Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (119 page)

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 Moseby 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 concessionaire, 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 of 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 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.