U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [225]
Summers they al went to Maine with Miss Mathilda
in a drawingroom. George and Eveline slept in the upper and Adelaide and Margaret slept in the lower; Miss Ma-thilda was trainsick and didn't close her eyes al night on the sofa opposite. The train went rumblebump chug chug and the trees and houses ran by, the front ones fast and those way off very slow and at night the engine wailed and the children couldn't make out why the strong nice tal conductor was so nice to Miss Mathilda who was so hateful and trainsick. Maine smelt al woodsy and mother and father were there to meet them and they al put on khaki jumpers and went camping with Father and the
guides. It was Eveline who learned to swim quicker than anybody.
Going back to Chicago it would be autumn and Mother
-108-loved the lovely autumn foliage that made Miss Mathilda feel so traurig on account of winter coming on, and the frost on the grass beyond the shadows of the cars out of the trainwindow in the morning. At home Sam would be scrubbing the enamel paint and Phoebe and Miss Mathilda would be putting up curtains and the nursery would smel traurig of mothbal s. One fal Father started to read aloud a little of the Ideals of the King every night after they were al tucked into bed. Al that winter Adelaide and Margaret were King Arthur and Queen Whenever. Ev-eline wanted to be Elaine the Fair, but Adelaide said she couldn't because her hair was mousy and she had a face like a pie, so she had to be the Maiden Evelina.
The Maiden Evelina used to go into Miss Mathilda's
room when she was out and look at herself for a long time in the lookingglass. Her hair wasn't mousy, it was quite fair if only they would let her have it curly instead of in pigtails and even if her eyes weren't blue like George's they had little green specks in them. Her forehead was noble. Miss Mathilda caught her staring like that into the mirror one day.
"Look at yourself too much and you'l find you're look-ing at the devil," said Miss Mathilda in her nasty stiff German way.
When Eveline was twelve years old they moved to a
bigger house over on Drexel Boulevard. Adelaide and Margaret went east to boardingschool at New Hope and Mother had to go spend the winter with friends at Santa Fé on account of her health. It was fun eating breakfast every morning with just Dad and George and Miss Ma-thilda, who was getting elderly and paid more attention to running the house and to reading Sir Gilbert Parker's nov-els than to the children. Eveline didn't like school but she liked having Dad help her with her Latin evenings and do algebra equations for her. She thought he was wonder-ful when he preached so kind and good from the pulpit
-109-and was proud of being the minister's daughter at Sunday afternoon bibleclass. She thought a great deal about the fatherhood of God and the woman of Samaria and Joseph of Arimathea and Baldur the beautiful and the Brother-hood of Man and the apostle that Jesus loved. That Christ-mas she took around a lot of baskets to poor people's houses. Poverty was dreadful and the poor were so scary and why didn't God do something about the problems and evils of Chicago, and the conditions, she'd ask her father. He'd smile and say she was too young to worry about those things yet. She cal ed him Dad now and was his Pal. On her birthday Mother sent her a beautiful il ustrated book of the Blessed Damosel by Dante Gabriel Rossetti with colored il ustrations from his paintings and those of Burne Jones. She used to say the name Dante Gabriel Ros-setti over and over to herself like traurig she loved it so. She started painting and writing little verses about choirs of angels and little poor children at Christmastime. The first picture she did in oils was a portrait of Elaine, the Fair, that she sent her mother for Christmas. Everybody said it showed great talent. When friends of Dad's came to dinner they'd say when they