U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [450]
She wasn't coming back. She just had the clothes she had on, and a few little pieces of cheap jewelry Tony had given her when they were first married, in her handbag. She went to the Miami and ordered an icecreamsoda in Eng--250-lish so that everybody would know she was an American girl, and waited for George.
She was so scared every minute she thought she'd keel over. Suppose George didn't come. But he did come and he certainly was tickled when he saw the draft, because he said the consulate didn't have any funds for a case like hers. He said he'd get the draft cashed in the morning and help her buy her ticket and everything. She said he was a dandy and then suddenly leaned over and put her hand in its white kid glove on his arm and looked right into his eyes that were blue like hers were and whispered, "George, you've got to help me some more. You've got to help me hide. . . . I'm so scared of that Cuban. You know they are terrible when they're jealous."
George turned red and began to hem and haw a little, but Margo told him the story of what had happened on her street just the other day, how a man, an armyofficer, had come home and found, wel , his sweetheart, with an-other man, wel , she might as wel tel the story the way it happened, she guessed George wasn't easily shocked anyway, they were in bed together and the armyofficer emptied al the chambers of his revolver into the other man and then chased the woman up the street with a
carvingknife and stabbed her five times in the public square. She began to giggle when she got that far and George began to laugh. "I know it sounds funny to you
. . . but it wasn't so funny for her. She died right there without any clothes on in front of everybody."
"Wel , I guess we'l have to see what we can do," said George, "to keep you away from that carvingknife." What they did was to go over to Matanzas on the Hershey electriccar and get a room at a hotel. They had supper there and a lot of ginfizzes and George, who'd told her he'd leave her to come over the next day just in time for the boat, got romantic over the ginfizzes and the moon-light and dogs barking and the roosters crowing. They
-251-went walking with their arms round each other down the quiet chalkycolored moonstruck streets, and he missed the last car back to Havana. Margo didn't care about anything except not to be alone in that creepy empty whitewal ed hotel with the moon so bright and everything. She liked George anyway.
The next morning at breakfast he said she'd have to let him lend her another fifty so that she could go back first-class and she said honestly she'd pay it back as soon as she got a job in New York and that he must write to her every day.
He went over on the early car because he had to be at the office and she went over later al alone through the glary green countryside shril ing with insects, and went in a cab right from the ferry to the boat. George met her there at the dock with her ticket and a little bunch of orchids, the first she'd ever had, and a rol of bil s that she tucked into her purse without counting. The stewards seemed awful surprised that she didn't have any baggage, so she made George tel them that she'd had to leave home at five minutes'
notice because her father, who was a very wealthy man, was sick in New York. She and George went right down to her room, and he was very sad about her going away and said she was the loveliest girl he'd ever seen and that he'd write her every day too, but she couldn't fol ow what he was saying she was so scared Tony would come down to the boat looking for her. At last the gong rang and George kissed her desperate hard and went ashore. She didn't dare go up on deck until she heard the engineroom bel s and felt the shaking of the boat as it began to back out of the dock. Out of the port-hole, as the boat pul ed out, she got a glimpse of a dapper dark man in a white