“It reminds me of school children twiddling their fingers at their teacher,” he laughed. “They’re so evidently produced to shock. A blush or shiver in every line! Do you remember when you learned your first naughty word, how you looked up the synonyms in the dictionary and then sprang them on your pals? With some it was more of an obsession than with others, of course. They would chalk up all the whoppers they could think on the sidewalks and sides of buildings. Well, that’s what the French playwrights are doing, and some of the poets and artists. Freud might explain it by showing that their normal impulses were checked in some way.
“I remember a Chicago newspaperman who got an overdose of Havelock Ellis and Freud and the decadents, I suppose. The result was a book with all the conventionally naughty things trotted in, like the chalk marks of an impudent schoolboy who hasn’t got enough outdoor exercise. And when the book was suppressed, he enjoyed all the sensations of the bad boy sitting on the stool with a dunce cap on his head, wriggling his fingers at authority.”
The ateliers, into which McCall’s newspaper friends got the three friends entrée, were more to their liking. Although here, too, Bill often found finger-wriggling at authority for its own sake. Here, at least, the delusion was honest. But in the drawing rooms they saw Paris in deeper perspective.
Here were men of all countries and representing all causes. Men in conventional black and white, sometimes relieved by a ribbon across an immaculate shirt front or a jeweled decoration; men in uniforms and in picturesque native costumes. There were red men, yellow men, black men and white men—men of all shades between. An Arab sheik, in turban and flowing robe, come to sue for the autonomy of a stretch of desert, conversed with the representative from Albania, in Paris on a similar mission. There were brilliant young Irish leaders and dreamers of the national independence of Bohemia. Fighters for Palestine, Polish nationalists, Hindu revolters, Persian revolutionists. One could not move without bumping into the holder of some claim of national autonomy.
“The trouble with them is that they’re all right, and, therefore, all wrong,” said Dr. Levin. “One of them could be right, or two, but here you run into twenty claims that contradict each other. Every land believes its natural boundaries to be the widest boundaries it can get—the boundaries when Peter the Magnificent or Oswald the Resplendent (some national hero that nobody else has ever heard about) reigned. And, of course, the domains of Peter overlap those of Oswald, who ruled a hundred years later. Each country is right, that is as right as any other country. But in this case, too many rights make everything all wrong.”
McCall sympathized with every national aspiration, and when delegates learned that in civilian life he was a writer on one of the great American newspapers they poured their woes and hopes into his ear. Hamilton, as an orthodox Democrat and admirer of President Wilson, listened eagerly.
There were Russian emigrés galore, whose downfall caused McCall to chuckle, although it was harder to delight in the fate of the mysterious Russian noblewoman—tall, slim, straight-shouldered, with brown hair, high cheek bones and great onyx-colored eyes—who hovered about.
There were other beautiful women—tall, fair English-women; animated, little Parisienne brunettes; a few majestic Americans. It was interesting to guess their nationality.
“There’s something about this I’m getting to like,” said Hamilton. “This cosmopolitan atmosphere. I’ve always been with Americans, of a certain class. Here one meets people from all parts of the world. And it’s not just a matter of having money, like in Chicago or New York. Some of the most interesting chaps here have been the painters and writers, fellows just struggling to get a hold on things.
“During the war, when I was quartered in little villages, I got an idea that the French were robbers, who tried to stick the Americans for every cent they could. I got a contempt for them because they didn’t have shower baths and modern plumbing, and apple pie in the restaurants. I see now, sanitary plumbing and all that is only one phase of civilization.”