The Sun Also Rises (4 page)

Brett laughed.

“I say, you are slow on the uptake,” she said. I had only sipped my brandy and soda. I took a long drink.

“That's better. Very funny,” Brett said. ‘Then he wanted me to go to Cannes with him. Told him I knew too many people in Cannes. Monte Carlo. Told him I knew too many people in Monte Carlo. Told him I knew too many people everywhere. Quite true, too. So I asked him to bring me here.”

She looked at me, her hand on the table, her glass raised. “Don't look like that,” she said. “Told him I was in love with you. True, too. Don't look like that. He was damn nice about it. Wants to drive us out to dinner tomorrow night. Like to go?”

“Why not?”

“I'd better go now.”

“Why?”

“Just wanted to see you. Damned silly idea. Want to get dressed and come down? He's got the car just up the street.”

“The count?”

“Himself. And a chauffeur in livery. Going to drive me around and have breakfast in the Bois. Hampers. Got it all at Zelli's. Dozen bottles of Mumms. Tempt you?”

“I have to work in the morning,” I said. “I'm too far behind you now to catch up and be any fun.”

“Don't be an ass.”

“Can't do it.”

“Right. Send him a tender message?”

“Anything. Absolutely.”

“Good-night, darling.”

“Don't be sentimental.”

“You make me ill.”

We kissed good-night and Brett shivered. “I'd better go,” she said. “Good-night, darling.”

“You don't have to go.”

“Yes.”

We kissed again on the stairs and as I called for the cordon the concierge muttered something behind her door. I went back upstairs and from the open window watched Brett walking up the street to the big limousine drawn up to the curb under the arc light. She got in and it started off. I turned around. On the table was an empty glass and a glass half-full of brandy and soda. I took them both out to the kitchen and poured the half-full glass down the sink. I turned off the gas in the dining room, kicked off my slippers sitting on the bed, and got into bed. This was Brett, that I had felt like crying about. Then I thought of her walking up the street and stepping into the car, as I had last seen her, and of course in a little while I felt like hell again. It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.

In the morning I
walked down the Boulevard to the rue Souffiot for coffee and brioche. It was a fine morning. The horse chestnut trees in the Luxembourg gardens were in bloom. There was the pleasant early morning feeling of a hot day. I read the papers with the coffee and then smoked a cigarette. The Bower-women were coming up from the market and arranging their daily stock. Students went by going up to the law school, or down to the Sorbonne. The Boulevard was busy with trams and people going to work. I got on an S bus and rode down to the Madeleine, standing on the back platform. From the Madeleine I walked along the Boulevard des Capucines to the Opera, and up to my office. I passed the man with the jumping frogs and the man with the boxer toys. I stepped aside to avoid walking into the thread with which his girl assistant manipulated the boxers. She was standing looking away, the thread in her folded hands. The man was urging two tourists to buy. Three more tourists had stopped and were watching. I walked on behind a man who was pushing a roller that printed the name CINZANO on the sidewalk in damp letters. All along people were going to work. It felt pleasant to be going to work. I walked across the avenue and turned in to my office.

Upstairs in the office I read the French morning papers, smoked, and then sat at the typewriter and got off a good morning's work. At eleven o'clock I went over to the Quai d'Orsay in a taxi and went in and sat with about a dozen correspondents, while the foreign office mouthpiece, a young Nouvelle Revue Française diplomat in horn-rimmed spectacles, talked and answered questions for half an hour. The President of the Council was in Lyons making a speech, or, rather he was on his way back. Several people asked questions to hear themselves talk and there were a couple of questions asked by news service men who wanted to know the answers. There was no news. I shared a taxi back from the Quai d'Orsay with Woolsey and Krum.

“What do you do nights, Jake?” asked Krum. “I never see you around.”

“Oh, I'm over in the Quarter.”

“I'm coming over some night. The Dingo. That's the great place, isn't it?”

“Yes. That, or this new dive, The Select.”

“I've meant to get over,” said Krum. “You know how it is, though, with a wife and kids.”

“Playing any tennis?” Woolsey asked.

“Well, no,” said Krum. “I can't say I've played any this year. I've tried to get away, but Sundays it's always rained, and the courts are so damned crowded.”

“The Englishmen all have Saturday off,” Woolsey said.

“Lucky beggars,” said Krum. “Well, I'll tell you. Someday I'm not going to be working for an agency. Then I'll have plenty of time to get out in the country.”

“That's the thing to do. Live out in the country and have a little car.”

“I've been thinking some about getting a car next year.”

I banged on the glass. The chauffeur stopped. “Here's my street,” I said. “Come in and have a drink.”

“Thanks, old man,” Krum said. Woolsey shook his head. “I've got to file that line he got off this morning.”

I put a two-franc piece in Krum's hand.

“You're crazy, Jake,” he said. “This is on me.”

“It's all on the office, anyway.”

“Nope. I want to get it.”

I waved good-bye. Krum put his head out. “See you at the lunch on Wednesday.”

“You bet.”

I went to the office in the elevator. Robert Cohn was waiting for me. “Hello, Jake,” he said. “Going out to lunch?”

“Yes. Let me see if there is anything new.”

“Where will we eat?”

“Anywhere.”

I was looking over my desk. “Where do you want to eat?” “How about Wetzel's? They've got good hors d'oeuvres.”

In the restaurant we ordered hors d'oeuvres and beer. The sommelier brought the beer, tall, beaded on the outside of the steins, and cold. There were a dozen different dishes of hors d'oeuvres.

“Have any fun last night?” I asked.

“No. I don't think so.”

“How's the writing going?”

“Rotten, I can't get this second book going.”

“That happens to everybody.”

“Oh, I'm sure of that. It gets me worried, though.”

“Thought anymore about going to South America?”

“I mean that.”

“Well, why don't you start off?”

“Frances.”

“Well,” I said, “take her with you.”

“She wouldn't like it. That isn't the sort of thing she likes. She likes a lot of people around.”

“Tell her to go to hell.”

“I can't. I've got certain obligations to her.”

He shoved the sliced cucumbers away and took a pickled herring.

“What do you know about Lady Brett Ashley, Jake?”

“Her name's Lady Ashley. Brett's her own name. She's a nice girl,” I said. “She's getting a divorce and she's going to marry Mike Campbell. He's over in Scotland now. Why?”

“She's a remarkably attractive woman.”

“Isn't she?”

“There's a certain quality about her, a certain fineness. She seems to be absolutely fine and straight.”

“She's very nice.”

“I don't know how to describe the quality,” Cohn said. “I suppose it's breeding.”

“You sound as though you liked her pretty well.”

“I do. I shouldn't wonder if I were in love with her.”

“She's a drunk,” I said. “She's in love with Mike Campbell, and she's going to marry him. He's going to be rich as hell someday.”

“I don't believe she'll ever marry him.”

“Why not?”

“I don't know. I just don't believe it. Have you known her a long time?”

“Yes,” I said. “She was a V. A. D. in a hospital I was in during the war.”

“She must have been just a kid then.”

“She's thirty-four now.”

“When did she marry Ashley?”

“During the war. Her own true love had just kicked off with the dysentery.”

“You talk sort of bitter.”

“Sorry. I didn't mean to. I was just trying to give you the facts.”

“I don't believe she would marry anybody she didn't love.”

“Well,” I said. “She's done it twice.”

“I don't believe it.”

“Well,” I said, “don't ask me a lot of fool questions if you don't like the answers.”

“I didn't ask you that.”

“You asked me what I knew about Brett Ashley.”

“I didn't ask you to insult her.”

“Oh, go to hell.”

He stood up from the table his face white, and stood there white and angry behind the little plates of hors d'oeuvres.

“Sit down,” I said. “Don't be a fool.”

“You've got to take that back.”

“Oh, cut out the prep school stuff.”

“Take it back.”

“Sure. Anything. I never heard of Brett Ashley. How's that?”

“No. Not that. About me going to hell.”

“Oh, don't go to hell,” I said. “Stick around. We're just starting lunch.”

Cohn smiled again and sat down. He seemed glad to sit down. What the hell would he have done if he hadn't sat down? “You say such damned insulting things, Jake.”

“I'm sorry. I've got a nasty tongue. I never mean it when I say nasty things.”

“I know it,” Cohn said. “You're really about the best friend I have, Jake.”

God help you, I thought. “Forget what I said,” I said out loud. “I'm sorry.”

“It's all right. It's fine. I was just sore for a minute.”

“Good. Let's get something else to eat.”

After we finished the lunch we walked up to the café de la Paix and had coffee. I could feel Cohn wanted to bring up Brett again, but I held him off it. We talked about one thing and another, and I left him to come to the office.

At five o'clock I
was in the Hotel Crillon waiting for Brett. She was not there, so I sat down and wrote some letters. They were not very good letters but I hoped their being on Crillon stationery would help them. Brett did not turn up, so about quarter to six I went down to the bar and had a Jack Rose with George the barman. Brett had not been in the bar either, and so I looked for her upstairs on my way out, and took a taxi to the Café Select. Crossing the Seine I saw a string of barges being towed empty down the current, riding high, the bargemen at the sweeps as they came toward the bridge. The river looked nice. It was always pleasant crossing bridges in Paris.

The taxi rounded the statue of the inventor of the semaphore engaged in doing same, and turned up the Boulevard Raspail, and I sat back to let that part of the ride pass. The Boulevard Raspail always made dull riding. It was like a certain stretch on the P.L.M. between Fontainebleau and Montereau that always made me feel bored and dead and dull until it was over. I suppose it is some association of ideas that makes those dead places in a journey. There are other streets in Paris as ugly as the Boulevard Raspail. It is a street I do not mind walking down at all. But I cannot stand to ride along it. Perhaps I had read something about it once. That was the way Robert Cohn was about all of Paris. I wondered where Cohn got that incapacity to enjoy Paris. Possibly from Mencken. Mencken hates Paris, I believe. So many young men get their likes and dislikes from Mencken.

The taxi stopped in front of the Rotonde. No matter what café in Montparnasse you ask a taxi-driver to bring you to from the right bank of the river, they always take you to the Rotonde. Ten years from now it will probably be the Dome. It was near enough, anyway. I walked past the sad tables of the Rotonde to the Select. There were a few people inside at the bar, and outside, alone, sat Harvey Stone. He had a pile of saucers in front of him, and he needed a shave.

“Sit down,” said Harvey, “I've been looking for you.”

“What's the matter?”

“Nothing. Just looking for you.”

“Been out to the races?”

“No. Not since Sunday.”

“What do you hear from the States?”

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

“What's the matter?”

“I don't know. I'm through with them. I'm absolutely through with them.”

He leaned forward and looked me in the eye.

“Do you want to know something, Jake?”

“Yes.”

“I haven't had anything to eat for five days.”

I figured rapidly back in my mind. It was three days ago that Harvey had won two hundred francs from me shaking poker dice in the New York Bar.

“What's the matter?”

“No money. Money hasn't come,” he paused. “I tell you it's strange, Jake. When I'm like this I just want to be alone. I want to stay in my own room. I'm like a cat.”

I felt in my pocket.

“Would a hundred help you any, Harvey?”

“Yes.”

“Come on. Let's go and eat.”

“There's no hurry. Have a drink.”

“Better eat.”

“No. When I get like this I don't care whether I eat or not.”

We had a drink. Harvey added my saucer to his own pile.

“Do you know Mencken, Harvey?”

“Yes. Why?”

“What's he like?”

“He's all right. He says some pretty funny things. Last time I had dinner with him we talked about Hoffenheimer. ‘The trouble is,' he said, ‘he's a garter snapper.' That's not bad.”

“That's not bad.”

“He's through now,” Harvey went on. “He's written about all the things he knows, and now he's on all the things he doesn't know.”

“I guess he's all right,” I said. “I just can't read him.”

“Oh, nobody reads him now,” Harvey said, “except the people that used to read the Alexander Hamilton Institute.”

“Well,” I said. “That was a good thing, too.”

“Sure,” said Harvey. So we sat and thought deeply for a while.

“Have another port?”

“All right,” said Harvey.

“There comes Cohn,” I said. Robert Cohn was crossing the street.

“That moron,” said Harvey. Cohn came up to our table. “Hello, you bums,” he said.

“Hello, Robert,” Harvey said. “I was just telling Jake here that you're a moron.”

“What do you mean?”

“Tell us right off. Don't think. What would you rather do if you could do anything you wanted?”

Cohn started to consider.

“Don't think. Bring it right out.”

“I don't know,” Cohn said. “What's it all about, anyway?”

“I mean what would you rather do. What comes into your head first. No matter how silly it is.”

“I don't know,” Cohn said. “I think I'd rather play football again with what I know about handling myself, now.”

“I misjudged you,” Harvey said. “You're not a moron. You're only a case of arrested development.”

“You're awfully funny, Harvey,” Cohn said. “Someday somebody will push your face in.”

Harvey Stone laughed. “You think so. They won't, though. Because it wouldn't make any difference to me. I'm not a fighter.”

“It would make a difference to you if anybody did it.”

“No, it wouldn't. That's where you make your big mistake. Because you're not intelligent.”

“Cut it out about me.”

“Sure,” said Harvey. “It doesn't make any difference to me. You don't mean anything to me.”

“Come on, Harvey,” I said. “Have another porto.”

“No,” he said. “I'm going up the street and eat. See you later, Jake.”

He walked out and up the street. I watched him crossing the street through the taxis, small, heavy, slowly sure of himself in the traffic.

“He always gets me sore,” Cohn said. “I can't stand him.”

“I like him,” I said. “I'm fond of him. You don't want to get sore at him.”

“I know it,” Cohn said. “He just gets on my nerves.”

“Write this afternoon?”

“No. I couldn't get it going. It's harder to do than my first book. I'm having a hard time handling it.”

The sort of healthy conceit that he had when he returned from America early in the spring was gone. Then he had been sure of his work, only with these personal longings for adventure. Now the sureness was gone. Somehow I feel I have not shown Robert Cohn clearly. The reason is that until he fell in love with Brett, I never heard him make one remark that would, in any way, detach him from other people. He was nice to watch on the tennis court, he had a good body, and he kept it in shape; he handled his cards well at bridge, and he had a funny sort of undergraduate quality about him. If he were in a crowd nothing he said stood out. He wore what used to be called polo shirts at school, and may be called that still, but he was not professionally youthful. I do not believe he thought about his clothes much. Externally he had been formed at Princeton. Internally he had been moulded by the two women who had trained him. He had a nice, boyish sort of cheerfulness that had never been trained out of him, and I probably have not brought it out. He loved to win at tennis. He probably loved to win as much as Lenglen, for instance. On the other hand, he was not angry at being beaten. When he fell in love with Brett his tennis game went all to pieces. People beat him who had never had a chance with him. He was very nice about it.

Anyhow, we were sitting on the terrace of the café Select, and Harvey Stone had just crossed the street.

“Come on up to the Lilas,” I said.

“I have a date.”

“What time?”

“Frances is coming here at seven-fifteen.”

“There she is.”

Frances Clyne was coming toward us from across the street. She was a very tall girl who walked with a great deal of movement. She waved and smiled. We watched her cross the street.

“Hello,” she said, “I'm so glad you're here, Jake. I've been wanting to talk to you.”

“Hello, Frances,” said Cohn. He smiled.

“Why, hello, Robert. Are you here?” She went on, talking rapidly. “I've had the damdest time. This one”—shaking her head at Cohn—“didn't come home for lunch.”

“I wasn't supposed to.”

“Oh, I know. But you didn't say anything about it to the cook. Then I had a date myself, and Paula wasn't at her office. I went to the Ritz and waited for her, and she never came, and of course I didn't have enough money to lunch at the Ritz—”

“What did you do?”

“Oh, went out, of course.” She spoke in a sort of imitation joyful manner. “I always keep my appointments. No one keeps theirs, nowadays. I ought to know better. How are you, Jake, anyway?”

“Fine.”

“That was a fine girl you had at the dance, and then went off with that Brett one.”

“Don't you like her?” Cohn asked.

“I think she's perfectly charming. Don't you?”

Cohn said nothing.

“Look, Jake. I want to talk with you. Would you come over with me to the Dome? You'll stay here, won't you, Robert? Come on, Jake.”

We crossed the Boulevard Montpamasse and sat down at a table. A boy came up with the
Paris Times,
and I bought one and opened it.

“What's the matter, Frances?”

“Oh, nothing,” she said, “except that he wants to leave me.”

“How do you mean?”

“Oh, he told everyone that we were going to be married, and I told my mother and everyone, and now he doesn't want to do it.”

“What's the matter?”

“He's decided he hasn't lived enough. I knew it would happen when he went to New York.”

She looked up, very bright-eyed and trying to talk inconsequentially.

“I wouldn't marry him if he doesn't want to. Of course I wouldn't. I wouldn't marry him now for anything. But it does seem to me to be a little late now, after we've waited three years, and I've just gotten my divorce.”

I said nothing.

“We were going to celebrate so, and instead we've just had scenes. It's so childish. We have dreadful scenes, and he cries and begs me to be reasonable, but he says he just can't do it.”

“It's rotten luck.”

“I should say it is rotten luck. I've wasted two years and a half on him now. And I don't know now if any man will ever want to marry me. Two years ago I could have married anybody I wanted, down at Cannes. All the old ones that wanted to marry somebody chic and settle down were crazy about me. Now I don't think I could get anybody.”

“Sure, you could marry anybody.”

“No, I don't believe it. And I'm fond of him, too. And I'd like to have children. I always thought we'd have children.”

She looked at me very brightly. “I never liked children much, but I don't want to think I'll never have them. I always thought I'd have them and then like them.”

“He's got children.”

“Oh, yes. He's got children, and he's got money, and he's got a rich mother, and he's written a book, and nobody will publish my stuff, nobody at all. It isn't bad, either. And I haven't got any money at all. I could have had alimony, but I got the divorce the quickest way.”

She looked at me again very brightly.

“It isn't right. It's my own fault and it's not, too. I ought to have known better. And when I tell him he just cries and says he can't marry. Why can't he marry? I'd be a good wife. I'm easy to get along with. I leave him alone. It doesn't do any good.”

“It's a rotten shame.”

“Yes, it is a rotten shame. But there's no use talking about it, is there? Come on, let's go back to the café.”

“And of course there isn't anything I can do.”

“No. Just don't let him know I talked to you. I know what he wants.” Now for the first time she dropped her bright, terribly cheerful manner. “He wants to go back to New York alone, and be there when his book comes out so when a lot of little chickens like it. That's what he wants.”

“Maybe they won't like it. I don't think he's that way. Really.”

“You don't know him like I do, Jake. That's what he wants to do. I know it. I know it. That's why he doesn't want to marry. He wants to have a big triumph this fall all by himself.”

“Want to go back to the café?”

“Yes. Come on.”

We got up from the table—they had never brought us a drink—and started across the street toward the Select, where Cohn sat
smiling at us from behind the marble-topped table.

“Well, what are you smiling at?” Frances asked him. “Feel pretty happy?”

“I was smiling at you and Jake with your secrets.”

“Oh, what I've told Jake isn't any secret. Everybody will know it soon enough. I only wanted to give Jake a decent version.”

“What was it? About your going to England?”

“Yes, about my going to England. Oh, Jake! I forgot to tell you. I'm going to England.”

“Isn't that fine!”

“Yes, that's the way it's done in the very best families. Robert's sending me. He's going to give me two hundred pounds and then I'm going to visit friends. Won't it be lovely? The friends don't know about it, yet.”

She turned to Cohn and smiled at him. He was not smiling now.

“You were only going to give me a hundred pounds, weren't you, Robert? But I made him give me two hundred. He's really very generous. Aren't you, Robert?”

I do not know how people could say such terrible things to Robert Cohn. There are people to whom you could not say insulting things. They give you a feeling that the world would be destroyed, would actually be destroyed before your eyes, if you said certain things. But here was Cohn taking it all. Here it was, all going on right before me, and I did not even feel an impulse to try and stop it. And this was friendly joking to what went on later.