LENINE REPORTED ALIVE 3 страница
The last night before they left was bright moonlight, so the Gothas came over. They were eating in a little res- taurant in Montmartre. The cashlady and the waiter made them all go down into the cellar when the sirens started wailing for the second time. There they met up with three youngish women named Suzette, Minette and Annette.
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When the little honking fireengine went by to announce that the raid was over it was already closing time and they couldn't get any more drinks at the bar; so the girls took them to a closely shuttered house where they were ushered into a big room with livercolored wallpaper that had green roses on it. An old man in a green baize apron brought up champagne and the girls began to sit on knees and ruffle up hair. Summers got the prettiest girl and hauled her right into the alcove where the bed was with a big mirror above the whole length of it. Then he pulled the curtain. Dick found himself stuck with the fattest and oldest one and got disgusted. Her flesh felt like rubber. He gave her ten francs and left.
Hurrying down the black sloping street outside he ran into some Australian officers who gave him a drink of whiskey out of a bottle and took him into another house where they tried to get a show put on, but the madam said the girls were all busy and the Australians were too drunk to pay attention anyway and started to wreck the place. Dick just managed to slip out before the gendarmes came. He was walking in the general direction of the hotel when there was another alerte and he found himself being yanked down into a subway by a lot of Belgians. There was a girl down there who was very pretty and Dick was trying to explain to her that she ought to go to a hotel with him when the man she was with, who was a colonel of Spahis in a red cloak covered with gold braid, came up, his waxed mustaches bristling with fury. Dick explained that it was all a mistake and there were apologies all around and they were all braves alliés. They walked around several blocks looking for some place to have a drink together, but every- thing was closed, so they parted regretfully at the door of Dick's hotel. He went up to the room in splendid humor; there he found the other two glumly applying argyrol and Metchnikoff paste. Dick made a good tall story out of his adventures. But the other two said he'd been a hell of a
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poor sport to walk out on a lady and hurt her sensitive feelings. "Fellers," began Fred Summers, looking in each of their faces with his round eyes, "it ain't a war, it's a goddam . . ." He couldn't think of a word for it so Dick turned out the light.
NEWSREEL XXII
COMING YEAR PROMISES REBIRTH OF RAILROADS
DEBS IS GIVEN 30 YEARS IN PRISON
There's a long long trail awinding Into the land of my dreams Where the nightingales are singing. And the white moon beams
future generations will rise up and call those men blessed who have the courage of their convictions, a proper appreciation of the value of human life as contrasted with material gain, and who, imbued with the spirit of brotherhood will lay hold of the great opportunity
BONDS BUY BULLETS BUY BONDS
COPPERS INFLUENCED BY UNCERTAIN OUTLOOK
WOMEN VOTE LIKE VETERAN POLITICIANS
restore time honored meat combination dishes such as hash, goulash, meat pies and liver and bacon. Every German soldier carries a little clothesbrush in his pocket; first thing he does when he lands in a prisoncage is to get out this brush and start cleaning his clothes
EMPLOYER MUST PROVE WORKER IS ESSENTIAL
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There's a long long night of waiting Until my dreams all come true
AGITATORS CAN'T GET AMERICAN PASSPORTS
the two men out of the Transvaal district during the voyage expressed their opinion that the British and American flags expressed nothing and, as far as they were concerned could be sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic, and acknowledged that they were socalled Nationalists, a type much resembling the I.W.W. here. "I have no intention" wrote Hearst, "of meeting Governor Smith either publicly, privately, politically, or socially, as I do not find any satisfaction
KILLS HERSELF AT SEA; CROWDER IN CITY AFTER SLACKERS
Oh old Uncle Sam He's got the infantree He's got the cavalree He's got artilleree And then by God we'll all go to Chermanee God Help Kaiser Bill!
THE CAMERA EYE (30)
remembering the grey crooked fingers the thick drip of blood off the canvas the bubbling when the lungcases try to breathe the muddy scraps of flesh you put in the ambulance alive and haul out dead
three of us sit in the dry cement fountain of the little garden with the pink walls in Récicourt
No there must be some way they taught as
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Land of the Free conscience Give me liberty or give me Well they give us death
sunny afternoon through the faint aftersick of mustardgas I smell the box the white roses and the white phlox with a crimson eye three brownandwhitestriped snails hang with infinite delicacy from a honeysuckle- branch overhead up in the blue a sausageballoon grazes drowsily like a tethered cow there are drunken wasps clinging to the tooripe pears that fall and squash when- ever the near guns spew their heavy shells that go off rumbling through the sky
with a whir that makes you remember walking in the woods and starting a woodcock
welltodo country people carefully built the walls and the little backhouse with the cleanscrubbed seat and the quartermoon in the door like the backhouse of an old farm at home carefully planted the garden and savored the fruit and the flowers and carefully planned this war
to hell with "em Patrick Henry in khaki submits to shortarm inspection and puts all his pennies in a Liberty Loan or give me
arrives shrapnel twanging its harps out of tiny powderpuff clouds invites us delicately to glory we happy watching the careful movements of the snails in the afternoon sunlight talking in low voices about
La Libre Belgique The Junius papers Areop- agitica Milton went blind for freedom of speech If
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you hit the words Democracy will understand even the bankers and the clergymen I you we must
When three men hold together The kingdoms are less by three
we are happy talking in low voices in the afternoon sunlight about apres la guerre that our fingers our blood our lungs our flesh under the dirty khaki feldgrau bleu horizon might go on sweeten grow until we fall from the tree ripe like the tooripe pears the arriv know and singing éclats sizzling gas shells theirs is the power and the glory
or give me death
RANDOLPH BOURNE
Randolph Bourne came as an inhabitant of this earth
without the pleasure of choosing his dwelling or his career.
He was a hunchback, grandson of a congregational minister, born in 1886 in Bloomfield, New Jersey; there he attended grammarschool and highschool.
At the age of seventeen he went to work as secre- tary to a Morristown businessman.
He worked his way through Columbia working in a pianola record factory in Newark, working as proof- reader, pianotuner, accompanist in a vocal studio in Carnegie Hall.
At Columbia he studied with John Dewey, got a travelling fellowship that took him to Eng- land Paris Rome Berlin Copenhagen,
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wrote a book on the Gary schools.
In Europe he heard music, a great deal of Wag- ner and Scriabine
and bought himself a black cape.
This little sparrowlike man, tiny twisted bit of flesh in a black cape, always in pain and ailing, put a pebble in his sling and hit Goliath square in the forehead with it.
War, he wrote, is the health of the state.
Half musician, half educational theorist (weak health and being poor and twisted in body and on bad terms with his people hadn't spoiled the world for Randolph Bourne; he was a happy man, loved die Meistersinger and playing Bach with his long hands that stretched so easily over the keys and pretty girls and good food and evenings of talk. When he was dying of pneumonia a friend brought him an eggnog; Look at the yellow, its beautiful, he kept saying as his life ebbed into delirium and fever. He was a happy man.) Bourne seized with feverish intensity on the ideas then going around at Columbia, he picked rosy glasses out of the turgid jumble of John Dewey's teach- ing through which he saw clear and sharp
the shining capitol of reformed democracy, Wilson's New Freedom;
but he was too good a mathematician; he had to work the equations out;
with the result
that in the crazy spring of 1917 he began to get unpopular where his bread was buttered at the New Republic;
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for New Freedom read Conscription, for Democ- racy, Win the War, for Reform, Safeguard the Morgan Loans
for Progress Civilization Education Service, Buy a Liberty Bond, Straff the Hun, Jail the Objectors.
He resigned from The New Republic; only The Seven Arts had the nerve to publish his articles against the war. The backers of The Seven Arts took their money elsewhere; friends didn't like to be seen with Bourne, his father wrote him begging him not to dis- grace the family name. The rainbowtinted future of reformed democracy went pop like a pricked soapbubble.
The liberals scurried to Washington;
some of his friends plead with him to climb up on Schoolmaster Wilson's sharabang; the war was great. fought from the swivel chairs of Mr. Creel's bureau in Washington.
He was cartooned, shadowed by the espionage service and the counter-espionage service; taking a walk with two girl friends at Wood's Hole he was arrested, a trunk full of manuscript and letters was stolen from him in Connecticut. (Force to the utmost, thundered Schoolmaster Wilson)
He didn't live to see the big circus of the Peace of Versailles or the purplish normalcy of the Ohio Gang.
Six weeks after the armistice he died planning an essay on the foundations of future radicalism in Amer- ica.
If any man has a ghost Bourne has a ghost, a tiny twisted unscared ghost in a black cloak hopping along the grimy old brick and brownstone streets still left in downtown New York,
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crying out in a shrill soundless giggle: War is the health of the state.
NEWSREEL XXIII
If you dont like your Uncle Sammy If you dont like the red white and blue
smiles of patriotic Essex County will be concentrated and recorded at Branch Brook Park, Newark, N. J., tomorrow afternoon. Bands will play while a vast throng marches hap- pily to the rhythm of wartime anthems and airs. Mothers of the nation's sons will be there; wives, many of them carry- ing babes born after their fathers sailed for the front, will occupy a place in Essex County's graphic pageant; relatives and friends of the heroes who are carrying on the message of Free- dom will file past a battery of cameras and all will smile a message recording installment no. 7 of Smiles Across the Sea. The hour for these folks to start smiling is 2:30.
MOBS PLUNDER CITIES NEWSPAPERMAN LEADS THROUGH BARRAGE
it was a pitiful sight at dusk every evening when the whole population evacuated the city, going to sleep in the fields until daylight. Old women and tiny children, cripples drawn in carts or wheeled in barrows men carrying chairs bring those too feeble and old to walk
JERSEY TROOPS TAKE WOMAN GUNNERS
the trouble had its origin with the demand of the marine workers for an eight hour day
If you dont like the stars in Old Glory Then go back to your land across the sea To the land from which you came Whatever be its name
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G.O.P. LEADER ACCUSED OF DRAFT FRAUDS
If you dont like the red white and blue Then dont act like the cur in the story Dont bite the hand that's feeding you
EVELINE HUTCHINS
Little Eveline and Arget and Lade and Gogo lived on the top floor of a yellowbrick house on the North Shore Drive. Arget and Lade were little Eveline's sisters. Gogo was her little brother littler than Eveline; he had such nice blue eyes but Miss Mathilda had horrid blue eyes. On the floor below was Dr. Hutchins' study where Your- father mustn't be disturbed, and Dearmother's room where she stayed all morning painting dressed in a lavender smock. On the groundfloor was the drawingroom and the diningroom, where parishioners came and little children must be seen and not heard, and at dinnertime you could smell good things to eat and hear knives and forks and tinkly companyvoices and Yourfather's booming scary voice and when Yourfather's voice was going all the company- voices were quiet. Yourfather was Dr. Hutchins but Our Father art in heaven. When Yourfather stood beside the bed at night to see that little girls said their prayers Eve- line would close her eyes tightscared. It was only when she'd hopped into bed and snuggled way down so that the covers were light across her nose that she felt cosy.
George was a dear although Adelaide and Margaret teased him and said he was their Assistant like Mr. Bless- ington was Father's assistant. George always caught things first and then they all had them. It was lovely when they had the measles and the mumps all at once. They stayed in bed and had hyacinths in pots and guinea pigs and Dear-
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mother used to come up and read the Jungle Book and do funny pictures and Yourfather would come up and make funny birdbeaks that opened out of paper and tell stories he made up right out of his head and Dearmother said he had said prayers for you children in church and that made them feel fine and grownup.
When they were all up and playing in the nursery George caught something again and had monia on account of getting cold on his chest and Yourfather was very sol- emn and said not to grieve if God called little brother away. But God brought little George back to them only he was delicate after that and had to wear glasses, and when Dearmother let Eveline help bathe him because Miss Mathilda was having the measles too Eveline noticed he had something funny there where she didn't have anything. She asked Dearmother if it was a mump, but Dearmother scolded her and said she was a vulgar little girl to have looked. "Hush, child, don't ask questions." Eveline got red all over and cried and Adelaide and Margaret wouldn't speak to her for days on account of her being a vulgar little girl.
Summers they all went to Maine with Miss Mathilda in a drawingroom. George and Eveline slept in the upper and Adelaide and Margaret slept in the lower; Miss Ma- thilda was trainsick and didn't close her eyes all night on the sofa opposite. The train went rumblebump chug chug and the trees and houses ran by, the front ones fast and those way off very slow and at night the engine wailed and the children couldn't make out why the strong nice tall conductor was so nice to Miss Mathilda who was so hateful and trainsick. Maine smelt all woodsy and mother and father were there to meet them and they all put on khaki jumpers and went camping with Father and the guides. It was Eveline who learned to swim quicker than anybody.
Going back to Chicago it would be autumn and Mother
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loved the lovely autumn foliage that made Miss Mathilda feel so traurig on account of winter coming on, and the frost on the grass beyond the shadows of the cars out of the trainwindow in the morning. At home Sam would be scrubbing the enamel paint and Phoebe and Miss Mathilda would be putting up curtains and the nursery would smell traurig of mothballs. One fall Father started to read aloud a little of the Ideals of the King every night after they were all tucked into bed. All that winter Adelaide and Margaret were King Arthur and Queen Whenever. Ev- eline wanted to be Elaine the Fair, but Adelaide said she couldn't because her hair was mousy and she had a face like a pie, so she had to be the Maiden Evelina.
The Maiden Evelina used to go into Miss Mathilda's room when she was out and look at herself for a long time in the lookingglass. Her hair wasn't mousy, it was quite fair if only they would let her have it curly instead of in pigtails and even if her eyes weren't blue like George's they had little green specks in them. Her forehead was noble. Miss Mathilda caught her staring like that into the mirror one day.
"Look at yourself too much and you'll find you're look- ing at the devil," said Miss Mathilda in her nasty stiff German way.
When Eveline was twelve years old they moved to a bigger house over on Drexel Boulevard. Adelaide and Margaret went east to boardingschool at New Hope and Mother had to go spend the winter with friends at Santa Fé on account of her health. It was fun eating breakfast every morning with just Dad and George and Miss Ma- thilda, who was getting elderly and paid more attention to running the house and to reading Sir Gilbert Parker's nov- els than to the children. Eveline didn't like school but she liked having Dad help her with her Latin evenings and do algebra equations for her. She thought he was wonder- ful when he preached so kind and good from the pulpit
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and was proud of being the minister's daughter at Sunday afternoon bibleclass. She thought a great deal about the fatherhood of God and the woman of Samaria and Joseph of Arimathea and Baldur the beautiful and the Brother- hood of Man and the apostle that Jesus loved. That Christ- mas she took around a lot of baskets to poor people's houses. Poverty was dreadful and the poor were so scary and why didn't God do something about the problems and evils of Chicago, and the conditions, she'd ask her father. He'd smile and say she was too young to worry about those things yet. She called him Dad now and was his Pal.
On her birthday Mother sent her a beautiful illustrated book of the Blessed Damosel by Dante Gabriel Rossetti with colored illustrations from his paintings and those of Burne Jones. She used to say the name Dante Gabriel Ros- setti over and over to herself like traurig she loved it so. She started painting and writing little verses about choirs of angels and little poor children at Christmastime. The first picture she did in oils was a portrait of Elaine, the Fair, that she sent her mother for Christmas. Everybody said it showed great talent. When friends of Dad's came to dinner they'd say when they were introduced to her, "So this is the talented one, is it?"
Adelaide and Margaret were pretty scornful about all that when they came home from school. They said the house looked dowdy and nothing had any style to it in Chicago, and wasn't it awful being ministers' daughters, but of course Dad wasn't like an ordinary minister in a white tie, he was a Unitarian and very broad and more like a prominent author or scientist. George was getting to be a sulky little boy with dirty fingernails who never could keep his necktie straight and was always breaking his glasses. Eveline was working on a portrait of him the way he had been when he was little with blue eyes and gam- boge curls. She used to cry over her paints she loved him
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so and little poor children she saw on the street. Every- body said she ought to study art.
It was Adelaide who first met Sally Emerson. One Eas- ter they were going to put on Aglavaine and Selizette at the church for charity. Miss Rodgers the French teacher at Dr. Grant's school was going to coach them and said that they oughi to ask Mrs. Philip Payne Emerson, who had seen the original production abroad, about the scenery and costumes; and that besides her interest would be in- valuable to make it go; everything that Sally Emerson was interested in went. The Hutchins girls were all excited when Dr. Hutchins called up Mrs. Emerson on the tele- phone and asked if Adelaide might come over some morn- ing and ask her advice about some amateur theatricals. They'd already sat down to lunch when Adelaide came back, her eyes shining. She wouldn't say much except that Mrs. Philip Payne Emerson knew Matterlink intimately and that she was coming to tea, but kept declaring, "She's the most stylish woman I ever met."
A glavaine and Selizette didn't turn out quite as the Hutchins girls and Miss Rodgers had hoped, though every- body said the scenery and costumes Eveline designed showed real ability, but the week after the performance, Eveline got a message one morning that Mrs. Emerson had asked her to lunch that day and only her. Adelaide and Margaret were so mad they wouldn't speak to her. She felt pretty shaky when she set off into the icybright dusty day. At the last minute Adelaide had lent her a hat and Margaret her fur neckpiece, so that she wouldn't disgrace them they said. By the time she got to the Emer- sons' house she was chilled to the bone. She was ushered into a little dressing room with all kinds of brushes and combs and silver jars with powder and even rouge and toiletwaters in purple, green and pink bottles and left to take off her things. When she saw herself in the big mirror she almost screamed she looked so young and pie-
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faced and her dress was so horrid. The only thing that looked any good was the foxfur so she kept that on when she went into the big upstairs lounge with its deep grey carpet soft underfoot and the sunlight pouring in through French windows onto bright colors and the black polished grandpiano. There were big bowls of freezias on every table and yellow and pink French and German books of reproductions of paintings. Even the sootbitten blocks of Chicago houses flattened under the wind and the zero sunlight looked faintly exciting and foreign through the big pattern of the yellow lace curtains. In the rich smell of the freezias there was a little expensive whisp of cigarette- smoke.
Sally Emerson came in smoking a cigarette and said, "Excuse me, my dear," some wretched woman had had her impaled on the telephone like a butterfly on a pin for the-last halfhour. They ate lunch at a little table the el- derly colored man brought in all set and Eveline was treated just like a grownup woman and a glass of port poured out for her. She only dared take a sip but it was delicious and the lunch was all crispy and creamy with cheese grated on things and she would have eaten a lot if she hadn't felt so shy. Sally Emerson talked about how clever Eveline's costumes had been for the show and said she must keep up her drawing and talked about how there were as many people with artistic ability in Chicago as any- where in the world and what was lacking was the milieu, the atmosphere my dear, and that the social leaders were all vicious numbskulls and that it was up to the few people who cared about art to stick together and create the rich beautiful milieu they needed, and about Paris, and about Mary Garden, and Debussy. Eveline went home with her head reeling with names and pictures, little snatches out of operas and in her nose the tickling smell of the freezias mixed with toasted cheese and cigarettesmoke. When she got home everything looked so cluttered and bare and ugly
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she burst out crying and wouldn't answer any of her sis- ters' questions; that made them madder than ever.
That June after school was over, they all went out to Santa Fé to see her mother. She was awfully depressed out at Santa Fé, the sun was so hot and the eroded hills were so dry and dusty and Mother had gotten so washedout looking and was reading theosophy and talking about God and the beauty of soul of the Indians and Mexicans in a way that made the children uncomfortable. Eveline read a great many books that summer and hated going out. She read Scott and Thackeray and W. J. Locke and Dumas and when she found an old copy of Trilby in the house she read it three times running. That started her seeing things in Du Maurier illustrations instead of in knights and ladies.
When she wasn't reading she was lying flat on her back dreaming out long stories about herself and Sally Emer- son. She didn't feel well most of the time and would drop into long successions of horrid thoughts about people's bodies that made her feel nauseated. Adelaide and Mar- garet told her what to do about her trouble every month but she didn't tell them how horrid it made her feel in- side. She read the Bible and looked up uterus and words like that in encyclopaedias and dictionaries. Then one night she decided she wouldn't stand it any more and went through the medicine chest in the bathroom till she found a bottle marked POISON that had some kind of laudanum compound in it. But she wanted to write a poem before she died, she felt so lovely musically traurig about dying, but she couldn't seem to get the rhymes right and finally fell asleep with her head on the paper. When she woke up it was dawn and she was hunched up over the table by her window, stiff and chilly in her thin nightgown. She slipped into bed shivering. Anyway she promised herself that she'd keep the bottle and kill herself whenever things seemed too filthy and horrid. That made her feel better.
That fall Margaret and Adelaide went to Vassar. Eve-
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line would have liked to go east too but everybody said she was too young though she'd passed most of her college board exams. She stayed in Chicago and went to artclasses and lectures of one sort or another and did churchwork. It was an unhappy winter. Sally Emerson seemed to have forgotten her. The young people around the church were so stuffy and conventional. Eveline got to hate the eve- nings at Drexel Boulevard, and all the vague Emerson her father talked in his rich preacher's boom. What she liked best was the work she did at Hull House. Eric Eg- strom gave drawingclasses there in the evenings and she used to see him sometimes smoking a cigarette in the back passage, leaning against the wall, looking very Norse, she thought, in his grey smock full of bright fresh dabs of paint. She'd sometimes smoke a cigarette with him ex- changing a few words about Manet or Claude Monet's in- numerable haystacks, all the time feeling uneasy because the conversation wasn't more interesting and clever and afraid somebody would come and find her smoking.
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