U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [80]
of the American Red Cross for Italy. There fol owed a couple more weeks waiting around during which Fred
-191-Summers took on a mysterious Serbian lady he picked up in a café back of the Place St. Michel who wanted to teach them to take hashish, and. Dick became friends with a drunken Montenegran who'd been a barkeep in New York and who promised to get them al decorated by King
Nicholas of Montenegro. But the day they were going to be received at Neuil y to have the decorations pinned on, the section left.
The convoy of twelve Fiats and eight Fords ran along the smooth macadam roads south through the Forest of Fontainebleau and wound east through the winecolored hil s of central France. Dick was driving a Ford alone and was so busy trying to remember what to do with his feet he could hardly notice the scenery. Next day they went over the mountains and down into the val ey of the Rhone, into a rich wine country with planetrees and cypresses, smel ing of the vintage and late fal roses and the south. By Montélimar, the war, the worry about jail and protest and sedition al seemed a nightmare out of another century. They had a magnificent supper in the quiet pink and white town with cêpes and garlic and strong red wine.
"Fel ers," Fred Summers kept saying, "this ain't a war, it's a goddam Cook's tour." They slept in style in the big brocadehung beds at the hotel, and when they left in the morning a little schoolboy ran after Dick's car shouting Vive l'Amerique and handed him a box of nougat, the local specialty; it was the land of Cockaigne.
That day the convoy fel to pieces running into Mar-seil es; discipline melted away; drivers stopped at al the wineshops along the sunny roads to drink and play craps. The Red Cross publicity man and the Saturday Evening Post correspondent who was the famous writer, Mont-gomery El is, got hideously boiled and could be heard whooping and yel ing in the back of the staffcar, while the little fat lieutenant ran up and down the line of cars at every stop red and hysterical y puffing. Eventual y they
-192-were al rounded up and entered Marseil es in formation. They'd just finished parking in a row in the main square and the boys were settling back into the bars and cafés round about, when a man named Ford got the bright idea of looking into his gasoline tank with a match and blew his car up. The local firedepartment came out in style and when car No. 8 was properly incinerated turned their high-pressure hose on the others, and Schuyler, who spoke the best French in the section, had to be dragged away from a conversation with the cigarette girl at the corner café to beg the firechief for chrissake to lay off.
chrissake to lay off.
With the addition of a fel ow named 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