Tender Is the Night (17 page)

It was
fun spending money in the sunlight of the foreign city with healthy bodies
under them that sent streams of color up to their faces; with arms and hands,
legs and ankles that they stretched out confidently, reaching or stepping with
the confidence of women lovely to men.

When
they got back to the hotel and found Dick, all bright and new in the morning,
both of them had a moment of complete childish joy.

He had
just received a garbled telephone call from Abe who, so it appeared, had spent
the forenoon in hiding.

“It was
one of the most extraordinary telephone conversations I’ve ever held.”

Dick had
talked not only to Abe but to a dozen others. On the phone these
supernumeraries had been typically introduced as: “— man wants to talk to you
is in the
teput
dome, well he says he was in it—what
is it?

“Hey,
somebody, shut-up—anyhow, he was in some
shandel
-scandal
and he
kaa
POS-
sibly
go
home. My own PER-
sonal
is that—my personal is he’s
had a—” Gulps sounded and thereafter what the party had, rested with the
unknown.

The
phone yielded up a supplementary offer:

“I
thought it would appeal to you anyhow as a psychologist.” The vague personality
who corresponded to this statement was eventually hung on to the phone; in the
sequence he failed to appeal to Dick, as a psychologist, or indeed as anything
else. Abe’s conversation flowed on as follows:

“Hello.”

“Well?”

“Well,
hello.”

“Who are
you?”

“Well.”
There were interpolated snorts of laughter.

“Well,
I’ll put somebody else on the line.”

Sometimes
Dick could hear Abe’s voice, accompanied by
scufflings
,
droppings of the receiver, far-away fragments such as, “No, I don’t, Mr. North.
. . .” Then a pert decided voice had said: “If you are a friend of Mr. North
you will come down and take him away.”

Abe cut
in, solemn and ponderous, beating it all down with an overtone of earth-bound
determination.

“Dick,
I’ve launched a race riot in
Montmartre
. I’m
going over and get Freeman out of jail. If a Negro from Copenhagen that makes
shoe polish—hello, can you hear me—well, look, if anybody comes there—” Once
again the receiver was a chorus of innumerable melodies.

“Why you
back in
Paris
?”
Dick demanded.

“I got
as far as
Evreux
,
and I decided to take a plane back so I could compare it with St.
Sulpice
. I mean I don’t intend to bring St.
Sulpice
back to
Paris
.
I don’t even mean Baroque! I meant St.
Germain
. For
God’s sake, wait a minute and I’ll put the chasseur on the wire.”

“For
God’s sake, don’t.”

“Listen—did
Mary get off all right?”

“Yes.”

“Dick, I
want you to talk with a man I met here this morning, the son of a naval officer
that’s been to every doctor in
Europe
. Let me
tell you about him—”

Dick had
rung off at this point—perhaps that was a piece of ingratitude for he needed
grist for the grinding activity of his mind.

“Abe
used to be so nice,” Nicole told Rosemary.
“So nice.
Long ago—when Dick and I were first married.
If you had known him then.
He’d come to stay with us for
weeks and weeks and we scarcely knew he was in the house. Sometimes he’d play—sometimes
he’d be in the library with a muted piano, making love to it by the hour—Dick,
do you remember that maid? She thought he was a ghost and sometimes Abe used to
meet her in the hall and moo at her, and it cost us a whole tea service
once—but we didn’t care.”

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 conversation; 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
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.”