U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [235]
"Where are you going to eat supper, Eveline Hutchins?" Eveline said she hadn't thought and before she knew it was eating with him in an Italian restaurant on 3rd Street. He ate a lot of spaghetti very fast and drank a lot of red wine and introduced her to the waiter, whose name was Giovanni. "He's a maximalist and so am I," he said.
"This young woman seems to be a philosophic anarchist, but we'l get her over that." Don Stevens came from South Dakota and had worked
on smal town papers ever since his highschool days. He'd also worked as a harvest hand back home and been in on several I.W.W. scraps. He showed Eveline his red card with considerable pride. He'd come to New York to work on The Call, but had just resigned because they were too damn lilylivered. he said. He also wrote for the Metro- politan Magazine
-130-politan Magazine and the Masses, and spoke at antiwar meetings. He said that there wasn't a chinaman's chance that the U. S. would keep out of the war; the Germans were winning, the working class al over Europe was on the edge of revolt, the revolution in Russia was the begin-ning of the worldwide social revolution and the bankers knew it and Wilson knew it; the only question was whether the industrial workers in the east and the farmers and casual laborers in the middle west and west would stand for war. The entire press was bought and muzzled. The Morgans had to fight or go bankrupt. "It's the greatest conspiracy in history."
Giovanni and Eveline listened holding their breath, Giovanni occasional y looking nervously around the room to see if any of the customers at the other tables looked like detectives. "God damn it, Giovanni, let's have an-other bottle of wine," Don would cry out in the middle of a long analysis of Kuhn, Loeb and Company's foreign holdings. Then suddenly he'd turn to Eveline fil ing up her glass, "Where have you been al these years?
I've so needed a lovely girl like you. Let's have a splendid time tonight, may be the last I've so needed a lovely girl like you. Let's have a splendid time tonight, may be the last good meal we ever get, we may be in jail or shot against a wal a month from now, isn't that so, Giovanni?"
Giovanni forgot to wait on his other tables and was bawled out by the proprietor. Eveline kept laughing. When Don asked her why, she said she didn't know ex-cept that he was so funny.
"But it real y is Armageddon, God damn it." Then he shook his head: "What's the use, there never was a woman living who could understand political ideas."
"Of course I can . . . I think it's terrible. I don't know what to do."
"I don't know what to do," he said savagely, "I don't know whether to fight the war and go to jail, or to get a job as a war correspondent and see the goddam mess. If
-131-you could rely on anybody to back you up it ud be another thing . . . Oh, hel , let's get out of here."
He charged the cheque, and asked Eveline to lend him half a dol ar to leave for Giovanni, said he didn't have a cent in his jeans. She found herself drinking a last glass of wine with him in a chil y littered room up three flights of dirty wooden stairs in Patchin Place. He began to make love to her and when she objected that she'd just known him for seven hours he said that was another stupid bour-geois idea she ought to get rid of. When she asked him about birthcontrol, he sat down beside her and talked for half an hour about what a great woman Margaret Sanger was and how birthcontrol was the greatest single blessing to mankind since the invention of fire. When he started to make love to her again in a businesslike way she laughing and blushing let him take off her clothes.