As he entered the amount on the stub, and drew two lines under it, he decided to go to Pierce, who was young and for whom he would have to put on only a small show. It was often easier to give a show than to watch one.
He went to the mail desk first—as the woman who served him pushed up with her bosom a piece of paper that had nearly escaped the desk, he thought how differently women use their bodies from men. He took his letters aside to open: There was a bill for seventeen psychiatric books from a German concern, a bill from Brentano’s, a letter from Buffalo from his father, in a handwriting that year by year became more indecipherable; there was a card from Tommy Barban postmarked Fez and bearing a facetious communication; there were letters from doctors in Zurich, both in German; a disputed bill from a plasterer in Cannes; a bill from a furniture maker; a letter from the publisher of a medical journal in Baltimore, miscellaneous announcements and an invitation to a showing of pictures by an incipient artist; also there were three letters for Nicole, and a letter for Rosemary sent in his care.
—Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?
He went toward Pierce but he was engaged with a woman, and Dick saw with his heels that he would have to present his check to Casasus at the next desk, who was free.
“How are you, Diver?” Casasus was genial. He stood up, his mustache spreading with his smile. “We were talking about Featherstone the other day and I thought of you—he’s out in California now.”
Dick widened his eyes and bent forward a little.
“In Cali-FOR-nia?”
“That’s what I heard.”
Dick held the check poised; to focus the attention of Casasus upon it he looked toward Pierce’s desk, holding the latter for a moment in a friendly eye-play conditioned by an old joke of three years before when Pierce had been involved with a Lithuanian countess. Pierce played up with a grin until Casasus had authorized the check and had no further recourse to detain Dick, whom he liked, than to stand up holding his pince-nez and repeat, “Yes, he’s in California.”
Meanwhile Dick had seen that Perrin, at the head of the line of desks, was in conversation with the heavyweight champion of the world; from a sidesweep of Perrin’s eye Dick saw that he was considering calling him over and introducing him, but that he finally decided against it.
Cutting across the social mood of Casasus with the intensity he had accumulated at the glass desk—which is to say he looked hard at the check, studying it, and then fixed his eyes on grave problems beyond the first marble pillar to the right of the banker’s head and made a business of shifting the cane, hat, and letters he carried—he said good-by and went out. He had long ago purchased the doorman; his taxi sprang to the curb.
“I want to go to the Films Par Excellence Studio—it’s on a little street in Passy. Go to the Muette. I’ll direct you from there.”
He was rendered so uncertain by the events of the last forty-eight hours that he was not even sure of what he wanted to do; he paid off the taxi at the Muette and walked in the direction of the studio, crossing to the opposite side of the street before he came to the building. Dignified in his fine clothes, with their fine accessories, he was yet swayed and driven as an animal. Dignity could come only with an overthrowing of his past, of the effort of the last six years. He went briskly around the block with the fatuousness of one of Tarkington’s adolescents, hurrying at the blind places lest he miss Rosemary’s coming out of the studio. It was a melancholy neighborhood. Next door to the place he saw a sign: “1000 chemises.” The shirts filled the window, piled, cravated, stuffed, or draped with shoddy grace on the showcase floor: “1000 chemises”—count them! On either side he read: “Papeterie,” “Patisserie,” “Solde,” “Reclame”—and Constance Talmadge in “Dejeuner de Soleil,” and farther away there were more sombre announcements: “Vetements Ecclesiastiques,” “Declaration de Deces” and “Pompes Funebres.” Life and death.
He knew that what he was now doing marked a turning point in his life—it was out of line with everything that had preceded it—even out of line with what effect he might hope to produce upon Rosemary. Rosemary saw him always as a model of correctness—his presence walking around this block was an intrusion. But Dick’s necessity of behaving as he did was a projection of some submerged reality: he was compelled to walk there, or stand there, his shirt- sleeve fitting his wrist and his coat sleeve encasing his shirt- sleeve like a sleeve valve, his collar molded plastically to his neck, his red hair cut exactly, his hand holding his small briefcase like a dandy—just as another man once found it necessary to stand in front of a church in Ferrara, in sackcloth and ashes. Dick was paying some tribute to things unforgotten, unshriven, unexpurgated.
XXI
After three-quarters of an hour of standing around, he became suddenly involved in a human contact. It was just the sort of thing that was likely to happen to him when he was in the mood of not wanting to see any one. So rigidly did he sometimes guard his exposed self-consciousness that frequently he defeated his own purposes; as an actor who underplays a part sets up a craning forward, a stimulated emotional attention in an audience, and seems to create in others an ability to bridge the gap he has left open. Similarly we are seldom sorry for those who need and crave our pity—we reserve this for those who, by other means, make us exercise the abstract function of pity.
So Dick might, himself, have analyzed the incident that ensued. As he paced the Rue des Saintes-Anges he was spoken to by a thin-faced American, perhaps thirty, with an air of being scarred and a slight but sinister smile. As Dick gave him the light he requested, he placed him as one of a type of which he had been conscious since early youth—a type that loafed about tobacco stores with one elbow on the counter and watched, through heaven knew what small chink of the mind, the people who came in and out. Intimate to garages, where he had vague business conducted in undertones, to barber shops, to the lobbies of theatres—in such places, at any rate, Dick placed him. Sometimes the face bobbed up in one of Tad’s more savage cartoons—in boyhood Dick had often thrown an uneasy glance at the dim borderland of crime on which he stood.
“How do you like Paris, Buddy?”
Not waiting for an answer the man tried to fit in his footsteps with Dick’s: “Where you from?” he asked encouragingly.
“From Buffalo.”
“I’m from San Antone—but I been over here since the war.”
“You in the army?”
“I’LL say I was. Eighty-fourth Division—ever heard of that outfit?”
The man walked a little ahead of him and fixed him with eyes that were practically menacing.
