U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [231]
" Dirk . . . this doesn't sound very ladylike, but like this it's too tiresome. . . . The way you acted last spring I thought you liked me . . . wel , how much do you? I want to know." Dirk put his glass down and turned red. Then he took a deep breath and said, " Eveline, you know I'm not the marrying kind . . . love 'em and leave 'em 's more like it. I can't help how I am."
"I don't mean I want you to marry me," her voice rose shril y out of control. She began to giggle. "I don't mean I want to be made an honest woman. Anyway, there's no reason." She was able to laugh more natural y. "Let's for-get it. . . . I won't tease you anymore."
"You're a good sport, Eveline. I always knew you were a good sport." Going down the aisle of the theatre he was so drunk she had to put her hand under his elbow to keep him from staggering. The music and cheap colors and jiggling bod-ies of the chorus girls al seemed to hit on some raw place inside her, so that everything she saw hurt like sweet on a jumpy tooth. Dirk kept talking al through, "See that girl . . . second from the left on the back row, that's Queenie Frothingham. . . . You understand, Eveline. But I'l tel you one thing, I never made a girl take the first misstep. . . . I haven't got that to reproach myself with." The usher came down and asked him to quit talking so loud, he was spoiling others' enjoyment of the show. He gave her a dol ar and said he'd loud, he was spoiling others' enjoyment of the show. He gave her a dol ar and said he'd be quiet as a mouse, as a little dumb mouse and suddenly went to sleep. At the end of the first act Eveline said she had to go home, said the doctor had told her she'd have to have plenty of sleep. He insisted on taking her to her door in a taxicab and then went off to go back to the show and to
-121-Queenie. Eveline lay awake al night staring at her win-dow. Next morning she was the first one down to breakfast. When Dad came down she told him she'd have to go to work and asked him to lend her a thousand dol ars to start an interior decorating business.
The decorating business she started with Eleanor Stod-dard in Chicago didn't make as much money as Eveline had hoped, and Eleanor was rather trying on the whole; but they met such interesting people and went to parties and first nights and openings of art exhibitions, and Sal y Emerson saw to it that they were very much in the van-guard of things in Chicago social y. Eleanor kept complain-ing that the young men Eveline col ected were al so poor and certainly more of a liability than an asset to the busi-ness. Eveline had great faith in their al making names for themselves, so that when Freddy Seargeant, who'd been such a nuisance and had had to be lent money various times, came through with an actual production of Tess of the d'Urbervilles in New York, Eveline felt so trium-phant she almost fel in love with him. Freddy was very much in love with her and Eveline couldn't decide what to do about him. He was a dear and she was very fond of him, but she couldn't imagine marrying him and this would be her first love affair and Freddy just didn't seem to carry her off her feet.
What she did like was sitting up late talking to him over Rhine wine and seltzer in the Brevoort café that was ful of such interesting people. Eveline would sit there looking at him through the crinkling cigarettesmoke won-dering whether she was going to have a love affair. He was a tal thin man of about thirty with some splashes of white in his thick black hair and a long pale face. He had a distinguished rather literary manner, used the broad "a"
-122-so that people often thought he was from Boston, one of the Back Bay Seargeants. One night they got to making plans for themselves and the American theater. If they could get backing they'd start a repertory theatre and do real American plays. He'd be the American Stanislavsky and she'd be the American Lady Gregory, and maybe the American Bakst too. When the café closed she told him to go around by the other