U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [379]
Everybody was settled in chairs; J.W. leaned over the back of his and said that this was going to be an informal chat, after al , he was an old newspaper man himself. There was a pause. Dick glanced around at J.W.'s pale slightly jowly face just in time to catch a flash of his blue eyes around the faces of the correspondents. An elderly man asked in a grave voice if Mr. Moorehouse cared to say anything about the differences of opinion between the President and Colonel House. Dick settled himself back to be bored. J.W. answered with a cool smile that they'd better ask Colonel House himself about that. When somebody spoke the word oil everybody sat up in their chairs. Yes, he could say definitely an accord, a working agree-ment had been reached between certain American oil
-463-producers and perhaps the Royal Dutch-Shel , oh, no, of course not to set prices but a proof of a new era of inter-national cooperation that was dawning in which great aggregations of capital would work together for peace and democracy, against reactionaries and militarists on the one hand and against the bloody forces of bolshevism on the other. And what about the League of Nations? "A new era," went on J.W. in a confidential tone, "is dawning." Chairs scraped and squeaked, pencils scratched on pads, everybody was very attentive. Everybody got it down that J.W. was sailing for New York on the Rochambeau in
two weeks. After the newspapermen had gone off to make their cable deadline, J.W. yawned and asked Dick to make his excuses to Eleanor, that he was real y too tired to get down to her place tonight. When Dick got out on the streets again there was stil a little of the violet of dusk in the sky. He hailed a taxi; goddam it, he could take a taxi whenever he wanted to now.
It was pretty stiff at Eleanor's, people were sitting around in the parlor and in one bedroom that had been fitted up as a sort of boudoir with a tal mirror draped with lace, talking uncomfortably and intermittently. The bridegroom looked as if he had ants under his col ar. Eveline and Eleanor were standing in the window talking with a gauntfaced man who turned out to be Don Stevens who'd been arrested in Germany by the Army of Occupa-tion and for whom Eveline had made everybody scamper around so. "And any time I get in a jam," he was saying,
"I always find a little Jew who helps get me out. . . this time he was a tailor."
"Wel , Eveline isn't a little Jew or a tailor," said Eleanor icily, "but I can tel you she did a great deal." Stevens walked across the room to Dick and asked him what sort of a man Moorehouse was. Dick found himself blushing. He wished Stevens wouldn't talk so loud.
"Why, he's a man of extraordinary ability," he stammered.
-464-"I thought he was a stuffed shirt. . . I didn't see what those damn fools of the bourgeois press thought they were getting for a story. . . I was there for the D.H."
"Yes, I saw you," said Dick.
"I thought maybe, from what Steve Warner said, you were the sort of guy who'd be boring from within."
"Boring in another sense, I guess, boring and bored." Stevens stood over him glaring at him as if he was going to hit him. "Wel , we'l know soon enough which side a man's on. We'l al have to show our faces, as they say in Russia, before long." Eleanor interrupted with a fresh smoking bottle of
champagne. Stevens went back to talk to Eveline in the window. "Why, I'd as soon have a Baptist preacher in the house," Eleanor tittered.
"Damn it, I hate people who get their pleasure by making other people feel uncomfortable," grumbled Dick under his breath. Eleanor smiled a quick V-shaped smile and gave his arm a pat with her thin white hand, that was tipped by long nails pointed and pink and marked with halfmoons. "So do I, Dick, so do I." When Dick whispered that he had a headache and
thought he'd go home and turn in, she gripped his arm and pul ed him into the hal . "Don't you dare go home and leave me alone with this