U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [312]
smoothly along the Corniche. They lunched at Monte
Carlo, took a look at the casino in the afternoon and went on and had tea in an English tearoom in Mentone. Next day they went up to Grasse and saw the perfume factories, and the day after they put Eleanor on the rapide for Rome. J.W. was to leave immediately afterwards to go back to Paris. Eleanor's thin white face looked a little forlorn Eveline thought, looking out at them through the window of the wagonlit. When the train pul ed out Eveline and J.W. stood on the platform in the empty station with the smoke swirling milky with sunlight under the glass roof overhead and looked at each other with a certain amount of constraint. "She's a great little girl," said J.W.
"I'm very fond of her," said Eveline. Her voice rang false in her ears. "I wish we were going with her." They walked back out to the car. "Where can I take you, Eveline, before I pul out, back to the hotel?" Eve-line's heart was pounding again. "Suppose we have a little
-309-lunch before you go, let me invite you to lunch." "That's very nice of you . . . wel , I suppose I might as wel , I've got to lunch somewhere. And there's no place fit for a white man between here and Lyons."
They lunched at the casino over the water. The sea
was very blue. Outside there were three sailboats with lateen sails making for the entrance to the port. It was warm and jol y, smelt of wine and food sizzled in butter in the glassedin restaurant. Eveline began to like it in Nice.
J.W. drank more wine than he usual y did. He began
to talk about his boyhood in Wilmington and even
hummed a little of a song he'd written in the old days. Eveline was thril ed. Then he began to tel her about Pittsburgh and his ideas about capital and labor. For des-sert they had peaches flambé with rum; Eveline recklessly ordered a bottle of champagne. They were getting along famously.
They began to talk about Eleanor. Eveline told about how she'd met Eleanor in the Art Institute and how
Eleanor had meant everything to her in Chicago, the only girl she'd ever met who was real y interested in the things she was interested in, and how much talent Eleanor had, and how much business ability. J.W. told about how much she'd meant to him during the trying years with his second wife Gertrude in New York, and how people had misunderstood their beautiful friendship that had been always free from the sensual and the degrading.
"Real y," said Eveline, looking J.W. suddenly straight in the eye, "I'd always thought you and Eleanor were lovers." J.W. blushed. For a second Eveline was afraid she'd shocked him. He wrinkled up the skin around his eyes in a comical boyish way. "No, honestly not .
. . I've been too busy working al my life ever to develop that side of my nature . . . People think differently about those things than they did." Eveline nodded. The deep
-310-flush on his face seemed to have set her cheeks on fire.
"And now," J.W. went on, shaking his head gloomily,
"I'm in my forties and it's too late."
"Why too late?"
Eveline sat looking at him with her lips a little apart, her cheeks blazing. "Maybe it's taken the war to teach us how to live," he said. "We've been too much interested in money and material things, it's taken the French to show us how to live. Where back home in the States could you find a beautiful atmosphere like this?" J.W. waved his arm to include in a sweeping gesture the sea, the tables crowded with women dressed in bright colors and men in their best uniforms, the bright glint of blue light on glasses and cutlery. The and men in their best uniforms, the bright glint of blue light on glasses and cutlery. The waiter mistook his gesture and slyly sub-stituted a ful bottle for the empty bottle in the cham-pagnepail.
"By gol y, Eveline, you've been so charming, you've made me forget the time and going back to Paris and everything. This is the sort of thing I've missed al my life until I met you and Eleanor . . . of course with Eleanor it's been al on the higher plane . . . Let's take a drink to Eleanor . . . beautiful