to the station bar and drank a bottle of mineral water and a glass of wine. He took a couple of bottles of mineral water and a fiasco of chianti back to the compartment, and offered Mr. Barrow and the girl drinks when they came back from the customs and the police looking very cross and sleepy. The girl said she couldn’t drink wine because she’d signed a pledge not to drink or smoke when she joined the N.E.R., but she drank some mineral water and complained that it tickled her nose. Then they all huddled back into their corners to try to sleep some more. By the time they pulled into the Termi station in Rome they were all calling each other by their first names. The Texas girl’s name was Anne Elizabeth. She and Dick had spent the day standing in the corridor looking out at the saffronroofed towns and the peasants’ houses each with a blue smear on the stucco behind the grapevine over the door, and the olives and the twisted shapes of the vines in their redterraced fields; the pale hilly Italian landscape where the pointed cypresses stood up so dark they were like gashes in a canvas. She’d told him all about trying to get overseas all through the war and how her brother had been killed learning to fly at San Antonio, and how nice Mr. Barrow had been on the boat and in Paris but that he would try to make love to her and acted so silly, which was very inconvenient; Dick said well maybe it wasn’t so silly. He could see that Anne Elizabeth felt fine about travelling to Rome with a real army officer who’d been to the front and could talk Italian and everything.

From the station he had to rush to the embassy with his despatch cases, but he had time to arrange to call up Miss Trent at the Near East Relief. Barrow too shook hands with him warmly and said he hoped they’d see something of each other; he was anxious to establish contacts with people who really knew what it was all about.

The only thing Dick thought of that night was to get through and get to bed. Next morning he called up Ed Schuyler at the Red Cross. They ate a big winey lunch together at an expensive restaurant near the Pincio gardens. Ed had been leading the life of Riley; he had an apartment on the Spanish Stairs and took a lot of trips. He’d gotten fat. But now he was in trouble. The husband of an Italian woman he’d been running round with was threatening to challenge him to a duel and he was afraid there’d be a row and he’d lose his job with the Red Cross. “The war was all right but it’s the peace that really gets you,” he said. Anyway he was sick of Italy and the Red Cross and wanted to go home. The only thing was that they were going to have a revolution in Italy and he’d like to stay and see it. “Well, Dick, for a member of the grenadine guards you seem to have done pretty well for yourself.”

“All a series of accidents,” said Dick, wrinkling up his nose. “Things are funny, do you know it?” “Don’t I know it… I wonder what happened to poor old Steve? Fred Summers was joining the Polish Legion, last I heard of him.” “Steve’s probably in jail,” said Dick, “where we ought to be.” “But it’s not every day you get a chance to see a show like this.”

It was four o’clock when they left the restaurant. They went to Ed’s room and sat drinking cognac in his window looking out over the yellow and verdigris roofs of the city and the baroque domes sparkling in the last sunlight, remembering how tremendously they’d felt Rome the last time they’d been there together, talking about what they’d be doing now that the war was over. Ed Schuyler said he wanted to get a foreign correspondent job that would take him out east; he couldn’t imagine going back home to upstate New York; he had to see Persia and Afghanistan. Talking about what he was going to do made Dick feel hellishly miserable. He started walking back and forth across the tiled floor.

The bell rang and Schuyler went out in the hall. Dick heard whispering and a woman’s voice talking Italian in a thin treble. After a moment Ed pushed a little longnosed woman with huge black eyes into the room. “This is Magda,” he said, “Signora Sculpi, meet Captain Savage.” After that they had to talk in mixed French and Italian. “I don’t think it’s going to rain,” said Dick. “Suppose I get hold of a girl for you and we take a drive and eat supper at Caesar’s palace… maybe it won’t be too cold.”

Dick remembered Anne Elizabeth and called up the N.E.R. The Texas voice was delighted, said the relievers were awful and that she’d made a date with Mr. Barrow but would get out of it. Yes, she’d be ready if they called for her in half an hour. After a lot of bargaining between Signora Sculpi and a cabman they hired a twohorse landau, considerably elegant and decrepit. Anne Elizabeth was waiting for them at her door. “Those old hens make me tired,” she said, jumping into the cab. “Tell him to hurry or Mr. Barrow’ll catch us…. Those old hens say I have to be in by nine o’clock. I declare it worse’n Sundayschool in there…. It was mighty nice of you to ask me out to meet your friends, Captain Savage…. I was just dying to get out and see the town…. Isn’t it wonderful? Say, where does the Pope live?”

The sun had set and it had begun to get chilly. The Palazzo dei Cesari was empty and chilly, so they merely had a vermouth there and went back into town for dinner. After dinner they went to a show at the Apollo. “My, I’ll ketch it,” said Anne Elizabeth, “but I don’t care. I want to see the town.”

She took Dick’s arm as they went into the theatre. “Do you know, Dick… all these foreigners make me feel kinder lonesome… I’m glad I got a white man with me…. When I was at school in New York I used to go out to Jersey to see a textile strike… I used to be interested in things like that. I used to feel like I do now then. But I wouldn’t miss any of it. Maybe it’s the way you feel when you’re having a really interesting time.” Dick felt a little drunk and very affectionate. He squeezed her arm and leaned over her. “Bad mans shan’t hurt lil’ Texas girl,” he crooned. “I guess you think I haven’t got good sense,” said Anne Elizabeth, suddenly changing her tone. “But oh lawsie, how’m I going to get along with that Methodist Board of Temperance and Public Morals I’ve got to live with! I don’t mean I don’t think their work’s fine… It’s awful to think of poor little children starving everywhere…. We’ve won the war, now it’s up to us to help patch things up in Europe just like the President says.” The curtain was going up and all the Italians around started shushing. Anne Elizabeth subsided. When Dick tried to get hold of her hand she pulled it away and flicked his with her fingers. “Say, I thought you were out of highschool,” she said.

The show wasn’t much, and Anne Elizabeth who couldn’t understand a word, kept letting her head drop on Dick’s shoulder and going to sleep. In the intermission when they all went to the bar for drinks, Anne Elizabeth dutifully took lemonade. Going upstairs again to their seats, there was suddenly a scuffle. A little Italian with eyeglasses and a bald head had run at Ed Schuyler screaming, “Traditore.” He ran at him so hard that they both lost their balance and rolled down the redcarpeted steps, the little Italian punching and kicking and Ed holding him off at arm’s length as best he could. Dick and Anne Elizabeth, who turned out to be very strong, grabbed the little Italian, picked him up off the ground and locked his arms behind him while Signora Sculpi fell on his neck sobbing. It was the husband.

Ed meanwhile got to his feet looking very red and sheepish. By the time the Italian police appeared everything had quieted down and the manager was nervously brushing the dust off Ed’s uniform. Anne Elizabeth found the little Italian his eyeglasses, that were badly bent, and he led his wife out, who was sobbing. He looked so funny, when he stopped in the door with his bent eyeglasses trembling on the end of his nose to shake his fist at Ed, that Dick couldn’t help laughing. Ed was apologizing profusely to the manager, who seemed to take his side, explaining to the policemen in their shiny hats that the husband was pazzo. The bell rang and they all went back to their seats. “Why, Anne Elizabeth, you’re a jujutsu expert,” Dick whispered, his lips touching her ear. They got to giggling so they couldn’t pay attention to the show and had to go out to a café.

“Now I suppose all the wops’ll think I’m a coward if I don’t challenge the poor little bugger to a duel.” “Sure, it’ll be cappistols at thirty paces now… or eggplants at five yards.” Dick was laughing so hard he was crying. Ed began to get sore. “It isn’t funny,” he said, “it’s hell of a thing to have happen… a guy never seems to be able to have any fun without making other people miserable.. poor Magda… it’s hellish for her…. Miss Trent, I hope you’ll excuse this ridiculous exhibition.” Ed got up and went home.

“Well, what on earth was that about, Dick?” asked Anne Elizabeth, when they’d gotten out in the street and were walking towards the N.E.R. boarding house. “Well, I suppose Signore husband was jealous on account of Ed’s running around with Magda… or else it’s a pretty little blackmail plot… poor Ed seems all cut up about it.” “People sure do things over here they wouldn’t do at home… I declare it’s peculiar.” “Oh, Ed gets in trouble everywhere… He’s got a special knack.” “I guess it’s the war and continental standards and everything loosens up people’s morals…. I never was prissy, but my goodness, I was surprised when Mr. Barrow asked me to go to his hotel the first day we landed… I’d only spoken to him three or four times before on the boat…. Now at home he wouldn’t have done that, not in a thousand years.” Dick looked searchingly into Anne Elizabeth’s face. “In Rome do as the Romans do,” he said with a funny smirk. She laughed, looking hard into his eyes as if trying to guess what he meant. “Oh, well, I guess it’s all part of life,” she said. In the shadow of the doorway he wanted to do some heavy kissing, but she gave him a quick peck in the mouth and shook her head. Then she grabbed his hand and squeezed it hard and said, “Let’s us be good friends.” Dick walked home with his head swimming with the scent of her sandy hair.

Dick had three or four days to wait in Rome. The President was to arrive on January 3 and several couriers were held at his disposition. Meanwhile he had nothing to do but walk around the town and listen to the bands practicing The Star-Spangled Banner and watch the flags and the stands going up.

The first of January was a holiday; Dick and Ed and Mr. Barrow and Anne Elizabeth hired a car and went out to Hadrian’s Villa and then on to Tivoli for lunch. It was a showery day and there was a great deal of mud on the roads. Anne Elizabeth said the rolling Campagna, yellow and brown with winter, made her think of back home along the Middlebuster. They ate fritto misto and drank a lot of fine gold Frascati wine at the restaurant above the waterfall. Ed and Mr. Barrow agreed about the Roman Empire and that the ancients knew the art of life. Anne Elizabeth seemed to Dick to be flirting with Mr. Barrow. It made him sore the way she let him move his chair close to hers when they sat drinking their coffee on the terrace afterwards, looking down into the deep ravine brimmed with mist from the waterfall. Dick sat drinking his coffee without saying anything.

When she’d emptied her cup Anne Elizabeth jumped to her feet and said she wanted to go up to the little round temple that stood on the hillside opposite like something in an old engraving. Ed said the path was too steep for so soon after lunch. Mr. Barrow said without enthusiasm, er, he’d go. Anne Elizabeth was off running across the bridge and down the path with Dick running after her slipping and stumbling in the loose gravel and the puddles. When they got to the bottom the mist was soppy and cold on their faces. The waterfall was right over their heads. Their ears were full of the roar of it. Dick looked back to see if Mr. Barrow was coming.

“He must have turned back,” he shouted above the falls. “Oh, I hate people who won’t ever go anywhere,” yelled Anne Elizabeth. She grabbed his hand. “Let’s run up to the temple.” They got up there breathless. Across the ravine they could see Ed and Mr. Barrow still sitting on the terrace of the restaurant. Anne Elizabeth thumbed her nose at them and then waved. “Isn’t this wonderful?” she spluttered. “Oh, I’m wild about ruins and scenery… I’d like to go all over Italy and see everything…. Where can we go this afternoon?… Let’s not go back and listen to them mouthing about the Roman Empire.”

“We might get to Nemi… you know the lake where Caligula had his galleys… but I don’t think we can get there without the car.” “Then they’d come along…. No, let’s take a walk.” “It might rain on us.” “Well, what if it does? We won’t run.”

They went up a path over the hills above the town and soon found themselves walking through wet pastures and oakwoods with the Campagna stretching lightbrown below them and the roofs of Tivoli picked out with black cypresses like exclamation points. It was a showery springfeeling afternoon. They could see the showers moving in dark grey and whitish blurs across the Campagna. Underfoot little redpurple cyclamens were blooming. Anne Elizabeth kept picking them and poking them in his face for him to smell. Her cheeks were red and her hair was untidy and she seemed to feel too happy to walk, running and skipping all the way. A small sprinkle of rain wet them a little and made the hair streak on her forehead. Then there was a patch of chilly sunlight. They sat down on the root of a big beechtree and looked up at the long redbrown pointed buds that glinted against the sky. Their noses were full of the smell of the little cyclamens. Dick felt steamy from the climb and the wet underbrush and the wine he’d drunk and the smell of the little cyclamens. He turned and looked in her eyes. “Well,” he said. She grabbed him by the ears and kissed him again and again. “Say you love me,” she kept saying in a strangling voice. He could smell her sandy hair and warm body and the sweetness of the little cyclamens. He pulled her to her feet and held her against his body and kissed her on the mouth; their tongues touched. He dragged her through a break in the hedge into the next field. The ground was too wet. Across the field was a little hut made of brush. They staggered as they walked with their arms around each other’s waists, their thighs grinding stiffly together. The hut was full of dry cornfodder. They lay squirming together among the dry crackling cornfodder. She lay on her back with her eyes closed, her lips tightly pursed. He had one hand under her head and with the other was trying to undo her clothes; something tore under his hand. She began pushing him away. “No, no, Dick, not here… we’ve got to go back.” “Darling girl… I must… you’re so wonderful.” She broke away from him and ran out of the hut. He sat up on the floor, hating her, brushing the dry shreds off his uniform.

Outside it was raining hard. “Let’s go back; Dick, I’m crazy about you but you oughtn’t to have torn my panties… oh, you’re so exasperating.” She began to laugh.

“You oughtn’t to start anything you don’t want to finish,” said Dick. “Oh, I think women are terrible… except prostitutes… there you know what you’re getting.”

She went up to him and kissed him. “Poor little boy… he feels so cross. I’m so sorry… I’ll sleep with you, Dick… I promise I will. You see it’s difficult… In Rome we’ll get a room somewhere.”

“Are you a virgin?” His voice was constrained and stiff.

She nodded. “Funny, isn’t it?… in wartime… You boys have risked your lives. I guess I can risk that.” “I guess I can borrow Ed’s apartment. I think he’s going to Naples tomorrow.” “But you really love me, Dick?” “Of course…. it’s only this makes me feel terrible… making love’s so magnificent.” “I suppose it is… Oh, I wish I was dead.”

They plodded along down the hill through the downpour that gradually slackened to a cold drizzle. Dick felt tired out and sodden; the rain was beginning to get down his neck. Anne Elizabeth had dropped her bunch of cyclamens.

When they got back the restaurant keeper said that the others had gone to the Villa d’Este, but would come back soon. They drank hot rum and water and tried to dry themselves over a brazier of charcoal in the kitchen. “We’re a fine pair of drowned rats,” tittered Anne Elizabeth. Dick growled, “A pair of precious idiots.”

By the time the others came back they were warm but still wet. It was a relief to argue with Barrow who was saying that if the ruling classes of today knew as much about the art of life as those old Italians he wouldn’t be a socialist. “I didn’t think you were a socialist any more,” broke in Anne Elizabeth. “I’m sure I’m not; look how the German socialists have acted in the war and now they try to crybaby and say they wanted peace all along.”

“It’s possible… to rec… to reconcile being a socialist with faith in our President and… er… in democracy,” stammered Barrow, going close to her. “We’ll have to have a long talk about that, Anne Elizabeth.”

Dick noticed how his eyes goggled when he looked at her. I guess he’s out after her, he said to himself. When they got into the car he didn’t care whether Barrow sat next to her or not. They drove all the way back to Rome in the rain.

The next three days were very busy with President Wilson’s visit to Rome. Dick got cards to various official functions, heard a great many speeches in Italian and French and English, saw a great many silk hats and decorations and saluted a great deal and got a pain in the back from holding a stiff military posture. In the Roman Forum he was near enough the President’s party to hear the short man with black mustaches who was pointing out the ruins of the temple of Romulus, say in stiff English, “Everything here bears relation to the events of the great war.” There was a hush as the people in the outer groups of dignitaries strained their ears to hear what Mr. Wilson would say.

“That is true,” replied Mr. Wilson in a measured voice. “And we must not look upon these ruins as mere stones, but as immortal symbols.” A little appreciative murmur came from the group. The Italian spoke a little louder next time. All the silk hats cocked at an angle as the dignitaries waited for the Italian’s reply. “In America,” he said with a little bow, “you have something greater, and it is hidden in your hearts.”

Mr. Wilson’s silk hat stood up very straight against all the time-eaten columns and the endless courses of dressed stone. “Yes,” replied Mr. Wilson, “it is the greatest pride of Americans to have demonstrated the immense love of humanity which they bear in their hearts.” As the President spoke Dick caught sight of his face past the cocksfeathers of some Italian generals. It was a grey stony cold face grooved like the columns, very long under the silk hat. The little smile around the mouth looked as if it had been painted on afterwards. The group moved on and passed out of earshot.

That evening at five, when he met Anne Elizabeth at Ed’s apartment he had to tell her all about the official receptions. He said all he’d seen had been a gold replica of the wolf suckling Romulus and Remus up at the Capitol when the President had been made a Roman citizen, and his face in the forum. “A terrifying face, I swear it’s a reptile’s face, not warmblooded, or else the face on one of those old Roman politicians on a tomb on the Via Appia…. Do you know what we are, Anne Elizabeth? we’re the Romans of the Twentieth Century”; he burst out laughing, “and I always wanted to be a Greek.”

Anne Elizabeth who was a great admirer of Wilson was annoyed at first by what he was saying. He was nervous and excited and went on talking and talking. For this once she broke her pledge and drank some hot rum with him, as the room was terribly chilly. In the light of the street lamps on the little corner of the Spanish Stairs they could see from Ed’s window, they could see the jumbled darkness of crowds continually passing and repassing. “By God, Anne Elizabeth, it’s terrible to think about it…. You don’t know the way people feel, people praying for him in peasants’ huts… oh, we don’t know anything and we’re grinding them all underfoot…. It’s the sack of Corinth… they think he’s going to give them peace, give them back the cosy beforethewar world. It makes you sick to hear all the speeches…. Oh, Christ, let’s stay human as long as we can… not get reptile’s eyes and stone faces and ink in our veins instead of blood…. I’m damned if I’ll be a Roman.”

“I know what you mean,” said Anne Elizabeth, ruffling up his hair. “You’re an artist, Dick, and I love you very much… you’re my poet, Dick.”

“To hell with them all,” said Dick, throwing his arms around her.

In spite of the hot rum, Dick was very nervous when he took his clothes off. She was trembling when he came to her on the bed. It was all right, but she bled a good deal and they didn’t have a very good time. At supper afterwards they couldn’t seem to find anything to say to each other. She went home early and Dick wandered desolately around the streets among the excited crowds and the flags and the illuminations and the uniforms. The Corso was packed; Dick went into a café and was greeted by a group of Italian officers who insisted on setting him up to drinks. One young fellow with an olive skin and very long black eyelashes, whose name was Carlo Hugobuoni, became his special friend and entertainer and took him around to all the tables introducing him as Il captain Salvaggio Ricardo. It was all asti spumante and Evviva gli americani and Italia irridenta and Meester Veelson who had saved civiltá and evviva la pace, and they ended by taking Dick to see the belle ragazze. To his great relief all the girls were busy at the house where they took him and Dick was able to slip away and go back to the hotel to bed.

The next morning when he came down to drink his coffee there was Carlo waiting for him in the hotel lobby. Carlo was very sleepy; he hadn’t been able to find a raggaza until five in the morning but now he was at the orders of his caro amico to show him round the town. All day Dick had him with him, in spite of his efforts to get rid of him without hurting his feelings. He waited while Dick went to get his orders from the military mission, had lunch with him and Ed Schuyler; it was all Ed could do to get him away so that Dick could go to Ed’s apartment to meet Anne Elizabeth. Ed was very funny about it, said that, as he’d lost Magda, he wouldn’t be able to do anything worthwhile there himself and was glad to have Dick using the room for venereal purposes. Then he linked his arm firmly in Carlo’s and carried him off to a café.

Dick and Anne Elizabeth were very tender and quiet. It was their last afternoon together. Dick was leaving for Paris that night, and Anne Elizabeth expected to be sent to Constantinople any day. Dick promised he’d get himself out to see her there. That night Anne Elizabeth went with him to the station. There they found Carlo waiting with a huge salami wrapped in silver paper and a bottle of chianti. The fellow that was going with him had brought the despatch cases, so there was nothing for Dick to do but get on the train. He couldn’t seem to think of anything to say and it was a relief when the train pulled out.

As soon as he reported to Colonel Edgecombe he was sent off again to Warsaw. Through Germany all the trains were late and people looked deathly pale and everybody talked of a bolshevik uprising. Dick was walking up and down the snowy platform, stamping to keep his feet warm, during an endless wait at a station in East Prussia, when he ran into Fred Summers. Fred was a guard on a Red Cross supply car and invited Dick to ride with him a couple of stations. Dick fetched his despatches and went along. Fred had the caboose fitted with an oilstove and a cot and a great store of wine, cognac and Baker’s chocolate. They rode all day together talking as the train joggled slowly across an endless grey frozen plain. “It’s not a peace,” said Fred Summers, “it’s a cockeyed massacre! Christ, you ought to see the pogroms.” Dick laughed and laughed. “Jerusalem, it makes me feel good to hear you, you old bum, Fred…. It’s like the old days of the grenadine guards.”

“Jez, that was a circus,” said Fred. “Out here it’s too damn hellish to be funny… everybody starved and crazy.”

“You were damn sensible not to get to be an officer… you have to be so damn careful about everything you say and do you can’t have any kind of good time.”

“Jez, you’re the last man I’d ever have expected to turn out a captain.”

“C’est la guerre,” said Dick.

They drank and talked and talked and drank so much that Dick could barely get back to his compartment with his despatch case. When they got into the Warsaw station Fred came running up with a package of chocolate bars. “Here’s a little relief, Dick,” he said. “It’s a fine for coucher avec. Ain’t a woman in Warsaw won’t coucher for all night for a chocolate bar.”

When he got back to Paris, Dick and Colonel Edgecombe went to tea at Miss Stoddard’s. Her drawingroom was tall and stately with Italian panels on the walls and yellow and orange damask hangings; through the heavy lace in the windows you could see the purple branches of the trees along the quai, the jade Seine and the tall stone lace of the apse of Notre Dame. “What a magnificent setting you have arranged for yourself, Miss Stoddard,” said Colonel Edgecombe, “and if you excuse the compliment, the gem is worthy of its setting.” “They were fine old rooms,” said Miss Stoddard, “all you need do with those old houses is to give them a chance.” She turned to Dick: “Young man, what did you do to Robbins that night we all had supper together? He talks about nothing else but what a bright fellow you are.” Dick blushed. “We had a glass of uncommonly good scotch together afterwards… It must have been that.” “Well, I’ll have to keep my eye on you… I don’t trust these bright young men.”

They drank tea sitting around an ancient wroughtiron stove. A fat major and a lanternjawed Standard Oil man named Rasmussen came in, and later a Miss Hutchins who looked very slender and welltailored in her Red Cross uniform. They talked about Chartres and about the devastated regions and the popular enthusiasm that was greeting Mr. Wilson everywhere and why Clemenceau always wore grey lisle gloves. Miss Hutchins said it was because he really had claws instead of hands and that was why they called him the tiger.

Miss Stoddard got Dick in the window: “I hear you’ve just come from Rome, Captain Savage… I’ve been in Rome a great deal since the war began… Tell me what you saw… tell me about everything… I like it better than anywhere.” “Do you like Tivoli?” “Yes, I suppose so; it’s rather a tourist place, though, don’t you think?” Dick told her the story of the fight at the Apollo without mentioning Ed’s name, and she was very much amused. They got along very well in the window watching the streetlamps come into greenish bloom along the river as they talked; Dick was wondering how old she was, la femme de trente ans.

As he and the Colonel were leaving they met Mr. Moorehouse in the hall. He shook hands warmly with Dick, said he was so glad to see him again and asked him to come by late some afternoon, his quarters were at the Crillon and there were often some interesting people there. Dick was curiously elated by the tea, although he’d expected to be bored. He began to think it was about time he got out of the service, and, on the way back to the office, where they had some work to clean up, asked the Colonel what steps he ought to take to get out of the service in France. He thought he might get a position of some kind in Paris. “Well, if you’re looking for that, this fellow Moorehouse is the man for you… I believe he’s to be in charge of some sort of publicity work for Standard Oil… Can you see yourself as a public relations counsel, Savage?” The Colonel laughed. “Well, I’ve got my mother to think of,” said Dick seriously.

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 smiled 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 declare 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.

When they got to her door she suddenly turned to him and said seriously, “Look, Dick, maybe we’ll put off the baby… I’ll try horseback riding. Everybody says that works. I’ll write you… honestly, I wouldn’t hamper your career in any way… and I know you ought to have time for your poetry… You’ve got a big future, boy, I know it… if we got married I’d work too.”

“Anne Elizabeth, you’re a wonderful girl, maybe if we didn’t have the baby we might wangle it somehow.” He took her by the shoulders and kissed her on the forehead. Suddenly she started jumping up and down, chanting like a child, “Goody, goody, goody, we’re going to get married.”

“Oh, do be serious, kid.”

“I am… unto death,” she said slowly. “Look, don’t come to see me tomorrow… I have a lot of supplies to check up. I’ll write you to Paris.”

Back at the hotel it gave him a curious feeling putting on his pyjamas and getting alone into the bed where he and Anne Elizabeth had been together that afternoon. There were bedbugs and the room smelt and he spent a miserable night.

All the way down to Paris on the train, Ed kept making him drink and talking about the revolution, saying he had it on good authority the syndicates were going to seize the factories in Italy the first of May. Hungary had gone red and Bavaria, next it would be Austria, then Italy, then Prussia and France; the American troops sent against the Russians in Archangel had mutinied: “It’s the world revolution, a goddam swell time to be alive, and we’ll be goddam lucky if we come out of it with whole skins.”

Dick said grumpily that he didn’t think so; the Allies had things well in hand. “But, Dick, I thought you were all for the revolution, it’s the only possible way to end this cockeyed war.” “The war’s over now and all these revolutions are just the war turned inside out… You can’t stop war by shooting all your opponents. That’s just more war.” They got sore and argued savagely. Dick was glad they were alone in the compartment. “But I thought you were a royalist, Ed.” “I was… but since seeing the King of Italy I’ve changed my mind… I guess I’m for a dictator, the man on the white horse.”

They settled to sleep on either side of the compartment, sore and drunk. In the morning they staggered out with headaches into the crisp air of a frontier station and drank steaming hot chocolate a freshfaced Frenchwoman poured out for them into big white cups. Everything was frosty. The sun was rising bright vermilion. Ed Schuyler talked about la belle, la douce France, and they began to get along better. By the time they reached the banlieue, they were talking about going to see Spinelli in Plus Ça Change that night.

After the office and details to attend to and the necessity of appearing stiff and military before the sergeants it was a relief to walk down the left bank of the Seine, where the buds were bursting pink and palest green on the trees, and the bouquinistes were closing up their stalls in the deepening lavender twilight, to the quai de la Tournelle where everything looked like two centuries ago, and to walk slowly up the chilly stone stairs to Eleanor’s and to find her sitting behind the teatable in an ivorycolored dress with big pearls around her neck pouring tea and retailing, in her malicious gentle voice, all the latest gossip of the Crillon and the Peace Conference. It gave Dick a funny feeling when she said as he was leaving that they wouldn’t see each other for a couple of weeks as she was going to Rome to do some work at the Red Cross office there. “What a shame we couldn’t have been there at the same time,” said Dick. “I’d have liked that too,” she said. “A revederdci, Richard.”

March was a miserable month for Dick. He didn’t seem to have any friends any more and he was sick to death of everybody around the despatch service. When he was off duty his hotel room was so cold that he’d have to go out to a café to read. He missed Eleanor and going to her cosy apartment in the afternoon. He kept getting worrying letters from Anne Elizabeth; he couldn’t make out from them what had happened; she made mysterious references to having met a charming friend of his at the Red Cross who had meant so much. Then too he was broke because he kept having to lend Henry money to buy off Olga with.

Early in April he got back from one of his everlasting trips to Coblenz and found a pneumatique from Eleanor for him at his hotel. She was inviting him to go on a picnic to Chantilly with her and J.W. the next Sunday.

They left at eleven from the Crillon in J.W.’s new Fiat. There was Eleanor in her grey tailored suit and a stately lady of a certain age named Mrs. Wilberforce, the wife of a vice-president of Standard Oil, and longfaced Mr. Rasmussen. It was a fine day and everybody felt the spring in the air. At Chantilly they went through the château and fed the big carp in the moat. They ate their lunch in the woods, sitting on rubber cushions. J.W. kept everybody laughing explaining how he hated picnics, asking everybody what it was that got into even the most intelligent women that they were always trying to make people go on picnics. After lunch they drove to Senlis to see the houses that the Uhlans had destroyed their in the battle of the Marne. Walking through the garden of the ruined château, Eleanor and Dick dropped behind the others. “You don’t know anything about when they’re going to sign peace, do you, Eleanor?” asked Dick.

“Why, it doesn’t look now as if anybody would ever sign… certainly the Italians won’t; have you seen what d’Annunzio said?”

“Because the day after peace is signed I take off Uncle Sam’s livery… The only time in my life time has ever dragged on my hands has been since I’ve been in the army.”

“I got to meet a friend of yours in Rome,” said Eleanor, looking at him sideways. Dick felt chilly all over. “Who was that?” he asked. It was an effort to keep his voice steady. “That little Texas girl… she’s a cute little thing. She said you were engaged!” Eleanor’s voice was cool and probing like a dentist’s tool.

“She exaggerated a little,” he gave a little dry laugh, “as Mark Twain said when they reported his death.” Dick felt that he was blushing furiously.

“I hope so… You see, Richard… I’m old enough to be, well at least your maiden aunt. She’s a cute little thing… but you oughtn’t to marry just yet, of course it’s none of my business… an unsuitable marriage has been the ruination of many a promising young fellow… I shouldn’t say this.”

“But I like your taking an interest like that, honestly it means a great deal to me… I understand all about marry in haste and repent at leisure. In fact I’m not very much interested in marriage anyway… but… I don’t know… Oh, the whole thing is very difficult.”

“Never do anything difficult… It’s never worth it,” said Eleanor severely. Dick didn’t say anything. She quickened her step to catch up with the others. Walking beside her he caught sight of her coldly chiselled profile jiggling a little from the jolt of her high heels on the cobbles. Suddenly she turned to him laughing, “Now I won’t scold you any more, Richard, ever again.”

A shower was coming up. They’d hardly got back into the car before it started to rain. Going home the gimcrack Paris suburbs looked grey and gloomy in the rain. When they parted in the lobby of the Crillon J.W. let Dick understand that there would be a job for him in his office as soon as he was out of the service. Dick went home and wrote his mother about it in high spirits:

… It’s not that everything isn’t intensely interesting here in Paris or that I haven’t gotten to know people quite close to what’s really going on, but wearing a uniform and always having to worry about army regulations and saluting and everything like that, seems to keep my mind from working. Inside I’ll be in the doldrums until I get a suit of civvies on again. I’ve been promised a position in J. Ward Moorehouse’s office here in Paris; he’s a dollar a year expert, but as soon as peace is signed he expects to start his business up again. He’s an adviser on public relations and publicity to big corporations like Standard Oil. It’s the type of work that will allow me to continue my real work on the side. Everybody tells me it’s the opportunity of a lifetime….

The next time he saw Miss Williams she smiled broadly and came right up to him holding our her hand. “Oh, I’m so glad, Captain Savage. J.W. says you’re gong to be with us… I’m sure it’ll be an enjoyable and profitable experience for all parties.”

“Well, I don’t suppose I ought to count my chickens before they’re hatched,” said Dick. “Oh, they’re hatched all right,” said Miss Williams, beaming at him.

In the middle of May Dick came back from Cologne with a hangover after a party with a couple of aviators and some German girls. Going out with German girls was strictly against orders from G.H.Q. and he was nervous for fear they might have been seen conducting themselves in a manner unbecoming to officers and gentlemen. He could still taste the sekt with peaches in it when he got off the train at the Gare du Nord. At the office Colonel Edgecombe noticed how pale and shaky he looked and kidded him about what a tremendous time they must be having in the occupied area. Then he sent him home to rest up. When he got to his hotel he found a pneumatique from Anne Elizabeth:

I’m staying at the Continental and must see you at once.

He took a hot bath and went to bed and slept for several hours. When he woke up it was already dark. It was some time before he remembered Anne Elizabeth’s letter. He was sitting on the edge of the bed sullenly buckling his puttees to go around and see her when there was a knock on his door. It was the elevatorman telling him a lady was waiting for him downstairs. The elevatorman had hardly said it before Anne Elizabeth came running down the hall. She was pale and had a red bruise on one side of her face. Something cantankerous in the way she ran immediately got on Dick’s nerves. “I told them I was your sister and ran up the stairs,” she said, kissing him breathlessly. Dick gave the elevatorman a couple of francs and whispered to her, “Come in. What’s the matter?” He left the room door half open.

“I’m in trouble… the N.E.R. is sending me home.”

“How’s that?”

“Played hookey once too often, I guess… I’m just as glad; they make me tired.”

“How did you hurt yourself?”

“Horse fell with me down at Ostia… I’ve been having the time of my life riding Italian cavalry horses… they’ll take anything.”

Dick was looking her hard in the face trying to make her out. “Well,” he said, “is it all right?… I’ve got to know… I’m worried sick about it.”

She threw herself face down on the bed. Dick tiptoed over and gently closed the door. She had her head stuck into her elbow and was sobbing. He sat on the edge of the bed and tried to get her to look at him. She suddenly got up and began walking around the room. “Nothing does any good… I’m going to have the baby… Oh, I’m so worried about Dad. I’m afraid it’ll kill him if he finds out… Oh, you’re so mean… you’re so mean.”

“But, Anne Elizabeth, do be reasonable… Can’t we go on being friends? I’ve just been offered a very fine position when I get out of the service, but I can’t take a wife and child at this stage of the game, you must understand that… and if you want to get married there are plenty of fellows who’d give their eyeteeth to marry you… You know how popular you are… I don’t think marriage means anything anyway.”

She sat down in a chair and immediately got up again. She was laughing: “If Dad or Buster was here it would be a shotgun wedding, I guess… but that wouldn’t help much.” Her hysterical laugh got on his nerves; he was shaking from the effort to control himself and talk reasonably.

“Why not G. H. Barrow? He’s a prominent man and has money… He’s crazy about you, told me so himself when I met him at the Crillon the other day… After all, we have to be sensible about things… It’s no more my fault than it is yours… if you’d taken proper precautions….”

She took her hat off and smoothed her hair in the mirror. Then she poured some water out in his washbasin, washed her face and smoothed her hair again. Dick was hoping she’d go, everything she did drove him crazy. There were tears in her eyes when she came up to him. “Give me a kiss, Dick… don’t worry about me… I’ll work things out somehow.”

“I’m sure it’s not too late for an operation,” said Dick. “I’ll find out an address tomorrow and drop you a line to the Continental… Anne Elizabeth… it’s splendid of you to be so splendid about this.”

She shook her head, whispered goodby and hurried out of the room.

“Well, that’s that,” said Dick aloud to himself. He felt terribly sorry about Anne Elizabeth. Gee, I’m glad I’m not a girl, he kept thinking. He had a splitting headache. He locked his door, got undressed and put out the light. When he opened the window a gust of raw rainy air came into the room and made him feel better. It was just like Ed said, you couldn’t do anything without making other people miserable. A hell of a rotten world. The streets in front of the Gare St. Lazare shone like canals where the streetlamps were reflected in them. There were still people on the pavements, a man calling I’n TRANsigeant, twangy honk of taxicabs. He thought of Anne Elizabeth going home alone in a taxicab through the wet streets. He wished he had a great many lives so that he might have spent one of them with Anne Elizabeth. Might write a poem about that and send it to her. And the smell of the little cyclamens. In the café opposite the waiters were turning the chairs upside down and setting them on the tables. He wished he had a great many lives so that he might be a waiter in a café turning the chairs upside down. The iron shutters clanked as they came down. Now was the time the women came out on the streets, walking back and forth, stopping, loitering, walking back and forth, and those young toughs with skin the color of mushrooms. He began to shiver. He got into bed, the sheets had a clammy glaze on them. All the same Paris was no place to go to bed alone, no place to go home alone in a honking taxi, in the heartbreak of honking taxis. Poor Anne Elizabeth. Poor Dick. He lay shivering between the clammy sheets, his eyes were pinned open with safetypins.

Gradually he got warmer. Tomorrow. Seventhirty: shave, buckle puttees… café au lait, brioches, beurre. He’d be hungry, hadn’t had any supper… deux oeux sur le plat. Bonjour m’ssieurs mesdames. Jingling spurs to the office, Sergeant Ames at ease. Day dragged out in khaki; twilight tea at Eleanor’s, make her talk to Moorehouse to clinch job after the signing of the peace, tell her about the late General Ellsworth, they’ll laugh about it together. Dragged out khaki days until after the signing of the peace. Dun, drab, khaki. Poor Dick got to go to work after signing of the peace. Poor Tom’s cold. Poor Dickyboy… Richard… He brought his feet up to where he could rub them. Poor Richard’s feet. After the Signing of the Peace.

By the time his feet were warm he’d fallen asleep.