1919

Richard Ellsworth Savage

The pinnacles and buttresses of the apse of Nôtre Dâme looked crumbly as cigarash in the late afternoon sunshine. “But you’ve got to stay, Richard,” Eleanor was saying as she went about the room collecting the teathings on a tray for the maid to take out. “I had to do something about Eveline and her husband before they sailed… after all, she’s one of my oldest friends… and I’ve invited all her wildeyed hangerson to come in afterwards.” A fleet of big drays loaded with winebarrels rumbled along the quay outside. Dick was staring out into the grey ash of the afternoon. “Do close that window, Richard, the dust is pouring in…. Of course, I realize that you’ll have to leave early to go to J.W.’s meeting with the press…. If it hadn’t been for that he’d have had to come, poor dear, but you know how busy he is.” “Well, I don’t exactly find the time hanging on my hands… but I’ll stay and greet the happy pair. In the army I’d forgotten about work.” He got to his feet and walked back into the room to light a cigarette.

“Well, you needn’t be so mournful about it.”

“I don’t see you dancing in the streets yourself.”

“I think Eveline’s made a very grave mistake… Americans are just too incredibly frivolous about marriage.”

Dick’s throat got tight. He found himself noticing how stiffly he put the cigarette to his mouth, inhaled the smoke and blew it out. Eleanor’s eyes were on his face, cool and searching. Dick didn’t say anything, he tried to keep his face stiff.

“Were you in love with that poor girl, Richard?”

Dick blushed and shook his head.

“Well, you needn’t pretend to be hard about it… it’s just young to pretend to be hard about things.”

“Jilted by army officer, Texas belle killed in a plane wreck… but most of the correspondents know me and did their best to kill that story…. What did you expect me to do, jump into the grave like Hamlet? The Hon. Mr. Barrow did all of that that was necessary. It was a frightfully tough break…” He let himself drop into a chair. “I wish I was hard enough so that I didn’t give a damn about anything. When history’s walking on all our faces is no time for pretty sentiments.” He made a funny face and started talking out of the corner of his mouth. “All I asked sister is to see de woild with Uncle Woodrow… le beau monde sans blague tu sais.” Eleanor was laughing her little shrill laugh when they heard Eveline’s and Paul Johnson’s voices outside on the landing.

Eleanor had bought them a pair of little blue parakeets in a cage. They drank Montracher and ate roast duck cooked with oranges. In the middle of the meal Dick had to go up to the Crillon. It was a relief to be out in the air, sitting in an open taxi, running past the Louvre made enormous by the late twilight under which the Paris streets seemed empty and very long ago like the Roman forum. All the way up past the Tuileries he played with an impulse to tell the taxidriver to take him to the opera, to the circus, to the fortifications, anywhere to hell and gone. He set his pokerface as he walked past the doorman at the Crillon.

Miss Williams gave him a relieved smile when he appeared in the door. “Oh, I was afraid you’d be late, Captain Savage.” Dick shook his head and grinned. “Anybody come?” “Oh, they’re coming in swarms. It’ll make the front pages,” she whispered. Then she had to answer the phone.

The big room was already filling up with newspaper men. Jerry Burnham whispered as he shook hands, “Say, Dick, if it’s a typewritten statement you won’t leave the room alive.” “Don’t worry,” said Dick with a grin. “Say, where’s Robbins?” “He’s out of the picture,” said Dick dryly, “I think he’s in Nice drinking up the last of his liver.”

J.W. had come in by the other door and was moving around the room shaking hands with men he knew, being introduced to others. A young fellow with untidy hair and his necktie crooked put a paper in Dick’s hand. “Say, ask him if he’d answer some of these questions.” “Is he going home to campaign for the League of Nations?” somebody asked in his other ear.

Everybody was settled in chairs; J.W. leaned over the back of his and said that this was going to be an informal chat, after all, he was an old newspaper man himself. There was a pause. Dick glanced around at J.W.’s pale slightly jowly face just in time to catch a flash of his blue eyes around the faces of the correspondents. An elderly man asked in a grave voice if Mr. Moorehouse cared to say anything about the differences of opinion between the President and Colonel House. Dick settled himself back to be bored. J.W. answered with a cool smile that they’d better ask Colonel House himself about that. When somebody spoke the word oil everybody sat up in their chairs. Yes, he could say definitely an accord, a working agreement had been reached between certain American oil producers and perhaps the Royal Dutch-Shell, oh, no, of course not to set prices but as proof of a new era of international cooperation that was dawning in which great aggregations of capital would work together for peace and democracy, against reactionaries and militarists on the one hand and against the bloody forces of bolshevism on the other. And what about the League of Nations? “A new era,” went on J.W. in a confidential tone, “is dawning.”

Chairs scraped and squeaked, pencils scratched on pads, everybody was very attentive. Everybody got it down that J.W. was sailing for New York on the Rochambeau in two weeks. After the newspapermen had gone off to make their cable deadline, J.W. yawned and asked Dick to make his excuses to Eleanor, that he was really too tired to get down to her place tonight. When Dick got out on the streets again there was still a little of the violet of dusk in the sky. He hailed a taxi; goddam it, he could take a taxi whenever he wanted to now.

It was pretty stiff at Eleanor’s, people were sitting around in the parlor and in one bedroom that had been fitted up as a sort of boudoir with a tall mirror draped with lace, talking uncomfortably and intermittently. The bridegroom looked as if he had ants under his collar. Eveline and Eleanor were standing in the window talking with a gauntfaced man who turned out to be Don Stevens who’d been arrested in Germany by the Army of Occupation and for whom Eveline had made everybody scamper around so. “And any time I get in a jam,” he was saying, “I always find a little Jew who helps get me out… this time he was a tailor.”

“Well, Eveline isn’t a little Jew or a tailor,” said Eleanor icily, “but I can tell you she did a great deal.”

Stevens walked across the room to Dick and asked him what sort of a man Moorehouse was. Dick found himself blushing. He wished Stevens wouldn’t talk so loud. “Why, he’s a man of extraordinary ability,” he stammered.

“I thought he was a stuffed shirt… I didn’t see what those damn fools of the bourgeois press thought they were getting for a story… I was there for the D.H.”

“Yes, I saw you,” said Dick.

“I thought maybe, from what Steve Warner said, you were the sort of guy who’d be boring from within.”

“Boring in another sense, I guess, boring and bored.”

Stevens stood over him glaring at him as if he was going to hit him. “Well, we’ll know soon enough which side a man’s on. We’ll all have to show our faces, as they say in Russia, before long.”

Eleanor interrupted with a fresh smoking bottle of champagne. Stevens went back to talk to Eveline in the window. “Why, I’d as soon have a Baptist preacher in the house,” Eleanor tittered.

“Damn it, I hate people who get their pleasure by making other people feel uncomfortable,” grumbled Dick under his breath. Eleanor smiled a quick V-shaped smile and gave his arm a pat with her thin white hand, that was tipped by long nails pointed and pink and marked with halfmoons. “So do I, Dick, so do I.”

When Dick whispered that he had a headache and thought he’d go home and turn in, she gripped his arm and pulled him into the hall. “Don’t you dare go home and leave me alone with this frost.” Dick made a face and followed her back into the salon. She poured him a glass of champagne from the bottle she still held in her hand: “Cheer up Eveline,” she whispered squeakily. “She’s about ready to go down for the third time.”

Dick stood around for hours talking to Mrs. Johnson about books, plays, the opera. Neither of them seemed to be able to keep track of what the other was saying. Eveline couldn’t keep her eyes off her husband. He had a young cubbish look Dick couldn’t help liking; he was standing by the sideboard getting tight with Stevens, who kept making ugly audible remarks about parasites and the lahdedah boys of the bourgeoisie. It went on for a long time. Paul Johnson got sick and Dick had to help him find the bathroom. When he came back into the salon he almost had a fight with Stevens, who, after an argument about the Peace Conference, suddenly hauled off with his fists clenched and called him a goddam fairy. The Johnsons hustled Stevens out. Eleanor came up to Dick and put her arm around his neck and said he’d been magnificent.

Paul Johnson came back upstairs after they’d gone to get the parakeets. He looked pale as a sheet. One of the birds had died and was lying on its back stiff with his claws in the air at the bottom of the cage.

At about three o’clock Dick rode home to his hotel in a taxi.