“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.”
Abe got himself up with an effort and went out to the Rue Cambon.
XXIV
With his miniature leather brief-case in his hand Richard Diver walked from the seventh arrondisement—where he left a note for Maria Wallis signed “Dicole,” the word with which he and Nicole had signed communications in the first days of love—to his shirt- makers where the clerks made a fuss over him out of proportion to the money he spent. Ashamed at promising so much to these poor Englishmen, with his fine manners, his air of having the key to security, ashamed of making a tailor shift an inch of silk on his arm. Afterward he went to the bar of the Crillon and drank a small coffee and two fingers of gin.
As he entered the hotel the halls had seemed unnaturally bright; when he left he realized that it was because it had already turned dark outside. It was a windy four-o’clock night with the leaves on the Champs Elysees singing and failing, thin and wild. Dick turned down the Rue de Rivoli, walking two squares under the arcades to his bank where there was mail. Then he took a taxi and started up the Champs Elysees through the first patter of rain, sitting alone with his love.
Back at two o’clock in the Roi George corridor the beauty of Nicole had been to the beauty of Rosemary as the beauty of Leonardo’s girl was to that of the girl of an illustrator. Dick moved on through the rain, demoniac and frightened, the passions of many men inside him and nothing simple that he could see.
Rosemary opened her door full of emotions no one else knew of. She was now what is sometimes called a “little wild thing”—by twenty- four full hours she was not yet unified and she was absorbed in playing around with chaos; as if her destiny were a picture puzzle— counting benefits, counting hopes, telling off Dick, Nicole, her mother, the director she met yesterday, like stops on a string of beads.
When Dick knocked she had just dressed and been watching the rain, thinking of some poem, and of full gutters in Beverly Hills. When she opened the door she saw him as something fixed and Godlike as he had always been, as older people are to younger, rigid and unmalleable. Dick saw her with an inevitable sense of disappointment. It took him a moment to respond to the unguarded sweetness of her smile, her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud yet guarantee a flower. He was conscious of the print of her wet foot on a rug through the bathroom door.
“Miss Television,” he said with a lightness he did not feel. He put his gloves, his brief-case on the dressing- table, his stick against the wall. His chin dominated the lines of pain around his mouth, forcing them up into his forehead and the corner of his eyes, like fear that cannot be shown in public.
“Come and sit on my lap close to me,” he said softly, “and let me see about your lovely mouth.”
She came over and sat there and while the dripping slowed down outside—drip—dri-i-ip, she laid her lips to the beautiful cold image she had created.
Presently she kissed him several times in the mouth, her face getting big as it came up to him; he had never seen anything so dazzling as the quality of her skin, and since sometimes beauty gives back the images of one’s best thoughts he thought of his responsibility about Nicole, and of the responsibility of her being two doors down across the corridor.
“The rain’s over,” he said. “Do you see the sun on the slate?”
Rosemary stood up and leaned down and said her most sincere thing to him:
“Oh, we’re such ACTORS—you and I.”
She went to her dresser and the moment that she laid her comb flat against her hair there was a slow persistent knocking at the door.
They were shocked motionless; the knock was repeated insistently, and in the sudden realization that the door was not locked Rosemary finished her hair with one stroke, nodded at Dick who had quickly jerked the wrinkles out of the bed where they had been sitting, and started for the door. Dick said in quite a natural voice, not too loud:
“—so if you don’t feel up to going out, I’ll tell Nicole and we’ll have a very quiet last evening.”
The precautions were needless for the situation of the parties outside the door was so harassed as to preclude any but the most fleeting judgments on matters not pertinent to themselves. Standing there was Abe, aged by several months in the last twenty- four hours, and a very frightened, concerned 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, on the suave model that heels the Republican party in the border States, 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 assertion that a thousand franc note had been seized out of his hand by a Negro, whose identification was one of the points of the case. Abe and Jules Peterson, accompanied by 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 prominent Negro restaurateur, Freeman, who had only drifted through the alcoholic fog at a very early stage and then vanished. The true culprit, whose case, as reported by his friends, was that he had merely commandeered a fifty-franc note to pay for drinks that Abe had ordered, had only recently and in a somewhat sinister role, reappeared upon the scene.
In brief, Abe had succeeded in the space of an hour in entangling himself with the personal lives, consciences, and emotions of one Afro-European and three Afro-Americans inhabiting the French Latin quarter. The disentanglement was not even faintly in sight and the day had passed in an atmosphere of unfamiliar Negro faces bobbing up in unexpected places and around unexpected corners, and insistent Negro voices on the phone.
In person, Abe had succeeded in evading 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
