LENINE REPORTED ALIVE 4 страница

Miss Mathilda said it was bad for a girl to be so dreamy
and wanted her to learn to sew.

All Eveline thought about that winter was going to the
Art Institute and trying to paint pictures of the Lake Front
that would be colored like Whistlers but be rich and full
like Millet drawings. Eric didn't love her or else he
wouldn't be so friendly and aloof. She'd had her great
love; now her life was over and she must devote herself
to art. She began to wear her hair screwed up in a knot
at the nape of her neck and when her sisters said it was
unbecoming she said she wanted it to be unbecoming. It
was at the Art Institute that her beautiful friendship with
Eleanor Stoddard began. Eveline was wearing her new
grey hat that she thought looked like something in a
Manet portrait and got to talking with such an interesting
girl. When she went home she was so excited she wrote
George, who was at boarding school, about it, saying she

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was the first girl she'd met who really seemed to feel
painting, that she could really talk about things with. And
then too she was really doing something, and so independ-
ent and told things so comically. After all if love was going
to be denied her she could build her life on a beautiful
friendship.

Eveline was getting to like it so much in Chicago, she
was really disappointed when the time came to leave for
the year's trip abroad that Dr. Hutchins had been plan-
ing for his family for so many years. But New York and
getting on the Baltic and making out the tags for their
baggage and the funny smell of the staterooms made her
forget all about that. They had a rough trip and the boat
rolled a good deal, but they sat at the captain's table and
the captain was a jovial Englishman and kept their spirits
up so that they hardly missed a meal. They landed in Liv-
erpool with twentythree pieces of baggage but lost the
shawlstrap that had the medicinechest in it on the way
down to London and had to spend their first morning get-
ting it from the Lost and Found Office at St. Pancras. In
London it was very foggy. George and Eveline went to
see the Elgin marbles and the Tower of London and ate
their lunches in A B C restaurants and had a fine time
riding in the tube. Dr. Hutchins only let them stay ten
days in Paris and most of that time they were making side
trips to see cathedrals. Notre Dame and Rheims and
Beauvais and Chartres with their bright glass and their
smell of incense in cold stone and the tall grey longfaced
statues nearly made Eveline a Catholic. They had a first
class compartment reserved all the way to Florence and a
hamper with cold chicken in it and many bottles of Saint
Galmier mineral water and they made tea on a little alco-
hol lamp.

That winter it rained a lot and the villa was chilly and
the girls squabbled among themselves a good deal and
Florence seemed to be full of nothing but old English la-

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dies; still Eveline drew from life and read Gordon Craig.
She didn't know any young men and she hated the young
Italians with names out of Dante that hung around Ade-
laide and Margaret under the delusion that they were rich
heiresses. On the whole she was glad to go home with
mother a little earlier than the others who were going to
take a trip to Greece. They sailed from Antwerp on the
Kroonland. Eveline thought it was the happiest moment
of her life when she felt the deck tremble under her feet as
the steamer left the dock and the long rumble of the
whistle in her ears.

Her mother didn't go down to the diningsaloon the first
night out so that Eveline was a little embarrassed going in
to table all alone and had sat down and started eating her
soup before she noticed that the young man opposite her
was an American and goodlooking. He had blue eyes and
crisp untidy tow hair. It was too wonderful when he turned
out to be from Chicago. His name was Dirk McArthur.
He'd been studying a year at Munich, but said he was get-
ting out before they threw him out. He and Eveline got
to be friends right away; they owned the boat after that.
It was a balmy crossing for April. They played shuffle-
board and decktennis and spent a lot of time in the bow
watching the sleek Atlantic waves curl and break under the
lunge of the ship.

One moonlight night when the moon was plunging
westward through scudding spindrift the way the. Kroon-
land was plunging through the uneasy swell, they climbed
up to the crowsnest. This was an adventure; Eveline
didn't want to show she was scared. There was no watch
and they were alone a little giddy in the snug canvas
socket that smelt a little of sailors' pipes. When Dirk put
his arm around her shoulders Eveline's head began to reel.
She oughtn't to let him. "Gee, you're a good sport, Eve-
line," he said in a breathless voice. "I never knew a nice
girl who was a good sport before." Without quite meaning

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to she turned her face towards his. Their cheeks touched
and his mouth slid around and kissed her hard on her
mouth. She pushed him away with a jerk.

"Hey, you're not trying to throw me overboard, are
you?" he said, laughing. "Look, Eveline, won't you give
me a little tiny kiss to show there's no hard feeling. There's
just you and me tonight on the whole broad Atlantic."

She kissed him scaredly on the chin. "Say, Eveline, I like
you so much. You're the swellest girl." She smiled at him
and suddenly he was hugging her tight, his legs hard and
strong against her legs, his hands spread over her back, his
lips trying to open her lips. She got her mouth away from
him. "No, no, please don't," she could hear her little
creaky voice saying.

"All right, I'm sorry. . . . No more caveman stuff,
honest injun, Eveline. But you mustn't forget that you're
the most attractive girl on the boat. . . . I mean in the
world, you know how a feller feels."

He started down first. Letting herself down through the
opening in the bottom of the crowsnest she began to get
dizzy. She was falling. His arms tightened around her.

"That's all right, girly, your foot slipped," he said
gruffly in her ear. "I've got you."

Her head was swimming, she couldn't seem to make her
arms and legs work; she could hear her little moaning
voice, "Don't drop me, Dirk, don't drop me."

When they finally got down the ladder to the deck Dirk
leaned against the mast and let out a long breath, "Whee
. . . you certainly gave me a scare, young lady."

"I'm so sorry," she said. "It was silly of me to suddenly
get girlish like that. . . . I must have fainted for a min-
ute."

"Gosh, I oughtn't to have taken you up there."

"I'm glad you did," Eveline said; then she found her-
self blushing and hurried off down the main deck to the
first class entrance and the stateroom, where she had to

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make up a story to explain to mother how she'd torn her
stocking.

She couldn't sleep that night but lay awake in her bunk
listening to the distant rhythm of the engines and the
creaking of the ship and the seethe of churned seas that
came in through the open porthole. She could still feel the
soft brush of his cheek and the sudden tightening muscles
of his arms around her shoulder. She knew now she was
terribly in love with Dirk and wished he'd propose to her.
But next morning she was really flattered when Judge
Ganch, a tall whitehaired lawyer from Salt Lake City with
a young red face and a breezy manner sat on the end of
her deckchair and talked to her by the hour about his early
life in the west and his unhappy marriage and politics and
Teddy Roosevelt and the progressive party. She'd rather
have been with Dirk, but it made her feel pretty and ex-
cited to see Dirk walk past with his nose out of joint while
she listened to Judge Ganch's stories. She wished the trip
would never end.

Back in Chicago she saw a lot of Dirk McArthur. He
always kissed her when he brought her home and he held
her very tight when he danced with her and sometimes
used to hold her hand and tell her what a nice girl she
was, but he never would say anything about getting mar-
ried. Once she met Sally Emerson at a dance she'd gone to
with Dirk she had to admit that she wasn't doing any
painting, and Sally Emerson looked so disappointed that
Eveline felt quite ashamed and started talking fast about
Gordon Craig and an exhibition of Matisse she'd seen in
Paris. Sally Emerson was just leaving. A young man was
waiting to dance with Eveline. Sally Emerson took her
hand and said: "But, Eveline, you mustn't forget that we
have high hopes of you." And while she was dancing
everything that Sally Emerson stood for and how wonder-
ful she used to think her came sweeping through Eveline's
head; but driving home with Dirk all these thoughts were

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dazzled out of her in the glare of his headlights, the strong
leap forward of the car on the pickup, the purr of the
motor, his arm around her, the great force pressing her
against him when they went around curves.

It was a hot night, he drove west through endless iden-
tical suburbs out into the prairie. Eveline knew that they
ought to go home, everybody was back from Europey now
and they'd notice how late she got in, but she didn't say
anything. It was only when he stopped the car that she
noticed that he was very drunk. He took out a flask and
offered her a drink. She shook her head. They'd stopped
in front of a white barn. In the reflection of the headlights
his shirtfront and his face and his mussed up hair all looked
chalky white. "You don't love me, Dirk," she said. "Sure
I do, love you better'n anybody . . . except myself . . .
that's a'trouble with me . . . love myself best." She
rubbed her knuckles through his hair, "You're pretty silly,
do you know it?""Ouch," he said. It was starting to rain
so he turned the car around and made for Chicago.

Eveline never knew exactly where it was they smashed
up, only that she was crawling out from under the seat
and that her dress was ruined and she wasn't hurt only the
rain was streaking the headlights of the cars that stopped
along the road on either side of them. Dirk was sitting on
the mudguard of the first car that had stopped. "Are you
all right, Eveline?" he called shakily. "It's only my dress,"
she said. He was bleeding from a gash in his forehead and
he was holding his arm against his body as if he were cold.
Then it was all nightmare, telephoning Dad, getting Dirk
to the hospital, dodging the reporters, calling up Mr. Mc-
Arthur to get him to set to work to keep it out of the
morning papers. It was eight o'clock of a hot spring morn-
ing when she got home wearing a raincoat one of the
nurses had lent her over her ruined evening dress.

The family was all at breakfast. Nobody said anything.
Then Dad got to his feet and came forward, with his nap-

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kin in his hand, "My dear, I shan't speak of your behavior
now, to say nothing of the pain and mortification you have
caused all of us. . . . I can only say it would have served
you right if you had sustained serious injuries in such an
escapade. Go up and rest if you can." Eveline went up-
stairs, doublelocked her door and threw herself sobbing on
the bed.

As soon as they could, her mother and sisters hurried
her off to Santa F. It was hot and dusty there and she
hated it. She couldn't stop thinking of Dirk. She began
telling people she believed in free love and lay for hours
on the bed in her room reading Swinburne and Laurence
Hope and dreaming. Dirk was there. She got so she could
almost feel the insistent fingers of his hands spread over
the small of her back and his mouth like that night in the
crowsnest on the Kroonland. It was a kind of relief when
she came down with scarlet fever and had to lie in bed for
eight weeks in the isolation wing of the hospital. Every-
body sent her flowers and she read a lot of books on de-
sign and interior decorating and did watercolors.

When she went up to Chicago for Adelaide's wedding in
October she had a pale mature look. Eleanor cried out
when she kissed her, "My dear, you've grown stunningly
handsome." She had one thing on her mind, to see Dirk
and get it over with. It was several days before they could
arrange to meet because Dad had called him up and for-
bidden him to come to the house and they had a scene over
the telephone. They met in the lobby of The Drake. She
could see at a glance that Dirk had been hitting it up since
she'd seen him. He was a little drunk now. He had a
sheepish boyish look that made her feel like crying. "Well,
how's Barney Oldfield?" she said, laughing. "Rotten, gee
you look stunning, Eveline. . . . Say The Follies of
1914 are in town, a big New York hit. . . . I got tickets,
do you mind if we go?""No, it'll be bully."

He ordered everything most expensive he could find on

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the bill of fare, and champagne. She had something in
her throat that kept her from swallowing. She had to say
it before he got too drunk.

" Dirk . . . this doesn't sound very ladylike, but like
this it's too tiresome. . . . The way you acted last spring
I thought you liked me . . . well, how much do you? I
want to know."

Dirk put his glass down and turned red. Then he took
a deep breath and said, " Eveline, you know I'm not the
marrying kind . . . love 'em and leave 'em 's more like
it. I can't help how I am."

"I don't mean I want you to marry me," her voice rose
shrilly out of control. She began to giggle. "I don't mean
I want to be made an honest woman. Anyway, there's no
reason." She was able to laugh more naturally. "Let's for-
get it. . . . I won't tease you anymore."

"You're a good sport, Eveline. I always knew you were
a good sport."

Going down the aisle of the theatre he was so drunk
she had to put her hand under his elbow to keep him from
staggering. The music and cheap colors and jiggling bod-
ies of the chorus girls all seemed to hit on some raw place
inside her, so that everything she saw hurt like sweet on
a jumpy tooth. Dirk kept talking all through, "See that
girl . . . second from the left on the back row, that's
Queenie Frothingham. . . . You understand, Eveline.
But I'll tell you one thing, I never made a girl take the
first misstep. . . . I haven't got that to reproach myself
with." The usher came down and asked him to quit talking
so loud, he was spoiling others' enjoyment of the show.
He gave her a dollar and said he'd be quiet as a mouse, as
a little dumb mouse and suddenly went to sleep.

At the end of the first act Eveline said she had to go
home, said the doctor had told her she'd have to have
plenty of sleep. He insisted on taking her to her door in
a taxicab and then went off to go back to the show and to

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Queenie. Eveline lay awake all night staring at her win-
dow. Next morning she was the first one down to breakfast.
When Dad came down she told him she'd have to go to
work and asked him to lend her a thousand dollars to start
an interior decorating business.

The decorating business she started with Eleanor Stod-
dard in Chicago didn't make as much money as Eveline
had hoped, and Eleanor was rather trying on the whole;
but they met such interesting people and went to parties
and first nights and openings of art exhibitions, and Sally
Emerson saw to it that they were very much in the van-
guard of things in Chicago socially. Eleanor kept complain-
ing that the young men Eveline collected were all so poor
and certainly more of a liability than an asset to the busi-
ness. Eveline had great faith in their all making names for
themselves, so that when Freddy Seargeant, who'd been
such a nuisance and had had to be lent money various
times, came through with an actual production of Tess of
the d'Urbervilles in New York, Eveline felt so trium-
phant she almost fell in love with him. Freddy was very
much in love with her and Eveline couldn't decide what to
do about him. He was a dear and she was very fond of
him, but she couldn't imagine marrying him and this would
be her first love affair and Freddy just didn't seem to
carry her off her feet.

What she did like was sitting up late talking to him
over Rhine wine and seltzer in the Brevoort café that
was full of such interesting people. Eveline would sit there
looking at him through the crinkling cigarettesmoke won-
dering whether she was going to have a love affair. He
was a tall thin man of about thirty with some splashes of
white in his thick black hair and a long pale face. He had
a distinguished rather literary manner, used the broad "a"

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so that people often thought he was from Boston, one of
the Back Bay Seargeants.

One night they got to making plans for themselves and
the American theater. If they could get backing they'd
start a repertory theatre and do real American plays. He'd
be the American Stanislavsky and she'd be the American
Lady Gregory, and maybe the American Bakst too. When
the café closed she told him to go around by the other
staircase and go up to her room. She was excited by the
idea of being alone in a hotel room with a young man and
thought how shocked Eleanor would be if she knew about
it. They smoked cigarettes and talked about the theatre a
little distractedly, and at last Freddy put his arm around
her waist and kissed her and asked if he could stay all
night. She let him kiss her but she could only think of
Dirk and told him please not this time, and he was very
contrite and begged her with tears in his eyes to forgive
him for sullying a beautiful moment. She said she didn't
mean that and to come back and have breakfast with her.

After he'd gone she half wished she'd made him stay.
Her body tingled all over the way it used to when Dirk
put his arms around her and she wanted terribly to know
what making love was like. She took a cold bath and went
to bed. When she woke up and saw Freddy again she'd
decide whether she was in love with him. But the next
morning she got a telegram calling her home. Dad was
seriously ill with diabetes. Freddy put her on the train.
She'd expected that the parting would carry her off her-
feet, but it didn't somehow.

Dr. Hutchins got better and Eveline took him down to
Santa Fé to recuperate. Her mother was sick most of the
time too, and as Margaret and Adelaide were both married
and George had gotten a job abroad with Hoover's Belgian
Relief, it seemed to be up to her to take care of the old peo-
ple. She spent a dreamy unhappy year in spite of the great
skeleton landscape and horsebacktrips and working at

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watercolors of Mexicans and Indian penitentes. She went
around the house ordering meals, attending to housekeep-
ing, irritated by the stupidity of servantgirls, making out
laundry lists.

The only man she met there who made her seem alive
was José O'Riely. He was a Spaniard in spite of his Irish
name, a slender young man with a tobaccocolored face and
dark green eyes, who had somehow gotten married to a
stout Mexican woman who brought out a new squalling
brown infant every nine months. He was a painter and
lived by doing odd carpenter jobs and sometimes posing
as a model. Eveline got to talk to him one day when he
was painting the garage doors and asked him to pose for
her. He kept looking at the pastel she was doing of him
and telling her it was wretched, until she broke down and
cried. He apologized in his stiff English and said she must
not be upset, that she had talent and that he'd teach her
to draw himself. He took her down to his house, an untidy
little shack in the Mexican part of town, where he intro-
duced her to Lola, his wife, who looked at her with scared
suspicious black eyes, and showed her his paintings, big
retablos painted on plaster that looked like Italian primi-
tives. "You see I paint martires," he said, "but not Chris-
tian. I paint the martires of the working class under ex-
ploitation. Lola does not understand. She want me to paint
rich ladies like you and make plenty money. Which you
think is best?" Eveline flushed; she didn't like being classed
with the rich ladies. But the pictures thrilled her and she
said she would advertise them among her friends; she de-
cided she'd discovered a genius.

O'Riely was grateful and wouldn't take any money for
posing or criticizing her paintings after that, instead he
sometimes borrowed small sums as a friend. Even before
he started making love to her, she decided that this time it
must be a real affair. She'd go crazy if something didn't
happen to her soon.

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The main difficulty was finding somewhere they could
go. Her studio was right back of the house and there was
the danger that her father or mother or friends coming to
call might break in on them any time. Then too Santa Fé
was a small place and people were already noticing how
often he went to her studio.

One night when the Hutchins' chauffeur was away, they
climbed up to his room above the garage. It was pitch
black there and smelled of old pipes and soiled clothes.
Eveline was terrified to find she'd lost control of her own
self; it was like going under ether. He was surprised to
find she was a virgin and was very kind and gentle, almost
apologetic. But she felt none of the ecstasy she had ex-
pected lying in his arms on the chauffeur's bed; it was
almost as if it had all happened before. Afterwards they
lay on the bed talking a long time in low intimate voices.
His manner had changed; he treated her gravely and in-
dulgently, like a child. He said he hated things to be se-
cret and sordid like that, it was brutalizing to them both.
He would find a place where they could meet in the open,
in the sun and air, not like criminals this way. He wanted
to draw her, the beautiful slenderness of her body would
be the inspiration of his painting and her lovely little round
breasts. Then he looked her over carefully to see if her
dress looked mussed and told her to run over to the house
and go to bed; and to take precautions if she didn't want
to have a baby, though he would be proud to have her bear
a child of his, particularly as she was rich enough to sup-
port it. The idea horrified her and she felt it was coarse
and unfeeling of him to talk about it lightly that way.

They met all that winter a couple of times a week in a
little deserted cabin that lay off the trail in the basin of a
small stony cañon back of the town. She would ride over
and he would walk by a different road. They called it their
desert island. Then one day Lola looked in his portfolios
and found hundreds of drawings of the same naked girl;

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she came up to the Hutchins' house shaking and screaming
with the hair streaming down her face, looking for Eveline
and crying that she was going to kill her. Dr. Hutchins was
thunderstruck; but though she was terribly frightened in-
side, Eveline managed to keep cool and tell her father that
she had let O'Riely do drawings of her but that there'd
been nothing else between them, and that his wife was a
stupid ignorant Mexican and couldn't imagine a man and a
woman being alone in a studio together without thinking
something disgusting. Although he scolded her for being
so imprudent Dad believed her and they managed to keep
the whole thing from Mother, but she only managed to
see Pepe once more after that. He shrugged his shoulders
and said what could he do, he couldn't abandon his wife
and children to starve, poor as he was he had to live with
them, and a man had to have a woman to work for him
and cook; he couldn't live on romantic lifeclasses, he
had to eat, and Lola was a good woman but stupid and
untidy and had made him promise not to see Eveline again.
Eveline turned on her heel and left him before he was
through talking. She was glad she had a horse she could
jump on and ride away.

THE CAMERA EYE (31)

a matrass covered with something from Vantine's
makes a divan in the ladyphotographer's studio we
sit on the divan and on cushions on the floor and the long-
necked English actor reads the Song of Songs in rhythms

and the ladyphotographer in breastplates and silk
bloomers dances the Song of Songs in rhythms

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the little girl in pink is a classical dancer with pan-
pipes but the hennahaired ladyphotographer dances the
Song of Songs in rhythms with winking bellybutton and
clash of breastplates in more oriental style

stay muh with flahgons comfort muh with ahpples
for I am sick of loeuve
his left hand is under muh head and his rahght hand
cloth embrace muh

the semiretired actress who lived upstairs let out a
yell and then another Burglars secondstory men
Good God she's being attacked we men run up the
stairs poor woman she's in hysterics Its the wrong flat
the stairs are full of dicks outside they're backing
up the waggon All right men on one side girls on
the other what the hell kind of place is this anyway? Dicks
coming in all the windows dicks coming out of the kitchen-
ette

the hennahaired ladyphotographer holds them at bay
draped in a portiere waving the telephone Is this
Mr. Wickersham's office? District Attorney trying
experience a few friends a little dance recital
in the most brutal manner prominent actress upstairs
in hysterics allright officer talk to the District Attor-
ney he'll tell you who I am who our friends are

Dicks slink away waggon jangles to another street
the English actor is speaking Only by the greatest

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control I kept muh temper the swine I'm terrible when
I'm aroused terrible
and the Turkish consul and his friend who were
there incog belligerent nation Department of Justice
Espionage hunting radicals proGermans slipped quietly
out and the two of us ran down the stairs and walked
fast downtown and crossed to Weehawken on the ferry

it was a night of enormous fog through which moved
blunderingly the great blind shapes of steamboat sirens
from the lower bay

in the bow of the ferry we breathed the rancid river-
breeze talking loud in a shouting laugh