HUNIS HAND SEEN IN PLOTS 2 страница

They settled on a plush bench near the stove at the end
of the cigarsmoky giltornamented room. Robbins ordered
a bottle of Scotch whiskey, glasses, lemon, sugar and a lot

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of hot water. It took a long time to get the hot water, so
Robbins poured them each a quarter of a tumbler of the
whiskey straight. When he'd drunk his, his face that had
been sagging and tired, smoothed out so that he looked ten
years younger. "Only way to keep warm in this goddam
town's to keep stewed.""Still I'm glad to be back in
little old Paree," said Dick, smiling and stretching his legs
out under the table. "Only place in the world to be right
at present," said Robbins. " Paris is the hub of the world
. . . unless it's Moscow."

At the word Moscow a Frenchman playing checkers at
the next table brought his eyes up from the board and
stared at the two Americans. Dick couldn't make out what
there was in his stare; it made him uneasy. The waiter came
with the hot water. It wasn't hot enough, so Robbins made
a scene and sent it back. He poured out a couple of half-
tumblers of straight whiskey to drink while they were wait-
ing. "Is the President going to recognize the soviets?"
Dick found himself asking in a low voice.

"I'm betting on it . . . I believe he's sending an un-
official mission. Depends a little on oil and manganese . . .
it used to be King Coal, but now it's Emperor Petroleum
and Miss Manganese, queen consort of steel. That's all in
the pink republic of Georgia . . . I hope to get there
soon, they say that they have the finest wine and the most
beautiful women in the world. By God, I got to get
there. . . . But the oil . . . God damn it, that's what
this damned idealist Wilson can't understand, while they're
setting him up to big feeds at Buckingham palace the jolly
old British army is occupying Mosul, the Karun River,
Persia . . . now the latrine news has it that they're in
Baku . . . the future oil metropolis of the world."

"I thought the Baku fields were running dry."

"Don't you believe it . . . I just talked to a fellow
who'd been there . . . a funny fellow, Rasmussen, you

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ought to meet him." Dick said hadn't we got plenty of oil
at home. Robbins banged his fist on the table.

"You never can have plenty of anything . . . that's the
first law of thermodynamics. I never have plenty of whis-
key. . . . You're a young fellow, do you ever have plenty
of tail? Well, neither Standard Oil or the Royal Dutch-
Shell can ever have plenty of crude oil."

Dick blushed and laughed a little forcedly. He didn't
like this fellow Robbins. The waiter finally came back with
boiling water and Robbins made them each a toddy. For a
while neither of them said anything. The checkerplayers
had gone. Suddenly Robbins turned to Dick and looked in
his face with his hazy blue drunkard's eyes: "Well, what
do you boys think about it all? What do the fellers in the
trenches think?"

"How do you mean?"

"Oh, hell, I don't mean anything. . . . But if they
thought the war was lousy wait till they see the peace . . .
Oh, boy, wait till they see the peace."

"Down at Tours I don't think anybody thought much
about it either way . . . however, I don't think that any-
body that's seen it considers war the prize way of settling
international difficulties . . . I don't think Blackjack
Pershing himself thinks that."

"Oh, listen to him . . . can't be more than twenty-
five and he talks like a book by Woodrow Wilson . . .
I'm a son of a bitch and I know it, but when I'm drunk
I say what I goddam please."

"I don't see any good a lot of loud talk's going to do.
It's a magnificent tragic show . . . the Paris fog smells of
strawberries . . . the gods don't love us but we'll die
young just the same. . . . Who said I was sober?"

They finished up a bottle. Dick taught Robbins a rhyme
in French:

Les marionettes font font font
Trois petit tours et puis s'en vont

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and when the café closed they went out arm in arm. Rob-
bins was humming,

Cheer up, Napoleon, you'll soon be dead
A short life and a gay one

and stopping to talk with all the petite femmes they met on
the Boul' Mich'. Dick finally left him talking to a cowlike
woman in a flappy hat in front of the fountain on the Place
St. Michel, and began the long walk home to his hotel
that was opposite the Gare St. Lazare.

The broad asphalt streets were deserted under the pink
arclights but here and there on benches along the quais,
under the bare dripping trees along the bank of the Seine,
in spite of the raw night couples were still sitting huddled
together in the strangleholds of l'amour. At the corner
of the boulevard Sébastopol a whitefaced young man who
was walking the other way looked quickly into his face and
stopped. Dick slackened his pace for a moment, but walked
on past the string of marketcarts rumbling down the rue
de Rivoli, taking deep breaths to clear the reek of whiskey
out of his head. The long brightlylighted avenue that led
to the opera was empty. In front of the opera there were
a few people, a girl with a lovely complexion who was
hanging on the arm of a pollu gave him a long smile.
Almost at his hotel he ran face to face into a girl who-
seemed remarkably pretty, before he knew it he was asking
her what she was doing out so late. She laughed, charm-
ingly he thought, and said she was doing the same thing he
was. He took her to a little hotel on the back street behind
his own. They were shown into a chilly room that smelt of
furniture polish. There was a big bed, a bidet, and a lot of
heavy claretcolored hangings. The girl was older than he'd
thought and very tired, but she had a beautiful figure
and very pale skin; he was glad to see how clean her under-
wear was, with a pretty lace edging. They sat a little while
on the edge of the bed talking low.

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When he asked her what her name was, she shook her
head and smiled, "Qu'est-ce que ça vous fait?"

"L'homme sans nom et la femme sans nom, vont faire
l'amour a l'hotel du néant," he said. "Oh qu'il est rigolo,
celui-là," she giggled. "Dis, tu n'est pas malade?" He
shook his head. "Moi non plus," she said, and started rub-
bing up against him like a kitten.

When they left the hotel they roamed around the dark
streets until they found an earlymorning coffeebar. They
ate coffee and croissants together in drowsy intimate quiet,
leaning very close to each other as they stood against the
bar. She left him to go up the hill towards Montmartre.
He asked her if he couldn't see her again sometime. She
shrugged her shoulders. He gave her thirty francs and
kissed her and whispered in her ear a parody of his little
rhyme:

Les petites marionettes font font font
Un p'tit peu d'amour et puis s'en vont

She laughed and pinched his cheek and the last he heard
of her was her gruff giggle and "Oh qu'il est rigolo,
celui-là."

He went back to his room feeling happy and sleepy and
saying to himself: what's the matter with my life is I
haven't got a woman of my own. He had just time to wash
and shave and put on a clean shirt and to rush down to
headquarters in order to be there when Colonel Edge-
combe, who was a damnably early riser, got in. He found
orders to leave for Rome that night.

By the time he got on the train his eyes were stinging
with sleepiness. He and the sergeant who went with him
had a compartment reserved at the end of a first class
coach marked Paris-Brindisi. Outside of their compart-
ment the train was packed; people were standing in the
aisles. Dick had taken off his coat and Sam Browne belt
and was loosening his puttees, planning to stretch out on

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one of the seats and go to sleep even before the train left,
when he saw a skinny American face in the door of the
compartment. "I beg your pardon, is this Ca-ca-captain
Savage?" Dick sat up and nodded yawning. " CaptainSav-
age, my name is Barrow, G. H. Barrow, attached to the
American delegation. . . . I have to go to Rome tonight
and there's not a seat on the train. The transport officer in
the station very kindly said that . . . er . . . er although
it wasn't according to Hoyle you might stretch a point and
allow us to ride with you . . . I have with me a very
charming young lady member of the Near East Re-
lief . . ."" CaptainSavage, it certainly is mighty nice of
you to let us ride with you," came a drawling Texas voice,
and a pinkcheeked girl in a dark grey uniform brushed past
the man who said his name was Barrow and climbed up into
the car. Mr. Barrow, who was shaped like a string bean
and had a prominent twitching Adam's apple and popeyes,
began tossing up satchels and suitcases. Dick was sore and
began to say stiffly, "I suppose you know that it's entirely
against my orders . . ." but he heard his own voice saying
it and suddenly grinned and said, "All right, Sergeant
Wilson and I will probably be shot at sunrise, but go
ahead." At that moment the train started.

Dick reluctantly scraped his things together into one
corner and settled down there and immediately closed his
eyes. He was much too sleepy to make the effort of talk-
ing to any damn relievers. The sergeant sat in the other
corner and Mr. Barrow and the girl occupied the other
seat. Through his doze Dick could hear Mr. Barrow's
voice chugging along, now and then drowned out by the
rattle of the express train. He had a stuttery way of talk-
ing like a badly running motorboat engine. The girl didn't
say much except, "Oh my," and "I declare," now and then.
It was the European situation: President Wilson says . . .
new diplomacy . . . new Europe . . . permanent peace
without annexations or indemnities. President Wilson

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says . . . new understanding between capital and labor
. . . President Wilson appeals to . . . industrial democ-
racy . . . plain people all over the world behind the
president. Covenant. League of Nations . . . Dick was
asleep dreaming of a girl rubbing her breasts against him
purring like a kitten, of a popeyed man making a speech, of
William Jennings Wilson speaking before the Baltimore conflagration, of industrial democracy in a bathhouse on
the Marne in striped trunks, with a young Texas boy with
pink cheeks who wanted to . . . like a string bean . . .
with a twitching adamsapple . . .

He woke up with a nightmarish feeling that somebody
was choking him. The train had stopped. It was stifling
in the compartment. The blue shade was drawn down on
the lamp overhead. He stepped over everybody's legs and
went out in the passage and opened a window. Cold moun-
tain air cut into his nostrils. The hills were snowy in the
moonlight. Beside the track a French sentry was sleepily
leaning on his rifle. Dick yawned desperately.

The Near East Relief girl was standing beside him,
looking at him smiling. "Where are we gettin' to, Captain
Savage? . . . Is this Italy yet?""I guess it's the Swiss
border . . . we'll have a long wait, I guess . . . they take
forever at these borders."

"Oh Jimminy," said the girl, jumping up and down,
"it's the first time I ever crossed a border."

Dick laughed and settled back into his seat again. The
train pulled into a barny lonelylooking, station, very dimly
lit, and the civilian passengers started piling out with their
baggage. Dick sent his papers by the sergeant to the mili-
tary inspection and settled back to sleep again.

He slept soundly and didn't wake up until the Mont
Cenis. Then it was the Italian frontier. Again cold air,
snowy mountains, everybody getting out into an empty
barn of a station.

Sleepysentimentally remembering the last time he'd

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gone into Italy on the Fiat car with Sheldrake, he walked
shivering to the station bar and drank a bottle of mineral
water and a glass of wine. He took a couple of bottles of
mineral water and a fiasco of chianti back to the compart-
ment, and offered Mr. Barrow and the girl drinks when
they came back from the customs and the police looking
very cross and sleepy. The girl said she couldn't drink
wine because she'd signed a pledge not to drink or smoke
when she joined the N.E.R., but she drank some mineral
water and complained that it tickled her nose. Then they
all huddled back into their corners to try to sleep some
more. By the time they pulled into the Termi station in
Rome they were all calling each other by their first names.
The Texas girl's name was Anne Elizabeth. She and Dick
had spent the day standing in the corridor looking out at
the saffronroofed towns and the peasants' houses each with
a blue smear on the stucco behind the grapevine over the
door, and the olives and the twisted shapes of the vines in
their redterraced fields; the pale hilly Italian landscape
where the pointed cypresses stood up so dark they were
like gashes in a canvas. She'd told him all about trying to
get overseas all through the war and how her brother
had been killed learning to fly at San Antonio, and how nice
Mr. Barrow had been on the boat and in Paris but that he
would try to make love to her and acted so silly, which
was very inconvenient; Dick said well maybe it wasn't so
silly. He could see that Anne Elizabeth felt fine about
travelling to Rome with a real army officer who'd been
to the front and could talk Italian and everything.

From the station he had to rush to the embassy with
his despatch cases, but he had time to arrange to call up
Miss Trent at the Near East Relief. Barrow too shook
hands with him warmly and said he hoped they'd see
something of each other; he was anxious to establish con-
tacts with people who really knew what it was all about.

The only thing Dick thought of that night was to get

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through and get to bed. Next morning he called up Ed
Schuyler at the Red Cross. They ate a big winey lunch
together at an expensive restaurant near the Pincio gardens.
Ed had been leading the life of Riley; he had an apart-
ment on the Spanish Stairs and took a lot of trips. He'd
gotten fat. But now he was in trouble. The husband of an
Italian woman he'd been running round with was threaten-
ing to challenge him to a duel and he was afraid there'd
be a row and he'd lose his job with the Red Cross. "The
war was all right but it's the peace that really gets you,"
he said. Anyway he was sick of Italy and the Red Cross
and wanted to go home. The only thing was that they were
going to have a revolution in Italy and he'd like to stay and
see it. "Well, Dick, for a member of the grenadine guards
you seem to have done pretty well for yourself."

"All a series of accidents," said Dick, wrinkling up his
nose. "Things are funny, do you know it?""Don't I know
it . . . I wonder what happened to poor old Steve? Fred
Summers was joining the Polish Legion, last I heard of
him."" Steve's probably in jail," said Dick, "where we
ought to be.""But it's not every day you get a chance to
see a show like this."

It was four o'clock when they left the restaurant. They
went to Ed's room and sat drinking cognac in his window
looking out over the yellow and verdigris roofs of the city
and the baroque domes sparkling in the last sunlight, re-
membering how tremendously they'd felt Rome the last
time they'd been there together, talking about what they'd
be doing now that the war was over. Ed Schuyler said he
wanted to get a foreign correspondent job that would take
him out east; he couldn't imagine going back home to up-
state New York; he had to see Persia and Afghanistan.
Talking about what he was going to do made Dick feel
hellishly miserable. He started walking back and forth
across the tiled floor.

The bell rang and Schuyler went out in the hall. Dick

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heard whispering and a woman's voice talking Italian in a
thin treble. After a moment Ed pushed a little long.
nosed woman with huge black eyes into the room. "This is
Magda," he said, " Signora Sculpi, meet Captain Savage."
After that they had to talk in mixed French and Italian.
"I don't think it's going to rain," said Dick. "Suppose I
get hold of a girl for you and we take a drive and eat
supper at Caesar's palace . . . maybe it won't be too cold."

Dick remembered Anne Elizabeth and called up the
N.E.R. The Texas voice was delighted, said the relievers
were awful and that she'd made a date with Mr. Barrow
but would get out of it. Yes, she'd be ready if they called
for her in half an hour. After a lot of bargaining between
Signora Sculpi and a cabman they hired a twohorse landau
considerably elegant and decrepit. Anne Elizabeth was
waiting for them at her door. "Those old hens make me
tired," she said, jumping into the cab. "Tell him to hurry
or Mr. Barrow'll catch us. . . . Those old hens say I have
to be in by nine o'clock. I declare it worse'n Sunday-
school in there. . . . It was mighty nice of you to ask me
out to meet your friends, Captain Savage. . . . I was
just dying to get out and see the town. . . . Isn't it won-
derful? Say, where does the Pope live?"

The sun had set and it had begun to get chilly. The
Palazzo dei Cesari was empty and chilly, so they merely
had a vermouth there and went back into town for dinner.
After dinner they went to a show at the Apollo. "My, I'll
ketch it," said Anne Elizabeth, "but I don't care. I want
to see the town."

She took Dick's arm as they went into the theatre. "Do
you know, Dick . . . all these foreigners make me feel
kinder lonesome . . . I'm glad I got a white man with
me. . . . When I was at school in New York I used to
go out to Jersey to see a textile strike . . . I used to be
interested in things like that. I used to feel like I do now
then. But I wouldn't miss any of it. Maybe it's the way

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you feel when you're having a really interesting time."
Dick felt a little drunk and very affectionate. He squeezed
her arm and leaned over her. "Bad mans shan't hurt lil'
Texas girl," he crooned. "I guess you think I haven't got
good sense," said Anne Elizabeth, suddenly changing her
tone. "But oh lawsie, how'm I going to get along with that
Methodist Board of Temperance and Public Morals I've
got to live with! I don't mean I don't think their work's
fine . . . It's awful to think of poor little children starv-
ing everywhere. . . . We've won the war, now it's up to
us to help patch things up in Europe just like the President
says." The curtain was going up and all the Italians around
started shushing. Anne Elizabeth subsided. When Dick
tried to get hold of her hand she pulled it away and
flicked his with her fingers. "Say, I thought you were
out of highschool," she said.

The show wasn't much, and Anne Elizabeth who
couldn't understand a word, kept letting her head drop
on Dick's shoulder and going to sleep. In the intermission
when they all went to the bar for drinks, Anne Elizabeth
dutifully took lemonade. Going upstairs again to their
seats, there was suddenly a scuffle. A little Italian with eye-
glasses and a bald head had run at Ed Schuyler screaming,
"Traditore." He ran at him so hard that they both lost
their balance and rolled down the redcarpeted steps, the
little Italian punching and kicking and Ed holding him
off at arm's length as best he could. Dick and Anne Eliza-
beth, who turned out to be very strong, grabbed the little
Italian, picked him up off the ground and locked his arms
behind him while Signora Sculpi fell on his neck sobbing.
It was the husband.

Ed meanwhile got to his feet looking very red and
sheepish. By the time the Italian police appeared every-
thing had quieted down and the manager was nervously
brushing the dust off Ed's uniform. Anne Elizabeth found
the little Italian his eyeglasses, that were badly bent, and

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he led his wife out, who was sobbing. He looked so funny,
when he stopped in the door with his bent eyeglasses
trembling on the end of his nose to shake his fist at Ed,
that Dick couldn't help laughing. Ed was apologizing pro-
fusely to the manager, who seemed to take his side, ex-
plaining to the policemen in their shiny hats that the hus-
band was pazzo. The bell rang and they all went back to
their seats. "Why, Anne Elizabeth, you're a jujutsu ex-
pert," Dick whispered, his lips touching her ear. They got
to giggling so they couldn't pay attention to the show and
had to go out to a café.

"Now I suppose all the wops'll think I'm a coward if
I don't challenge the poor little bugger to a duel.""Sure,
it'll be cappistols at thirty paces now . . . or eggplants at
five yards." Dick was laughing so hard he was crying. Ed
began to get sore. "It isn't funny," he said, "it's a hell of a
thing to have happen . . . a guy never seems to be able to
have any fun without making other people miserable . . .
poor Magda . . . it's hellish for her. . . . Miss Trent,
I hope you'll excuse this ridiculous exhibition." Ed got up
and went home.

"Well, what on earth was that about, Dick?" asked
Anne Elizabeth, when they'd gotten out in the street and
were walking towards the N.E.R. boarding house. "Well,
I suppose Signore husband was jealous on account of Ed's
running around with Magda . . . or else it's a pretty little
blackmail plot . . . poor Ed seems all cut up about it."
"People sure do things over here they wouldn't do at
home . . . I declare it's peculiar.""Oh, Ed gets in trouble
everywhere. . . . He's got a special knack.""I guess it's
the war and continental standards and everything loosens
up people's morals. . . . I never was prissy, but my good-
ness, I was surprised when Mr. Barrow asked me to go to
his hotel the first day we landed . . . I'd only spoken to
him three or four times before on the boat. . . . Now at
home he wouldn't have done that, not in a thousand years."

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Dick looked searchingly into Anne Elizabeth's face. "In
Rome do as the Romans do," he said with a funny smirk.
She laughed, looking hard into his eyes as if trying to
guess what he meant. "Oh, well, I guess it's all part of
life," she said. In the shadow of the doorway he wanted
to do some heavy kissing, but she gave him a quick peck in
the mouth and shook her head. Then she grabbed his hand
and squeezed it hard and said, "Let's us be good friends."
Dick walked home with his head swimming with the scent
of her sandy hair.

Dick had three or four days to wait in Rome. The Presi-
dent was to arrive on January 3 and several couriers were
held at his disposition. Meanwhile he had nothing to do
but walk around the town and listen to the bands practicing
The Star-Spangled Banner and watch the flags and the
stands going up.

The first of January was a holiday; Dick and Ed and
Mr. Barrow and Anne Elizabeth hired a car and went out
to Hadrian's Villa and then on to Tivoli for lunch. It
was a showery day and there was a great deal of mud on
the roads. Anne Elizabeth said the rolling Campagna, yel-
low and brown with winter, made her think of back home
along the Middlebuster. They ate fritto misto and drank a
lot of fine gold Frascati wine at the restaurant above the
waterfall. Ed and Mr. Barrow agreed about the Roman
Empire and that the ancients knew the art of life. Anne
Elizabeth seemed to Dick to be flirting with Mr. Barrow.
It made him sore the way she let him move his chair close
to hers when they sat drinking their coffee on the terrace
afterwards, looking down into the deep ravine brimmed
with mist from the waterfall. Dick sat drinking his coffee
without saying anything.

When she'd emptied her cup Anne Elizabeth jumped
to her feet and said she wanted to go up to the little round
temple that stood on the hillside opposite like something
in an old engraving. Ed said the path was too steep for so

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soon after lunch. Mr. Barrow said without enthusiasm, er,
he'd go. Anne Elizabeth was off running across the bridge
and down the path with Dick running after her slipping
and stumbling in the loose gravel and the puddles. When
they got to the bottom the mist was soppy and cold on
their faces. The waterfall was right over their heads. Their
ears were full of the roar of it. Dick looked back to see if
Mr. Barrow was coming.

"He must have turned back," he shouted above the falls.
"Oh, I hate people who won't ever go anywhere," yelled
Anne Elizabeth. She grabbed his hand. "Let's run up to the
temple." They got up there breathless. Across the ravine
they could see Ed and Mr. Barrow still sitting on the ter-
race of the restaurant. Anne Elizabeth thumbed her nose
at them and then waved. "Isn't this wonderful?" she
spluttered. "Oh, I'm wild about ruins and scenery . . .
I'd like to go all over Italy and see everything. . . .
Where can we go this afternoon? . . . Let's not go back
and listen to them mouthing about the Roman Empire."

"We might get to Nemi . . . you know the lake where
Caligula had his galleys . . . but I don't think we can
get there without the car.""Then they'd come along. . . .
No, let's take a walk.""It might rain on us.""Well, what
if it does? We won't run."

They went up a path over the hills above the town and
soon found themselves walking through wet pastures and
oakwoods with the Campagna stretching lightbrown below
them and the roofs of Tivoli picked out with black cypresses
like exclamation points. It was a showery springfeeling
afternoon. They could see the showers moving in dark
grey and whitish blurs across the Campagna. Underfoot
little redpurple cyclamens were blooming. Anne Elizabeth
kept picking them and poking them in his face for him to
smell. Her cheeks were red and her hair was untidy and
she seemed to feel too happy to walk, running and skip-
ping all the way. A small sprinkle of rain wet them a