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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

 

-99-

 

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

 

-106-

 

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-

 

-107-

 

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

 

-108-

 

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

 

-109-

 

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

 

-110-

 

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-

 

-111-

 

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

 

-112-

 

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-

 

-113-

 

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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