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By Root 8722 0

Sheldrake who was an expert on folkdancing and had been in the famous sec-tion 7, the grenadine guards dined in state at the Bristol. They continued the evening at the promenoire at the Apol o, that was so ful of al the petite femmes in the world, they never saw the show. Everything was cock-eyed and ful of women, the shril bright main streets with their cafés and cabarets, and the black sweaty tunnels of streets back of the harbor ful of rumpled beds and sailors and black skin and brown skin, wriggling bel ies, flopping purplewhite breasts, grinding thighs. Very late Steve and Dick found themselves alone in a little restaurant eating ham and eggs and coffee. They were drunk and sleepy and quarrel ing drowsily. When they paid, the middleaged waitress told them to put the tip on the corner of the table and blew them out of their chairs by calmly hoisting her skirts and picking up the coins between her legs.

"It's a hoax, a goddam hoax. . . . Sex is a slotmachine," Steve kept saying and it seemed gigantical y funny, so funny that they went into an early morning bar and tried to tel the man behind the counter about it, but he didn't understand them and wrote out on a piece of paper the name of an establishment where they could faire rigajig, une maison, propre, convenable, et de haute moralité.

-193-Hooting with laughter they found themselves reeling and stumbling as they climbed endless stairways. The wind was cold as hel . They were in front of a crazylooking cathedral looking down on the harbor, steamboats, great ex-panses of platinum sea hemmed in by ashen mountains.

"By God, that's the Mediterranean."

They sobered up in the cold jostling wind and the wide metal ic flare of dawn and got back to their hotel in time to shake the others out of their drunken slumbers and be the first to report for duty at the parked cars. Dick was so sleepy he forgot what he ought to do with his feet and ran his Ford into the car ahead and smashed his headlights. The fat lieutenant bawled him out shril y and took the car away from him and put him on a Fiat with Sheldrake, so he had nothing to do al day but look out of his drowse at the Corniche and the Mediterranean and the redroofed towns and the long lines of steamboats bound east hugging the shore for fear of Uboats, convoyed by an occasional French destroyer with its smokestacks in al the wrong places.

Crossing the Italian border they were greeted by crowds of schoolchildren with palmleaves and baskets of oranges, and a movie operator. Sheldrake kept stroking his beard and bowing and saluting at the cheers of evviva gli americani, until zowie, he got an orange between the eyes that pretty near gave him a nosebleed. Another man down the line came within an inch of having his eye put out by a palmbranch thrown by a delirious inhabitant of Vinti-miglia. It was a great reception. That night in San Remo enthusiastic wops kept running up to the boys on the street, shaking their hands and congratulating them on il Presi-dente Veelson; somebody stole al the spare tires out of the camionette and the Red Cross Publicity Man's suitcase that had been left in the staffcar. They were greeted effusively and shortchanged in the bars. Evviva gli aleati. Everybody in the section began to curse out Italy and

-194-the rubber spaghetti and the vinegary wine, except. Dick and Steve, who suddenly became woplovers and bought themselves grammars to learn the language. Dick already gave a pretty good imitation of talking Italian, especial y before the Red Cross officers, by putting an o on the end of al the French words he knew. He didn't give a damn about anything any more. It was sunny, vermouth was a great drink, the towns and the toy churches on the tops of hil s and the vineyards and the cypresses and the blue sea were like a succession of backdrops for an oldfashioned opera. The buildings were stagy and ridiculously mag-nificent; on every blank wal the damn wops had painted windows and colonnades and balconies with fat Titian-haired beauties leaning over them and clouds and covies of dimpletummied cupids.