Abe as after Peterson, and Peterson was very much after what protection he might get from Abe.
Up in Stockholm Peterson had failed as a small manufacturer of shoe polish and now possessed only his formula and sufficient trade tools to fill a small box; however, his new protector had promised in the early hours to set him up in business in Versailles. Abe’s former chauffeur was a shoemaker there and Abe had handed Peterson two hundred francs on account.
Rosemary listened with distaste to this rigmarole; to appreciate its grotesquerie required a more robust sense of humor than hers. The little man with his portable manufactory, his insincere eyes that, from time to time, rolled white semicircles of panic into view; the figure of Abe, his face as blurred as the gaunt fine lines of it would permit—all this was as remote from her as sickness.
“I ask only a chance in life,” said Peterson with the sort of precise yet distorted intonation peculiar to colonial countries. “My methods are simple, my formula is so good that I was drove away from Stockholm, ruined, because I did not care to dispose of it.”
Dick regarded him politely—interest formed, dissolved, he turned to Abe:
“You go to some hotel and go to bed. After you’re all straight Mr. Peterson will come and see you.”
“But don’t you appreciate the mess that Peterson’s in?” Abe protested.
“I shall wait in the hall,” said Mr. Peterson with delicacy. “It is perhaps hard to discuss my problems in front of me.”
He withdrew after a short travesty of a French bow; Abe pulled himself to his feet with the deliberation of a locomotive.
“I don’t seem highly popular to-day.”
“Popular but not probable,” Dick advised him. “My advice is to leave this hotel—by way of the bar, if you want. Go to the Chambord, or if you’ll need a lot of service, go over to the Majestic.”
“Could I annoy you for a drink?”
“There’s not a thing up here,” Dick lied.
Resignedly Abe shook hands with Rosemary; he composed his face slowly, holding her hand a long time and forming sentences that did not emerge.
“You are the most—one of the most—”
She was sorry, and rather revolted at his dirty hands, but she laughed in a well-bred way, as though it were nothing unusual to her to watch a man walking in a slow dream. Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane. Respect rather than fear. There is something awe- inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions, who will do anything. Of course we make him pay afterward for his moment of superiority, his moment of impressiveness. Abe turned to Dick with a last appeal.
“If I go to a hotel and get all steamed and curry-combed, and sleep awhile, and fight off these Senegalese— could I come and spend the evening by the fireside?”
Dick nodded at him, less in agreement than in mockery and said: “You have a high opinion of your current capacities.”
“I bet if Nicole was here she’d let me come back.”
“All right.” Dick went to a trunk tray and brought a box to the central table; inside were innumerable cardboard letters.
“You can come if you want to play anagrams.”
Abe eyed the contents of the box with physical revulsion, as though he had been asked to eat them like oats.
“What are anagrams? Haven’t I had enough strange—”
“It’s a quiet game. You spell words with them—any word except alcohol.”
“I bet you can spell alcohol,” Abe plunged his hand among the counters. “Can I come back if I can spell alcohol?”
“You can come back if you want to play anagrams.”
Abe shook his head resignedly.
“If you’re in that frame of mind there’s no use—I’d just be in the way.” He waved his finger reproachfully at Dick. “But remember what George the third said, that if Grant was drunk he wished he would bite the other generals.”
With a last desperate glance at Rosemary from the golden corners of his eyes, he went out. To his relief Peterson was no longer in the corridor. Feeling lost and homeless he went back to ask Paul the name of that boat.
XXV
When he had tottered out, Dick and Rosemary embraced fleetingly. There was a dust of Paris over both of them through which they scented each other: the rubber guard on Dick’s fountain pen, the faintest odor of warmth from Rosemary’s neck and shoulders. For another half-minute Dick clung to the situation; Rosemary was first to return to reality.
“I must go, youngster,” she said.
They blinked at each other across a widening space, and Rosemary made an exit that she had learned young, and on which no director had ever tried to improve.
She opened the door of her room and went directly to her desk where she had suddenly remembered leaving her wristwatch. It was there; slipping it on she glanced down at the daily letter to her mother, finishing the last sentence in her mind. Then, rather gradually, she realized without turning about that she was not alone in the room.
In an inhabited room there are refracting objects only half noticed: varnished wood, more or less polished
