U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [95]
When the trees, began to bud outside her window and the flowerwomen in the markets began to sel narcissuses and daffodils, the feeling that it was spring made her long months alone in Paris seem drearier than ever. Jerry Burnham had gone to Palestine; Raoul Lemonnier had
never come to see her again; whenever he was in town Major Appleton came around and paid her rather elab-orate attentions, but he was just too tiresome. Eliza Felton was driving an ambulance attached to a U. S. basehospital on the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne and would come
-224-around those Sundays when she was off duty and make Eveline's life miserable with her complaints that Eveline was not the free pagan soul she'd thought at first. She said that nobody loved her and that she was praying for the Bertha with her number on it that would end it al . It got so bad that Eveline wasn't able to stay in the house at al on Sunday and often spent the afternoon in her office reading Anatole France. Then Yvonne's crotchets were pretty trying; she tried to run Eveline's life with her tightlipped comments. When Don Stevens turned up for a leave, looking more haggard than ever in the grey uniform of the Quaker out-fit, it was a godsend, and Eveline decided maybe she'd been in love with him after al . She told Yvonne he was her cousin and that they'd been brought up like brother and sister and put him up in Eleanor's room. Don was in a tremendous state of excitement about the success of the Bolsheviki in Russia, ate enormously, drank al the wine in the house, and was ful of mysterious references to underground forces he was in touch with. He said al the armies were mutinous and that what had hap-pened at Caporetto would happen on the whole front, the German soldiers were ready for revolt too and that would be the beginning of the world revolution. He told her about the mutinies at Verdun, about long trainloads of soldiers he'd seen going up to an attack crying, "A bas la guerre," and shooting at the gendarmes as they went.
" Eveline, we're on the edge of gigantic events. . . . The working classes of the world won't stand for this nonsense any longer . . . damn it, the war wil have been almost worth while if we get a new socialist civiliza-tion out of it." He leaned across the table and kissed her right under the thin nose of Yvonne who was bringing in pancakes with burning brandy on them. He wagged his finger at Yvonne and almost got a smile out of her by the way he said, "Après la guerre finie."
-225-That spring and summer things certainly did seem shaky, almost as if Don were right. At night she could hear the gigantic surf of the guns in continuous barrage on the crumpling front. The office was ful of crazy rumors: the British Fifth army had turned and run, the Canadians had mutinied and seized Amiens, spies were disabling al the American planes, the Austrians were breaking through in Italy again. Three times the Red Cross office had or-ders to pack up their records and be ready to move out of Paris. In the face of al that it was hard for the publicity department to keep up the proper cheerful attitude in their releases, but Paris kept on fil ing up reassuringly with American faces, American M.P.s, Sam Browne belts and canned goods; and in July Major Moorehouse, who had just arrived back from the States, came into the office with a firsthand account of Château Thierry and announced that the war would be over in a year. The same evening he asked Eveline to dine with him at the Café de la Paix and to do it she broke a date she had with Jerry Burnham who had