So much fun--so long ago. Rosemary envied them their fun, imagining a life of leisure unlike her own. She knew little of leisure but she had the respect for it of those who have never had it. She thought of it as a resting, without realizing that the Divers were as far from relaxing as she was herself.
"What did this to him?" she asked. "Why does he have to drink?"
Nicole shook her head right and left, disclaiming responsibility for the matter: "So many smart men go to pieces nowadays."
"And when haven't they?" Dick asked. "Smart men play close to the line because they have to--some of them can't stand it, so they quit."
"It must lie deeper than that." Nicole clung to her conservatism; also she was irritated that Dick should contradict her before Rosemary. "Artists like--well, like Fernand don't seem to have to wallow in alcohol. Why is it just Americans who dissipate?"
There were so many answers to this question that Dick decided to leave it in the air, to buzz victoriously in Nicole's ears. He had become intensely critical of her. Though he thought she was the most attractive human creature he had ever seen, though he got from her everything he needed, he scented battle from afar, and subconsciously he had been hardening and arming himself, hour by hour. He was not given to self-indulgence and he felt comparatively graceless at this moment of indulging himself, blinding his eyes with the hope that Nicole guessed at only an emotional excitement about Rosemary. He was not sure--last night at the theatre she had referred pointedly to Rosemary as a child.
The trio lunched downstairs in an atmosphere-of carpets and padded waiters, who did not march at the stomping quick-step of those men who brought good food to the tables whereon they had recently dined. Here there were families of Americans staring around at families of Americans, and trying to make conversation with one another.
There was a party at the next table that they could not account for. It consisted of an expansive, somewhat secretarial, would-you-mind-repeating young man, and a score of women. The women were neither young nor old nor of any particular social class; yet the party gave the impression of a unit, held more closely together for example than a group of wives stalling through a professional congress of their husbands. Certainly it was more of a unit than any conceivable tourist party.
An instinct made Dick suck back the grave derision that formed on his tongue; he asked the waiter to find out who they were.
"Those are the gold-star muzzers," explained the waiter.
Aloud and in low voices they exclaimed. Rosemary's eyes filled with tears.
"Probably the young ones are the wives," said Nicole.
Over his wine Dick looked at them again; in their happy faces, the dignity that surrounded and pervaded the party, he perceived all the maturity of an older America. For a while the sobered women who had come to mourn for their dead, for something they could not repair, made the room beautiful. Momentarily, he sat again on his father's knee, riding with Mosby27 while the old loyalties and devotions fought on around him. Almost with an effort he turned back to his two women at the table and faced the whole new world in which he believed.
--Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?
XXIII
ABE NORTH was still in the Ritz bar, where he had been since nine in the morning. When he arrived seeking sanctuary the windows were open and great beams were busy at pulling up the dust from smoky carpets and cushions. Chasseurs tore through the corridors, liberated and disembodied, moving for the moment in pure space. The sit-down bar for women, across from the bar proper, seemed very small--it was hard to imagine what throngs it could accommodate in the afternoon.
The famous Paul, the concessionnaire, had not arrived, but Claude, who was checking stock, broke off his work with no improper surprise to make Abe a pick-me-up. Abe sat on a bench against a wall. After two drinks he began to feel better--so much better that he mounted to the barber's shop and was shaved. When he returned to the bar Paul had arrived--in his custom-built motor, from which he had disembarked correctly at the Boulevard des Capucines. Paul liked Abe and came over to talk.
"I was supposed to ship home this morning," Abe said. "I mean yesterday morning, or whatever this is."
"Why din you?" asked Paul.
Abe considered, and happened finally to a reason: "I was reading a serial in Liberty and the next installment was due here in Paris--so if I'd sailed I'd have missed it--then I never would have read it."
"It must be a very good story."
"It's a terr-r-rible story."
Paul arose chuckling and paused, leaning on the back of a chair:
"If you really want to get off, Mr. North, there are friends of yours going to-morrow on the France--Mister what is this name--and Slim Pearson. Mister--I'll think of it--tall with a new beard."
"Yardly," Abe supplied.
"Mr. Yardly. They're both going on the France."
He was on his way to his duties but Abe tried to detain him: "If I didn't have to go by way of Cherbourg. The baggage went that way."
"Get your baggage in New York," said Paul, receding.
The logic of the suggestion fitted gradually into Abe's pitch--he grew rather enthusiastic about being cared for, or rather about prolonging his state of irresponsibility.
Other clients had meanwhile drifted in to the bar: first came a huge Dane whom Abe had somewhere encountered. The Dane took a seat across the room, and Abe guessed he would be there all the day, drinking, lunching, talking or reading newspapers. He felt a desire to out-stay him. At eleven the college boys began to step in, stepping gingerly lest they tear one another bag from bag. It was about then he had the chasseur telephone to the Divers; by the time he was in touch with them he was in touch also with other friends--and his hunch was to put them all on different phones at once--the result was somewhat general. From time to time his mind reverted to the fact that he ought to go over and get Freeman out of jail, but he shook off all facts as parts of the nightmare.
By one o'clock the bar was jammed; amidst the consequent mixture of voices the staff of waiters functioned, pinning down their clients to the facts of drink and money.
"That makes two stingers ... and one more ... two martinis and one ... nothing for you, Mr. Quarterly ... that makes three rounds. That makes seventy-five francs, Mr. Quarterly. Mr. Schaeffer said he had this--you had the last ... I can only do what you say ... thanks vera-much."
In the confusion Abe had lost his seat; now he stood gently swaying and talking to some of the people with whom he had involved himself. A terrier ran a leash around his legs but Abe managed to extricate himself without upsetting and became the recipient of profuse apologies. Presently he was invited to lunch, but declined. It was almost Briglith, he explained, and there was something he had to do at Briglith. A little later, with the exquisite manners of the alcoholic that are like the manners of a prisoner or a family servant, he said good-by to an acquaintance, and turning around discovered that the bar's great moment was over as precipitately as it had begun.
Across from him the Dane and his companions had ordered luncheon. Abe did likewise but scarcely touched it. Afterwards, he just sat, happy to live in the past. The drink made past happy things contemporary with the present, as if they were still going on, contemporary even with the future as if they were about to happen again.
At four the chasseur approached him:
"You wish to see a colored fellow of the name Jules Peterson?"
"God! How did he find me?"
"I didn't tell him you were present."
"Who did?" Abe fell over his glasses but recovered himself.
"Says he's already been around to all the American bars and hotels."
"Tell him I'm not here--" As the chasseur turned away Abe asked: "Can he come in here?"
"I'll find out."
Receiving the question Paul glanced over his shoulder; he shook his head, then seeing Abe he came over.
"I'm sorry; I can't allow it."
Abe got himself up with an effort
and went out to the rue Cambon.
XXIV
WITH his miniature leather briefcase in his hand Richard Diver walked from the seventh arrondissement--where he left a note for Maria Wallis signed "Dicole," the word with which he and Nicole had signed communications in the first days of love--to his shirt-makers where the clerks made a fuss over him out of proportion to the money he spent. Ashamed at promising so much to these poor Englishmen, with his fine manners, his air of having the key to security, ashamed of making a tailor shift an inch of silk on his arm. Afterward he went to the bar of the Crillon and drank a small coffee and two fingers of gin.
As he entered the hotel the halls had seemed unnaturally bright; when he left he realized that it was because it had already turned dark outside. It was a windy four-o'clock night with the leaves on the Champs-Elysees singing and failing, thin and wild. Dick turned down the rue de Rivoli, walking two squares under the arcades to his bank where there was mail. Then he took a taxi and started up the Champs-Elysees through the first patter of rain, sitting alone with his love.
Back at two o'clock in the Roi George corridor the beauty of Nicole had been to the beauty of Rosemary as the beauty of Leonardo's girl was to that of the girl of an illustrator. Dick moved on through the rain, demoniac and frightened, the passions of many men inside him and nothing simple that he could see.
Rosemary opened her door full of emotions no one else knew of. She was now what is sometimes called a "little wild thing"--by twenty-four full hours she was not yet unified and she was absorbed in playing around with chaos; as if her destiny were a picture puzzle--counting benefits, counting hopes, telling off Dick, Nicole, her mother, the director she met yesterday, like stops on a string of beads.
When Dick knocked she had just dressed and been watching the rain, thinking of some poem, and of full gutters in Beverly Hills. When she opened the door she saw him as something fixed and Godlike as he had always been, as older people are to younger, rigid and unmalleable. Dick saw her with an inevitable sense of disappointment. It took him a moment to respond to the unguarded sweetness of her smile, her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud yet guarantee a flower. He was conscious of the print of her wet foot on a rug through the bathroom door.
"Miss Television,"28 he said with a lightness he did not feel. He put his gloves, his briefcase on the dressing table, his stick against the wall. His chin dominated the lines of pain around his mouth, forcing them up into his forehead and the corner of his eyes, like fear that cannot be shown in public.
"Come and sit on my lap close to me," he said softly, "and let me see about your lovely mouth."
She came over and sat there and while the dripping slowed down outside--drip--dri-i-ip, she laid her lips to the beautiful cold image she had created.
Presently she kissed him several times in the mouth, her face getting big as it came up to him; he had never seen anything so dazzling as the quality of her skin, and since sometimes beauty gives back the images of one's best thoughts he thought of his responsibility about Nicole, and of the possibility of her being two doors down across the corridor.
"The rain's over," he said. "Do you see the sun on the slate?"
Rosemary stood up and leaned down and said her most sincere thing to him:
"Oh, we're such actors--you and I."
She went to her dresser and the moment that she laid her comb flat against her hair there was a slow persistent knocking at the door.
They were shocked motionless; the knock was repeated insistently, and in the sudden realization that the door was not locked Rosemary finished her hair with one stroke, nodded at Dick who had quickly jerked the wrinkles out of the bed where they had been sitting, and started for the door. Dick said in quite a natural voice, not too loud:
"--so if you don't feel up to going out, I'll tell Nicole and we'll have a very quiet last evening."
The precautions were needless for the situation of the parties outside the door was so harassed as to preclude any but the most fleeting judgments on matters not pertinent to themselves. Standing there was Abe, aged by several months in the last twenty-four hours, and a very frightened, concerned colored man whom Abe introduced as Mr. Peterson of Stockholm.
"He's in a terrible situation and it's my fault," said Abe. "We need some good advice."
"Come in our rooms," said Dick.
Abe insisted that Rosemary come too and they crossed the hall to the Divers' suite. Jules Peterson, a small, respectable Negro, on the suave model that heels the Republican party in the border states, followed.
It appeared that the latter had been a legal witness to the early morning dispute in Montparnasse; he had accompanied Abe to the police station and supported his assertion that a thousand-franc note had been seized out of his hand by a Negro, whose identification was one of the points of the case. Abe and Jules Peterson, accompanied by an agent of police, returned to the bistro and too hastily identified as the criminal a Negro, who, so it was established after an hour, had only entered the place after Abe left. The police had further complicated the situation by arresting the prominent Negro restaurateur, Freeman, who had only drifted through the alcoholic fog at a very early stage and then vanished. The true culprit, whose case, as reported by his friends, was that he had merely commandeered a fifty-franc note to pay for drinks that Abe had ordered, had only recently and in a somewhat sinister role, reappeared upon the scene.
In brief, Abe had succeeded in the space of an hour in entangling himself with the personal lives, consciences, and emotions of one Afro-European and three Afro-Americans inhabiting the Latin Quarter. The disentanglement was not even faintly in sight and the day had passed in an atmosphere of unfamiliar Negro faces bobbing up in unexpected places and around unexpected corners, and insistent Negro voices on the phone.
In person, Abe had succeeded in evading all of them, save Jules Peterson. Peterson was rather in the position of the friendly Indian who had helped a white. The Negroes who suffered from the betrayal were not so much after Abe as after Peterson, and Peterson was very much after what protection he might get from Abe.
Up in Stockholm Peterson had failed as a small manufacturer of shoe polish and now possessed only his formula and sufficient trade tools to fill a small box; however, his new protector had promised in the early hours to set him up in business in Versailles. Abe's former chauffeur was a shoe-maker there and Abe had handed Peterson two hundred francs on account.
Rosemary listened with distaste to this rigmarole; to appreciate its grotesquerie required a more robust sense of humor than hers. The little man with his portable manufactory, his insincere eyes that, from time to time, rolled white semicircles of panic into view; the figure of Abe, his face as blurred as the gaunt fine lines of it would permit--all this was as remote from her as sickness.
"I ask only a chance in life," said Peterson with the sort of precise yet distorted intonation peculiar to colonial countries. "My methods are simple, my formula is so good that I was drove away from. Stockholm, ruined, because I did not care to dispose of it."
Dick regarded him politely--interest formed, dissolved, he turned to Abe:
"You go to some hotel and go to bed. After you're all straight Mr. Peterson will come and see you."
"But don't you appreciate the mess that Peterson's in?" Abe protested.
"I shall wait in the hall," said Mr. Peterson with delicacy. "It is perhaps hard to discuss my problems in front of me."
He withdrew after a short travesty of a French bow; Abe pulled himself to his feet with the deliberation of a locomotive.
"I don't seem highly popular to-day."
"Popular but not probable," Dick advised him. "My advice is to leave this hotel--by way of the bar, if you want. Go to the Chambord, or if you'll need a lot of service, go over to the Majestic."
"Could I annoy you for a drink?"
"There's not a thing up here," Dick lied.
Resignedly Abe shook hands with Rosemary; he composed his face slow
ly, holding her hand a long time and forming sentences that did not emerge.
"You are the most--one of the most----"
She was sorry, and rather revolted at his dirty hands, but she laughed in a well-bred way, as though it were nothing unusual to her to watch man walking in a slow dream. Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane. Respect rather than fear. There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions, who will do anything. Of course we make him pay afterward for his moment of superiority, his moment of impressiveness. Abe turned to Dick with a last appeal.
"If I go to a hotel and get all steamed and curry-combed, and sleep awhile, and fight off these Senegalese--could I come and spend the evening by the fireside?"
Dick nodded at him, less in agreement than in mockery and said: "You have a high opinion of your current capacities."
"I bet if Nicole was here she'd let me come back."
"All right." Dick went to a trunk tray and brought a box to the central table; inside were innumerable cardboard letters.
"You can come if you want to play anagrams."
Abe eyed the contents of the box with physical revulsion, as though he had been asked to eat them like oats.
"What are anagrams? Haven't I had enough strange----"
"It's a quiet game. You spell words with them--any word except alcohol."
"I bet you can spell alcohol," Abe plunged his hand among the counters. "Can I come back if I can spell alcohol?"
"You can come back if you want to play anagrams."
Abe shook his head resignedly.
"If you're in that frame of mind there's no use--I'd just be in the way." He waved his finger reproachfully at Dick. "But remember what George the Third said, that if Grant29 was drunk he wished he would bite the other generals."
With a last desperate glance at Rosemary from the golden corners of his eyes, he went out. To his relief Peterson was no longer in the corridor. Feeling lost and homeless he went back to ask Paul the name of that boat.