He was grateful to the doormen and the mail clerks at the Guaranty Trust for treating him like someone who still mattered; and when he had a letter—they were few now, and most of them were from Fran, who seemed to desire to keep up a sisterly friendship with him—he took it with fatuous dignity and retired to a table in front of a café on the Boulevard des Italiens to read it, to reread it, though the most that he gathered was that she had found a charming new restaurant in Berlin.
Once a man who was asking for his mail at the Guaranty Trust said, “Aren’t you Mr. Dodsworth of the Revelation Company? Met you, sir, at the motor show in New York.”
Sam was so pleased that he asked the man to lunch, and telephoned to him often, to the end that the man, who had regarded Sam as one of his gods, saw that he was merely a solitary and common human being, and despised him and was uninterested.
And always Fran was with him, scolding at his weakness; always he saw her face. At twilight, and at three in the morning, when he could sleep no longer and rose to smoke a cigarette, he heard her saying, “Oh, Sam, I couldn’t have believed that you could ever become a dirty drunk like this!” He nestled his head on her shoulder and weepingly confessed his failure as a human being and thereafter was racked with pity for her mad and gallant effort to be more than herself, so that he would gladly have done what he could to help Kurt to win her. … Samuel Dodsworth, so abnormally flushed that no friend of his hearty triumphant days would have recognized him, sitting on the edge of his bed, his hair wild and his pajamas wrinkled, smoking cigarettes, longing to telephone from Paris to Berlin and tell Fran that he hoped she would be the Countess Obersdorf, and kept from it chiefly by the thought that she wouldn’t like it at all and would be very tart about it if he awoke her at three in the morning.
He had known unhappiness often enough, but never complete suffering like this—a suffering so vague and directionless and unreasonable that he raged at himself for his moody weakness—a suffering so confusing that he would have preferred any definite pain of the body. Fran was to him a madness. Now he cursed her for disloyalty and in long unmoving silences reviewed her superciliousnesses, but the result was no stout resolution to be free, but sudden pity for her—a fear that she would be slighted by Kurt’s family—a picture of her alone and friendless, crying at twilight. He remembered in jagged reminiscences the most grotesquely assorted things—a white fur evening cape she had once had, and how she had prepared a lunch of coffee and salad and cold partridge on the roadside, when they had motored to Detroit; her way of saying “I am a very sleepy young woman,” and a funny slatternly pair of pink wool bedroom slippers which she had loved. He glowed in these relivings and came bolt out of them to ache the more, till she was to him a spiritual virus from which he had to be free.
He found Nande Azeredo; and he was rather completely untrue to Fran, and while he liked Nande, he could not persuade himself to like being untrue.
He had gone back to the Café Select, hoping to see Elsa and by some magic to take her away from the sharp-nosed Mr. Keipp. There was no question now of willingness to be what he still called “disloyal,” there was only a question of keeping from going insane. The moralities with which comfortably married clergymen concern themselves did not exist for him now.
He did not see Elsa, and as he sat alone a tall, rather handsome girl, with a face as broad between the cheek bones as a Tartar ambled up, sat down uninvited, and demanded, in an English that sounded as though it were played on a flute, “Vot’s the trouble? You look down in the mout’.”
“I am. What would you like to drink?”
“Grand Marnier. … Did she die, or run away from you?”
“I’d rather not talk about it.”
“So bad as that? Good. I talk about this place here. I will give imitations of the people here.”
And she did, merrily, not badly. She seemed to him quite the brightest light he had found since Berlin. His guess was that she was an artists’ model; there were few professional prostitutes to be found at the Dôme or the Select, no matter how competent were some of the amateurs.
She told him that she was Nande Azeredo, as though he ought to know who she was.
Fernande Azeredo (he discovered presently) was half Portuguese, half Russian, and altogether French. She was twenty-five and she had lived in nine countries, been married three times, and once shot a Siberian wolf. She had been a chorus girl, a dress mannequin, a masseuse, and now she scratched out a thin living by making wax models for show-window dummies and called herself a sculptress. She boasted that though she had had fifty-seven lovers (“And, my dear, one was
