Tender Is the Night (18 page)

Abe got
himself up with an effort and went out to the Rue
Cambon
.

XXIV

With his
miniature leather brief-case in his hand Richard Diver walked from the seventh
arrondisement
—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
Élysées
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
Élysées
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,” he said with a lightness he did not feel. He put his gloves, his
brief-case 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 responsibility 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
rôle
, 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 French 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 shoemaker 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 slowly, 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 a 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 Grant 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.

XXV

When he
had tottered out, Dick and Rosemary embraced fleetingly. There was a dust of
Paris
over both of them
through which they scented each other: the rubber guard on Dick’s fountain pen,
the faintest odor of warmth from Rosemary’s neck and shoulders. For another
half-minute Dick clung to the situation; Rosemary was first to return to
reality.

“I must
go, youngster,” she said.

They
blinked at each other across a widening space, and Rosemary made an exit that
she had learned young, and on which no director had ever tried to improve.

She
opened the door of her room and went directly to her desk where she had
suddenly remembered leaving her wristwatch. It was there; slipping it on she
glanced down at the daily letter to her mother, finishing the last sentence in
her mind. Then, rather gradually, she realized without turning about that she
was not alone in the room.

In an
inhabited room there are refracting objects only half noticed: varnished wood,
more or less polished brass, silver and ivory, and beyond these a thousand
conveyers of light and shadow so mild that one scarcely thinks of them as that,
the tops of picture- frames, the edges of pencils or ash-trays, of crystal or
china ornaments; the totality of this refraction—appealing to equally subtle
reflexes of the vision as well as to those associational fragments in the
subconscious that we seem to hang on to, as a glass-fitter keeps the
irregularly shaped pieces that may do some time—this fact might account for
what Rosemary afterward mystically described as “realizing” that there was
some one
in the room, before she could determine it. But
when she did realize it she turned swift in a sort of ballet step and saw that
a dead Negro was stretched upon her bed.

As she
cried “
aaouu
!” and her still unfastened wristwatch
banged against the desk she had the preposterous idea that it was Abe North.
Then she dashed for the door and across the hall.