VI

She woke up cooled and shamed. The sight of her beauty in the mirror did not reassure her and a letter, sent by her mother, from the boy who had taken her to a Yale party last fall, which announced his presence in Paris was no help—all that seemed far away. She left her room to meet the Divers. She and Nicole had arranged it to go shopping together. She admired Nicole for her beauty and her wisdom, and also for the first time in her life she was jealous. In the taxi she looked at Nicole, matching herself against her.

“We lived there,” Rosemary suddenly pointed to a building in the Rue des Saints-Péres.

“That’s strange. Because when I was twelve Mother and Baby and I once spent a winter there,” and Nicole pointed to a hotel directly across the street. “We’d just built our Lake Forest house and we were economizing. At least Baby and I and the governess economized and Mother travelled.”

“We were economizing too,” said Rosemary, realizing that the word meant different things to them.

“Mother always spoke of it very carefully as a small hotel—” Nicole gave her quick magnetic little laugh, “—I mean instead of saying a ‘cheap’ hotel. If any friends asked us our address we’d never say, ‘We’re in a dingy little hole where we’re glad of running water,’—we’d say ‘We’re in a small hotel.’ As if all the big ones were too noisy and vulgar for us. Of course the friends always saw through us and told everyone about it, but Mother always said it showed we knew our way around Europe. She did, of course: she was born a German citizen. But her mother was American, and she was brought up in Chicago, and she was more American than European.”

They were meeting the others in two minutes for lunch in the Norths’ already empty apartment. The day seemed different to Rosemary from the day before. When she saw Dick face to face, their eyes met. After that everything was all right, everything was wonderful, she knew that he was beginning to fall in love with her. She felt wildly happy. She scarcely looked at him but she knew everything was all right.

After luncheon the Divers and the Norths and Rosemary went to the Franco-American Films, to be joined by Collis Clay, her young man from New Haven, to whom she had telephoned.

In the projection room she sat between Collis Clay and Dick. Then the lights went out, and she was alone with Dick at last. They looked at each other in the half darkness.

“Dear Rosemary,” he murmured. Their shoulders touched.

There she was—the school girl of a year ago, hair down her back; there she was—SO young and innocent—the product of her mother’s loving care.

Daddy’s girl. Rosemary triumphed. Her fineness of character, her courage and steadfastness intruded upon by the vulgarity of the world—it was so moving that the emotions of the whole row of people went out to her at intervals during the picture. There was a break once and the light went on and after the chatter of applause Dick said to her sincerely: “I’m simply astounded. You’re going to be one of the best actresses on the stage.”

In the taxi with Dick and Collis Clay—they were dropping Collis, and Dick was taking Rosemary to a tea party to which Nicole and the Norths did not want to go—Collis said:

“That’s a great picture. I’ve seen it four times. I know one boy at New Haven who’s seen it a dozen times—he went all the way to Hartford to see it one time. And when I brought Rosemary up to New Haven he was so shy he wouldn’t meet her. Can you beat that?”

Dick and Rosemary looked at each other, wanting to be alone, but Collis failed to understand.

“I’ll drop you where you’re going,” he suggested. “I’m staying at the Lutetia.”

“We’ll drop you,” said Dick.

“It’ll be easier for me to drop you. No trouble at all.”

“I think it will be better if we drop you.”

After he was finally gone, they were left alone.

“I don’t know what came over me last night,” Rosemary said. “That glass of champagne? I’ve never done anything like that before.”

“You simply said you loved me.”

“I do love you—I can’t change that.” It was time for Rosemary to cry, so she cried a little in her handkerchief.

“I’m afraid I’m in love with you,” said Dick, “and that’s not the best thing that could happen.”

They stopped thinking with an almost painful relief, stopped seeing; they only breathed and sought each other. They were still in the happier stage of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, no other human relations mattered.

But for Dick that portion of the road was short.

“There’s nothing to do about it,” he said, with a feeling of panic. “I’m in love with you but it doesn’t change what I said last night.”

“That doesn’t matter now. I just wanted to make you love me—if you love me everything’s all right.”

“Unfortunately I do. But Nicole mustn’t know—she mustn’t suspect even faintly. Nicole and I have got to go on together. In a way that’s more important than just wanting to go on.”

“Kiss me once more.”

He kissed her, but then momentarily left her.

“Nicole mustn’t suffer—she loves me and I love her—you understand that.”

She did understand—it was the sort of thing she understood well, not hurting people. She knew the Divers loved each other because it had been her primary assumption. She had thought however that it was a rather cooled relation, and actually rather like the love of herself and her mother.

“And I mean love,” he said, guessing her thoughts. “Active love—it’s more complicated than I can tell you. It was responsible for that crazy duel.”

“How did you know about the duel? I thought we were to keep it from you.”

“Do you think Abe can keep a secret?” He spoke with irony. “Tell a secret over the radio, publish it in a tabloid, but never tell it to a man who drinks more than three or four a day.”

She laughed in agreement, staying close to him.

“So you understand my relations with Nicole are complicated. She’s not very strong—she looks strong but she isn’t. And this makes rather a mess.”

“Oh, say that later! But kiss me now—love me now. I’ll love you and never let Nicole see.”

“You darling.”

They reached the hotel after the tea party, and Rosemary walked a little behind him, to admire him, to adore him. His step was alert as if he had just come from some great doings and was hurrying on toward others.

They walked upstairs—five flights. At the first landing they stopped and kissed; she was careful on the next landing, on the third more careful still. On the next—there were two more—she stopped half way and kissed him goodby. At his urgency she walked down with him to the one below for a minute—and then up and up. Dick went back downstairs to make some arrangements for the evening—Rosemary ran to her room and wrote a letter to her mother; she was conscience-stricken because she did not miss her mother at all.

The party that night was an absolute success. Everything had been foreseen. People joined them as if by magic. There was, among many things, the car of the Shah of Persia. Where Dick had got it was unknown. Rosemary accepted it as a fact. The car had been built on a special chassis in America. Its wheels were of silver, so was the radiator. The inside of the body was inlaid with innumerable brilliants which would be replaced with true gems by the court jeweller when the car arrived in Teheran the following week. There was only one real seat in the back, because the Shah must ride alone, so they took turns riding in it and sitting on the floor.

But always there was Dick. Never had she known any one so nice, so thoroughly nice as Dick was that night. She compared him with all other men at the party—and felt there was no comparison.

Afterward she remembered the times when she had felt the happiest. The first time was when she and Dick danced together and she felt her beauty sparkling bright against his tall, strong form. There was a moment when they were not dancing at all, simply clinging together.

Later, when six of them, stood in the front lobby of the Ritz, Mary said suddenly:

“That’s enough. I’ve got to get Abe home. His boat train leaves at eleven. It’s so important—I feel the whole future depends on his catching it, but whenever I argue with him he does the exact opposite.”

“I’ll try and persuade him,” offered Rosemary.

“Would you?” Mary said doubtfully. “Maybe you could.”

Then Dick came up to Rosemary:

“Nicole and I are going home and we thought you’d want to go with us.”

“I can’t,” she said. “I promised Mary North to stay along with them—or Abe’ll never go to bed.”

“Don’t you know you can’t do anything about people?” he advised her. “If Abe was my roommate in college, drunk for the first time, it’d be different. Now there’s nothing to do.”

“Well, I’ve got to stay,”’ she said.

He kissed the inside of her elbow quickly.

VII

Abe left from the Gare Saint Lazare at eleven—he stood alone under the glass dome, relic of the seventies, era of the Crystal Palace; his hands, of that gray color that only twenty-four hours can produce, were in his coat pockets to conceal the trembling fingers. He was scarcely recognizable as the man who had swum upon Gausse’s Beach a fortnight ago.

He was early; he looked from left to right with his eyes only; he could not use any other part of his body.

At the minute when he wondered whether or not he had time for a drink at the buffet, he saw Nicole at the stairs. He watched her.

When she saw Abe, they sat down on a bench.

“I came because you asked me,” said Nicole. Abe seemed to have forgotten why he asked her and Nicole was quite content to look at the travellers passing by.

“I’m tired of you both, but it doesn’t show because you’re even more tired of me—you know what I mean. If I had any enthusiasm, I’d go on to new people,” Abe said.

Nicole slapped him with her velvet gloves.

“Seems rather foolish to be unpleasant, Abe. Anyhow you don’t mean that. I can’t see why you’ve given up everything.”

Abe considered.

“I suppose I got bored; and then it was such a long way to go back in order to get anywhere.”

Often a man can play the helpless child in front of a woman, but he can almost never bring it off when he feels like a helpless child.

Abe was feeling worse every minute—he could think of nothing but unkind nervous remarks. For a while there was no communication between them. Unlike lovers they had no past; unlike man and wife, they had no future; yet up to this morning Nicole had liked Abe better than any one except Dick—and he had been heavy with love for her for years.

Abe remarked:

“Trouble is when you’re sober you don’t want to see anybody, and when you’re drunk nobody wants to see you.”

“Who, me?” Nicole laughed.

“No—me.”

Rosemary and Mary North came in sight, walking slowly and searching for Abe, and Nicole shouted “Hey! Hi! Hey!” and laughed and waved the package of handkerchiefs she had bought for Abe.

They stood in an uncomfortable group made little by Abe’s gigantic presence. They were frightened at his will, once a will to live, now a will to die.

Dick Diver came and brought with him relief for the three women.

The train began to move. Abe waved from his window.

He saw Rosemary for the first time that morning. They exchanged glances. For a moment each seemed unreal to the other—then the slow warmth of love began again.

He saw, not without panic, that the affair could not stand still, it must go on or go back; for the first time it occurred to him that Rosemary was more in control than he.

However, everything that had happened—Abe’s departure and Mary’s coming departure for Salzburg this afternoon had ended the time in Paris.

During their luncheon, outdoors, across from the Luxembourg Gardens, Rosemary had cramps and felt unhappy.

After Mary North left them, accompanied by the Italian singing teacher who had joined them for coffee and was taking her to her train, Rosemary stood up, as she was having an engagement at her studio: “to meet some officials.”

“And oh—” she said “—if Collis Clay comes while you are still sitting here, just tell him I couldn’t wait; tell him to call me tomorrow.”

Dick asked for the check; the Divers relaxed.

“Well—” they said together.

What did Nicole think? Rosemary was one of a dozen people he had attracted in the past years: these had included a French circus clown, Abe and Mary North, a pair of dancers, a writer, a painter, a half-crazy pederast from the Russian Ballet, a promising tenor. Nicole well knew how seriously these people interpreted his interest and enthusiasm; but she realized also that, except while their children were being born, Dick had not spent a night apart from her since their marriage.

Collis Clay appeared between the tables and greeted the Divers. Nicole left almost immediately and he sat with Collis, finishing the last of his wine. Dick rather liked Collis—he was “post-war”; less difficult than most of the young men he had known at New Haven a decade before. Dick listened to him with amusement. Suddenly his blood ran cold as he realized the content of Collis’s monologue.

“—she’s not so cold as you’d probably think. I admit I thought she was cold for a long time. But she got into a jam with a friend of mine going from New York to Chicago at Easter—a boy named Hillis—she had a compartment with a cousin of mine but she and Hillis wanted to be alone, so in the afternoon my cousin came and played cards in our compartment. Well, after about two hours we went back and there was Rosemary and Bill Hillis standing in the vestibule arguing with the conductor—Rosemary white as a sheet. Seems they locked the door and pulled down the blinds and I guess there was something going on when the conductor came for the tickets and knocked on the door. They thought it was us kidding them and wouldn’t let him in at first, and when they did, he was plenty sore. He asked Hillis if that was his compartment and whether he and Rosemary were married that they locked the door, and Hillis lost his temper trying to explain there was nothing wrong. He said the conductor had insulted Rosemary and believe me I had an awful time smoothing it over.”

With every detail imagined, Dick felt a change taking place within him. Only the image of a third person, even in the past, threw him off his balance and sent through him waves of pain and desire.

He had guessed that Collis Clay was in love with Rosemary in some curious way Dick could not understand. The affair with Hillis seemed to have made no emotional impression on Collis.

… Dick went over Paris to his bank, and while there, came up to the mail desk. There was a bill for seventeen psychiatric books, a letter from Buffalo from his father, in a handwriting that year by year became more indecipherable; there was a card from Tommy Barban; there were letters from doctors in Zurich; a bill from a furniture maker; also there were three letters for Nicole, and a letter for Rosemary sent in his care.

As he left the bank, he got into a taxi waiting outside.

“I want to go to the Films Par Excellence Studio—it’s on a little street in Passy.”

The events of the last forty-eight hours had made him so uncertain that he was not even sure of what he wanted to do; he paid off the taxi and walked in the direction of the studio.

He knew that what he was now doing was out of line with everything that had been before it—his walking around this block was not proper.

After three-quarters of an hour of standing around, it became clear that he had missed Rosemary. He went into the bistro on the corner and called the hotel. After a long while a little voice said hello.

“This is Dick—I had to call you.”

A pause from her—then: “I’m glad you did.”

“I came to meet you at your studio—I’m in Passy. I thought maybe we’d ride somewhere.”

“Oh, I only stayed there a minute! I’m so sorry.” A silence.

“Rosemary.”

“Yes, Dick.”

“Are you alone?”

“Who do you think I’d be with?”

“I’d like to be with you now.”

Silence, then a sigh and an answer. “I wish you were with me now.”

There was the hotel room where she lay behind a telephone number, and there was music around her—

“And two—for tea.

And me for you,

And you for me

Alow-own.”

“It’s impossible,” he said to himself. In a minute he was out in the street.

Rosemary returned to her desk and finished a letter to her mother.

“—I only saw him for a little while but I thought he was wonderful looking. I fell in love with him (Of course I Do Love Dick Best but you know what I mean). He really is going to direct the picture and is leaving immediately for Hollywood, and I think we ought to leave, too. Collis Clay has been here. I like him all right but have not seen much of him because of the Divers, who really are the Nicest People I Have Ever Known. Are you coming north or shall I come south with the Divers?”