His resolution held. Once he had accomplished the awful struggle of winning himself, once he turned from it to winning her, he began to see her (through a slightly champagne-colored haze) as wondrously desirable.
“Probably I’ll kick myself tomorrow. I don’t care! I’m glad I’m going to have her! Now to get rid of these young brats! Stop brooding, Sam, and speak your little piece! … I’ll take her to the Continental, too, by thunder!”
Fran would have marveled to hear her taciturn Samuel chattering. Early he discovered a way of parrying these young geniuses—by admitting, before they hinted it, that he was a lowbrow, but that he ranked higher among the lowbrows than they among the highbrows.
This attack disorganized them, and enabled him to contradict them with cheerful casualness. He heard himself stating that Eddie Guest was the best American poet, and a number of other things which he had heard from Tub Pearson and which he did not believe. His crassness was so complete that they were staggered, being accustomed to having gentlemen as large and as rich as Mr. Pearson J. Thomas deprecate their own richness and largeness, and admire the sophistication of Mr. Gillespie, Mr. Short, and Mr. Keipp.
Elsa agreed with him in everything; made him ardent by taking his side against them; encouraged him till (with a mild astonishment at his own triumphs of asininity) he heard himself asserting that vacuum cleaners were more important than Homer, and that Mr. Mutt, of the comic strips, was a fuller-blooded character than Soames Forsyte.
And meantime, he was buying.
Mr. Gillespie, Mr. Short, and Mr. Keipp never refused another drink. After the champagne, Elsa suggested brandies (she had forgotten that it was a beverage of which she had scarcely heard) and there were many brandies, and the pile of saucers, serving as memoranda of drinks for which he would have to pay, rose and rose in front of Sam, while the innocent pioneer part of the table in front of Mr. Gillespie, Mr. Short, and Mr. Keipp was free of anything save their current brandies.
But Sam was craftily delighted. Could anything better show Elsa that he was a worthier lover than the sharp-nosed Mr. Keipp?
He was talking, now, exclusively to Elsa, ignoring the young men. He was almost beginning to be honest with her, in his desire to have sympathy from this rosy child. He decided that her eyes weren’t hard, really, but intelligent.
He finally dared to grope under the table, and her hand flew to his, so warm, so young, so living, and answered his touch with a pressure which stirred him intolerably. He became very gay, joyous with the thought of the secret they were sharing. But a slight check occurred to the flow of his confidences.
Elsa cooed, “Oh, excuse me just a moment, dear. There’s Van Nuys Rodney over there. Something I have to ask him. ’Scuse me a moment.”
She flitted to a table at which sat a particularly hairy and blue-shirted man and he saw her drop all her preening in an absorbed conversation.
He sat neglected by his guests at his own table.
In three minutes, Mr. Jack Keipp lounged to his feet, muttered, “Pardon me a moment,” and Sam saw him join Elsa and Van Nuys Rodney and plunge into talk. Then Mr. Gillespie yawned, “Well, I think I’ll turn in,” Mr. Short suggested, “Glad met you, Mr. Oh,” and they were gone. Sam watched them stroll down the boulevard. He wished that he had been pleasanter to them—even Shorts and Gillespies would be worth having in this city of gaiety and loneliness.
When he looked back, he saw that Elsa, Mr. Keipp, and Mr. Rodney had vanished, complete.
He waited for Elsa to come back. He waited an hour, with the monstrous pile of saucers before him as his only companion. She did not come. He paid the waiter, he rose slowly, unsmilingly beckoned to a taxicab, and sat in it cold and alone.
Some time in the night—and he was never quite sure whether he had been dreaming or half-awake—he heard Fran saying coldly, “My dear Samuel, don’t you see at last—isn’t it exactly what I told you?—that you have less knowledge of women than a European like Kurt would have at eighteen? You American men! Fussing and fuming and fretting over the obvious question of whether or not you’ll seduce that little harlot! And then unable to accomplish it! What a spectacle! But Kurt—in the first place, of course, Kurt would have taken Elsa away from there, away from her little parasite friends—”
It was Fran’s very voice, and he had nothing to answer.
He awoke again to hear not Fran but himself jeering, “And the rottenest part of the whole thing was the cheap superiority you felt to those three little rats of would-be artists. Poor kids! Of course they have to be conceited and supercilious, to keep their courage up, because they’re failures.”
And again, “Yes, that’s all true, but I’ll find Elsa again, and this time—”
XXVIII
He slept badly; he rose at six and rang for breakfast. But at breakfast everything was gratefully dear to him.
He was so thankful that he had not gone astray with Elsa that he did not think of it for more than a second. All his thoughts blazed about Fran.
Why had he let the dissensions, the blame and impatience, all the nothings, grow into a barrier unreal but thwarting as a wall seen in a nightmare? All that was needed was a really frank talk with her! And this trip to Paris, confessing to Matey, being idiotic with Elsa, just being alone and away from Fran, had made it possible for him to be frank.
He’d been stupid. Fran was a child. Why not treat her as one, a lovely and much beloved child; be more patient, not be infuriated by her passing tantrums? A child. A lake mirroring
