1919 (43 page)

They heard music in another café and saw the shadows of dancers passing across the windows upstairs. “Let's go up there,” said Eveline. They went in and upstairs to the dancehall that was a long room full of mirrors. There Eveline said she wanted to drink some Rhine wine. They studied the card a long while and finally with a funny sideways look at Paul, she suggested liebefraumilch. Paul got red, “I wish I had a liebe frau,” he said. “Why probably you have . . . one in every port,” said Eveline. He shook his head.

Next time they danced he held her very tight. He didn't seem so awkward as he had before. “I feel pretty lonely myself, these days,” said Eveline when they sat down again. “You, lonely . . . with the whole of the Peace Conference running after you, and the A.E.F. too . . . Why, Don told me you're a dangerous woman.” She shrugged her shoulders, “When did Don find that out? Maybe you could be dangerous too, Paul.”

Next time they danced she put her cheek against his. When the music stopped he looked as if he was going to kiss her, but he didn't. “This is the most wonderful evening I ever had in my life,” he said, “I wish I was the kind of guy you really wanted to have take you out.” “Maybe you could get to be, Paul . . . you seem to be learning fast. . . . No, but we're acting silly . . . I hate ogling and flirting around . . . I guess I want the moon . . . maybe I want to get married and have a baby.” Paul was embarrassed. They sat silent watching the other dancers. Eveline saw a young French soldier lean over and kiss the little girl he was dancing with on the lips; kissing, they kept on dancing. Eveline wished she was that girl. “Let's have a little more wine,” she said to Paul. “Do you think we'd better? All right, what the hec, we've having a big time.”

Getting in the taxicab Paul was pretty drunk, laughing and hugging her. As soon as they were in the darkness of the back of the taxi they started kissing. Eveline held Paul off for a minute, “Let's go to your place instead of mine,” she said. “I'm afraid of my concièrge.” “All right . . . it's awful little,” said Paul, giggling. “But ish gebibbel, we should worry get a wrinkle.”

When they had gotten past the bitter eyes that sized them up of the old man who kept the keys at Paul's hotel they staggered up a long chilly winding stair and into a little room that gave on a court. “It's a great life if you don't weaken,” said Paul, waving his arms after he'd locked and bolted the door. It had started to rain again and the rain made the sound of a waterfall on the glass roof at the bottom of the court. Paul threw his hat and tunic in the corner of the room and came towards her, his eyes shining.

They'd hardly gotten to bed when he fell asleep with his head on her shoulder. She slipped out of bed to turn the light off and open the window and then snuggled shivering against his body that was warm and relaxed like a child's. Outside the rain poured down on the glass roof. There was a puppy shut up somewhere in the building that whined and yelped desperately without stopping. Eveline couldn't get to sleep. Something shut up inside her was whining like the puppy. Through the window she began to see the dark peak of a roof and chimneypots against a fading purple sky. Finally she fell asleep.

Next day they spent together. She'd phoned in to the Red Cross that she was sick as usual and Paul forgot about the Sorbonne altogether. They sat all morning in the faint sunshine at a café near the Madeleine making plans about what they'd do. They'd get themselves sent back home as soon as they possibly could and get jobs in New York and get married. Paul was going to study engineering in his spare time. There was a firm of grain and feed merchants in Jersey City, friends of his father's he knew he could get a job with. Eveline could start up her decorating business again. Paul was happy and confident and had lost his apologetic manner. Eveline kept telling herself that Paul had stuff in him, that she was in love with Paul, that something could be made out of Paul.

The rest of the month of May they were both a little lightheaded all the time. They spent all their pay the first few days so that they had to eat at little table d'hôte restaurants crowded with students and working people and poor clerks where they bought books of tickets that gave them a meal for two francs or two fifty. One Sunday in June they went out to St. Germain and walked through the forest. Eveline had spells of nausea and weakness and had to lie down on the grass several times. Paul looked worried sick. At last they got to a little settlement on the bank of the Seine. The Seine flowed fast streaked with green and lilac in the afternoon light, brimming the low banks bordered by ranks of huge poplars. They crossed a little ferry rowed by an old man that Eveline called Father Time. Halfway over she said to Paul, “Do you know what's the matter with me, Paul? I'm going to have a baby.”

Paul let his breath out in a whistle. “Well, I hadn't just planned for that . . . I guess I've been a stinker not to make you marry me before this. . . . We'll get married right away. I'll find out what you have to do to get permission to get married in the A.E.F. I guess it's all right, Eveline . . . but, gee, it does change my plans.”

They'd reached the other bank and walked up through Conflans to the railroad station to get the train back to Paris. Paul looked worried. “Well, don't you think it changes my plans too?” said Eveline dryly. “It's going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, that's what it is.”

“Eveline,” said Paul seriously with tears in his eyes, “what can I ever do to make it up to you? . . . honest, I'll do my best.” The train whistled and rumbled into the platform in front of them. They were so absorbed in their thoughts they hardly saw it. When they'd climbed into a third class compartment they sat silent bolt upright facing each other, their knees touching, looking out of the window without seeing the suburbs of Paris, not saying anything. At last Eveline said with a tight throat, “I want to have the little brat, Paul, we have to go through everything in life.” Paul nodded. Then she couldn't see his face anymore. The train had gone into a tunnel.

WHOLE WORLD IS SHORT OF PLATINUM

 

Il serait Criminel de Negliger Les Intérêts Français dans les Balkans

 

KILLS SELF IN CELL

 

the quotation of United Cigar Stores made this month of $167 per share means $501 per share for the old stock upon which present stockholders are receiving 27% per share as formerly held. Through peace and war it has maintained and increased its dividends

 

6 TRAPPED ON UPPER FLOOR

 

How are you goin' to keep 'em down on the farm

After they've seen Paree

 

If Wall street needed the treaty, which means if the business interests of the country properly desired to know to what extent we are being committed in affairs which do not concern us, why should it take the trouble to corrupt the tagrag and bobtail which forms Mr. Wilson's following in Paris?

 

ALLIES URGE MAGYAR PEOPLE TO UPSET
BELA KUN REGIME

 

11
WOMEN MISSING IN BLUEBEARD MYSTERY

 

Enfin La France Achète les stocks Américains

 

How are you goin' to keep 'em away from Broadway

                             
Jazzin' around

                                  
Paintin' the town

 

the boulevards during the afternoon presented an unwonted aspect. The café terraces in most cases were deserted and had been cleared of their tables and chairs. At some of the cafés customers were admitted one by one and served by faithful waiters, who, however, had discarded their aprons

 

YEOMANETTE SHRIEKS FOR FORMER SUITOR AS
SHE SEEKS DEATH IN DRIVE APARTMENT

 

DESIRES OF HEDJAZ STIR PARIS CRITICS

 

in order not prematurely to show their colors a pretense is made of disbanding a few formations; in reality however, these troops are being transferred lock stock and barrel to Kolchak

 

I.W.W. IN PLOT TO KILL WILSON

 

Find 10,000 Bags of Decayed Onions

 

FALL ON STAIRS KILLS WEALTHY CITIZEN

 

the mistiness of the weather hid the gunboat from sight soon after it left the dock, but the President continued to wave his hat and smile as the boat headed towards the George Washington

 

OVERTHROW OF SOVIET RULE SURE

I commit my soul into the hands of my savior
, wrote John Pierpont Morgan in his will,
in full confidence that having redeemed it and washed it in His most precious blood, He will present it faultless before my heavenly father, and I intreat my children to maintain and defend at all hazard and at any cost of personal sacrifice the blessed doctrine of complete atonement for sin through the blood of Jesus Christ once offered and through that alone
,

and into the hands of the House of Morgan represented by his son,

he committed,

when he died in Rome in 1913,

the control of the Morgan interests in New York, Paris and London, four national banks, three trust companies, three life insurance companies, ten railroad systems, three street railway companies, an express company, the International Mercantile Marine,

power,

on the cantilever principle, through interlocking directorates

over eighteen other railroads, U.S. Steel, General Electric, American Tel and Tel, five major industries;

the interwoven cables of the Morgan Stillman Baker combination held credit up like a suspension bridge, thirteen percent of the banking resources of the world.

 

The first Morgan to make a pool was Joseph Morgan, a hotelkeeper in Hartford Connecticut who organized stagecoach lines and bought up Ætna Life Insurance stock in a time of panic caused by one of the big New York fires in the 1830's;

his son Junius followed in his footsteps, first in the drygoods business, and then as partner to George Peabody, a Massachusetts banker who built up an enormous underwriting and mercantile business in London and became a friend of Queen Victoria;

Junius married the daughter of John Pierpont, a Boston preacher, poet, eccentric, and abolitionist; and their eldest son,

John Pierpont Morgan

arrived in New York to make his fortune

after being trained in England, going to school at Vevey, proving himself a crack mathematician at the University of Göttingen,

a lanky morose young man of twenty,

just in time for the panic of '57.

(war and panics on the stock exchange, bankruptcies, warloans, good growing weather for the House of Morgan.)

 

When the guns started booming at Fort Sumter, young Morgan turned some money over reselling condemned muskets to the U.S. army and began to make himself felt in the gold room in downtown New York; there was more in trading in gold than in trading in muskets; so much for the Civil War.

During the Franco-Prussian war Junius Morgan floated a huge bond issue for the French government at Tours.

At the same time young Morgan was fighting Jay Cooke and the German-Jew bankers in Frankfort over the funding of the American war debt (he never did like the Germans or the Jews).

The panic of '75 ruined Jay Cooke and made J. Pierpont Morgan the boss croupier of Wall Street; he united with the Philadelphia Drexels and built the Drexel building where for thirty years he sat in his glassedin office, redfaced and insolent, writing at his desk, smoking great black cigars, or, if important issues were involved, playing solitaire in his inner office; he was famous for his few words, Yes or No, and for his way of suddenly blowing up in a visitor's face and for that special gesture of the arm that meant,
What do I get out of it?

In '77 Junius Morgan retired; J. Pierpont got himself made a member of the board of directors of the New York Central railroad and launched the first
Corsair.
He liked yachting and to have pretty actresses call him Commodore.

He founded the Lying-in Hospital on Stuyvesant Square, and was fond of going into St. George's church and singing a hymn all alone in the afternoon quiet.

In the panic of '93

at no inconsiderable profit to himself

Morgan saved the U.S. Treasury; gold was draining out, the country was ruined, the farmers were howling for a silver standard, Grover Cleveland and his cabinet were walking up and down in the blue room at the White House without being able to come to a decision, in Congress they were making speeches while the gold reserves melted in the Subtreasuries; poor people were starving; Coxey's army was marching to Washington; for a long time Grover Cleveland couldn't bring himself to call in the representative of the Wall Street moneymasters; Morgan sat in his suite at the Arlington smoking cigars and quietly playing solitaire until at last the president sent for him;

he had a plan all ready for stopping the gold hemorrhage.

 

After that what Morgan said went; when Carnegie sold out he built the Steel Trust.

J. Pierpont Morgan was a bullnecked irascible man with small black magpie's eyes and a growth on his nose; he let his partners work themselves to death over the detailed routine of banking, and sat in his back office smoking black cigars; when there was something to be decided he said Yes or No or just turned his bank and went back to his solitaire.

 

Every Christmas his librarian read him Dickens'
A Christmas Carol
from the original manuscript.

He was fond of canarybirds and pekinese dogs and liked to take pretty actresses yachting. Each
Corsair
was a finer vessel than the last.