VIII

Nicole awoke late. Dick’s bed was empty—only after a minute did she realize that she had been awakened by a knock at their door.

“Entrez!” she called, but there was no answer, and after a moment she went to open it. A gendarme faced her and stepped inside the door.

“Mr. North—he is here?”

“What? No—he’s gone to America.”

“When did he leave, Madame?”

“Yesterday morning.”

He shook his head.

“He was in Paris last night. He is registered here but his room is not occupied. They told me I had better ask at this room.”

“We saw him off yesterday morning on the train.”

“He has been seen here this morning.”

“We know nothing about it,” she said in amazement.

He considered. He was an ill-smelling, handsome man.

“You were not with him at all last night?”

“No.”

“We have arrested a Negro. We are convinced we have at last arrested the correct Negro.”

“I assure you that I haven’t an idea what you’re talking about. If it’s Mr. Abraham North, well, if he was in Paris last night we didn’t know it.”

The man nodded, convinced but disappointed.

“What happened?” Nicole demanded.

“Mr. North was robbed and he made a complaint. We have arrested a Negro. Mr. Afghan should come to identify him.”

After the gendarme left, Nicole took a bath and dressed. She phoned the hotel office and found that Abe had indeed registered at six-thirty this morning. His room, however, was still unoccupied. Just as she decided to go out, the office called and announced:

“Mr Crawshow, a Negro.”

“On what business?” she demanded.

“He says he knows you and the doctor. He says there is a Mr Freeman in prison. He says there is injustice and he wishes to see Mr North before he himself is arrested.”

“We know nothing about it.” Abe’s reappearance made it clear to her how tired she was of his adventures. Thinking no more of him she went out, ran into Rosemary at the dressmaker’s, and shopped with her on the Rue de Rivoli.

When they got back to the hotel and found Dick, they learned that he had just received a call from Abe who had spent the morning in hiding.

Abe had said: “Dick, I’ve started a race riot in Montmartre. I’m going to get Freeman out of prison. If a Negro that makes shoe polish—well, if anybody comes there—”

“Why you back in Paris?” Dick demanded.

“I got as far as Evreux, and I decided to take a plane back—For God’s sake, wait a minute and I’ll put—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 put down the receiver.

“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.”

Rosemary envied them, 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.

“Why does he have to drink?” she asked.

Nicole shook her head right and left: “So many smart men go to pieces nowadays.”

The trio lunched downstairs. There was a party at the next table. It consisted of a young man, and a dozen 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 of husbands who had come to a professional congress of their husbands or than any conceivable tourist party.

Dick asked the waiter to find out who they were.

“Those are the gold-star mothers,” explained the waiter.

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 faces, he saw the maturity of an older America. For a while the women who had come to mourn for their dead, for something they could not repair, made the room beautiful.

Abe North was still in the Ritz bar, where he had been since nine in the morning. When he arrived the famous barman Paul, who liked Abe, came over to talk.

“I was supposed to ship home this morning,” Abe said. “I mean yesterday morning.”

“Why didn’t you?” asked Paul.

Abe considered to find 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.”

Paul chuckled and paused, leaning on the back of a chair:

“If you really want to get off, Mr. North, there are friends of yours going tomorrow on the France—Mr Pearson and Mr Yardly. They’re both going on the France.”

Abe grew rather enthusiastic about being cared for.

At four the bell-boy 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 got himself up with an effort and went out.

At two o’clock Rosemary opened her door. When Dick knocked and she opened the door she saw him as something Godlike.

She came over and sat on the bed, he sat near her. She kissed him several times in the mouth, and he thought of his responsibility about Nicole two doors across the corridor.

There was a knocking at the door.

They were shocked motionless; the knock was repeated, and suddenly realizing that the door was not locked Rosemary started for the door, while Dick quickly jerked the wrinkles out of the bed where they had been sitting.

Standing there was Abe, aged by several months in the last twenty-four hours, and a very frightened 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, 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 words that a thousand franc note had been seized out of his hand by a Negro. Abe and Jules Peterson with 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 well-known Negro restaurateur, Freeman, who had also been there. The true criminal had only recently reappeared upon the scene.

In brief, Abe had in an hour entangled himself with the personal lives and emotions of one Afro-European and three Afro-Americans from the French Latin quarter.

Abe had evaded 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 frightened.

Dick looked at him and turned to Abe:

“You go to some hotel and go to bed. After you feel better Mr. Peterson will come and see you.”

“I shall wait in the hall,” said Mr. Peterson with delicacy. “It is perhaps hard to discuss my problems in front of me.”

He left the room quietly; Abe got to his feet.

“I don’t seem highly popular to-day.”

With a last desperate glance at Rosemary, he went out. To his relief Peterson was no longer in the corridor. Feeling homeless he went back to ask Paul the name of that boat.

When he had gone out, Dick and Rosemary embraced. Rosemary was first to return to reality.

“I must go,” she said.

She opened the door of her room and realized without looking about that she was not alone in the room. She saw that a dead Negro was stretched upon her bed.

As she cried “aaouu!”, she ran for the door and across the hall.

“DICK! DICK! Come and see!”

Dick ran across the hall into her room. He felt Peterson’s pulse—the body was warm, the face was bitter in death. By French law Dick had no right to touch the body but he moved the arm a little to see something—there was a stain on the green coverlet, there might be blood on the blanket under it.

Dick closed the door and stood thinking; he heard steps in the corridor and then Nicole calling him by name. Opening the door he whispered: “Bring the coverlet and top blanket from one of our beds—don’t let any one see you.” He added quickly, “Look here, you mustn’t get upset over this—it’s only some negro fight.”

The body, as Dick lifted it, was light. Laying it beside the bed he stripped off the coverlet and top blanket and then opening the door an inch, listened. Quickly Dick and Nicole exchanged bundles across the corridor; after putting this coverlet on Rosemary’s bed, Dick stood thinking. He thought first that Abe’s hostile Indian had found the friendly Indian and discovered him in the corridor, and when the latter had hidden in Rosemary’s room, had followed and killed him; second, that if the situation were allowed to develop naturally, no power on earth could save Rosemary’s reputation. Under her contract she was to remain “Daddy’s Girl.”

He dragged the body into the corridor. Then he went to the phone and called the manager-owner of the hotel.

“McBeth?—it’s Doctor Diver speaking—something very important.”

It was good that he had made the extra effort to make friends with Mr. McBeth. Here was one use for all the charm that Dick had spread over lots of people.

“Going out of the suite we came on a dead Negro … in the hall … Wait a minute now—I knew you didn’t want any guests to see the body so I’m phoning you. Of course I must ask you to keep my name out of it. I don’t want any French red tape just because I discovered the man.”

What consideration for the hotel! Only because Mr. McBeth, with his own eyes, had seen it in Doctor Diver two nights before, could he believe the story without question.

In a minute Mr. McBeth arrived and in another minute he was joined by a gendarme. In the interval he found time to whisper to Dick, “You can be sure the name of any guest will be protected. I’m only too grateful to you for what you did.”

Mr. McBeth took an immediate step that may only be imagined, but that influenced the gendarme. He made notes and sent a telephone call to his post.

Dick went back to his suite.

“What HAP-pened?” cried Rosemary.

“Where’s Nicole?”

“I think she’s in the bathroom.”

He went to the bathroom. And now Rosemary, too, could hear, louder and louder, some strange sounds.

With the idea that Nicole had fallen in the bathroom and hurt herself, Rosemary followed Dick. She saw Nicole kneeling beside the tub and swaying. “It’s you!” she cried, “—it’s you come to intrude on the only privacy I have in the world —with the coverlet with red blood on it. I’ll wear it for you—I’m not ashamed. On All Fools Day we had a party on the Zurichsee, and all the fools were there, and I wanted to come dressed in a coverlet but they wouldn’t let me—”

“Control yourself!”

“—so I sat in the bathroom. What else could I do?”

“Control yourself, Nicole!”

“I never expected you to love me —it was too late—only don’t come in the bathroom, the only place I can go for privacy. Don’t bring me coverlets with red blood on them and don’t ask me to wash them.”

“Control yourself. Get up—”

Rosemary stood trembling: now she knew what Violet McKisco had seen in the bathroom at Villa Diana.