So much fun—so long ago.
Rosemary envied them their fun, imagining a life of leisure unlike her own.
She knew little of leisure but she had the respect for it of those who have never had it.
She thought of it as a resting, without realizing that the Divers were as far from relaxing as she was herself.
“What did this to him?” she asked.
“Why does he have to drink?”
Nicole shook her head right and left, disclaiming responsibility for the matter:
“So many smart men go to pieces nowadays.”
“And when haven’t they?” Dick asked.
“Smart men play close to the line because they have to—some of them can’t stand it, so they quit.”
“It must lie deeper than that.”
Nicole clung to her conversation; also she was irritated that Dick should contradict her before Rosemary.
“Artists like—well, like Fernand don’t seem to have to wallow in alcohol.
Why is it just Americans who dissipate?”
There were so many answers to this question that Dick decided to leave it in the air, to buzz victoriously in Nicole’s ears.
He had become intensely critical of her.
Though he thought she was the most attractive human creature he had ever seen, though he got from her everything he needed, he scented battle from afar, and subconsciously he had been hardening and arming himself, hour by hour.
He was not given to self-indulgence and he felt comparatively graceless at this moment of indulging himself, blinding his eyes with the hope that Nicole guessed at only an emotional excitement about Rosemary.
He was not sure—last night at the theatre she had referred pointedly to Rosemary as a child.
The trio lunched downstairs in an atmosphere of carpets and padded waiters, who did not march at the stomping quick-step of those men who brought good food to the tables whereon they had recently dined.
Here there were families of Americans staring around at families of Americans, and trying to make conversation with one another.
There was a party at the next table that they could not account for.
It consisted of an expansive, somewhat secretarial, would- you-mind-repeating young man, and a score of women.
The women were neither young nor old nor of any particular social class; yet the party gave the impression of a unit, held more closely together for example than a group of wives stalling through a professional congress of their husbands.
Certainly it was more of a unit than any conceivable tourist party.
An instinct made Dick suck back the grave derision that formed on his tongue; he asked the waiter to find out who they were.
“Those are the gold-star muzzers,” explained the waiter.
Aloud and in low voices they exclaimed. Rosemary’s eyes filled with tears.
“Probably the young ones are the wives,” said Nicole.
Over his wine Dick looked at them again; in their happy faces, the dignity that surrounded and pervaded the party, he perceived all the maturity of an older America.
For a while the sobered women who had come to mourn for their dead, for something they could not repair, made the room beautiful.
Momentarily, he sat again on his father’s knee, riding with Moseby while the old loyalties and devotions fought on around him.
Almost with an effort he turned back to his two women at the table and faced the whole new world in which he believed.
—Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?
XXIII
Abe North was still in the Ritz bar, where he had been since nine in the morning.
When he arrived seeking sanctuary the windows were open and great beams were busy at pulling up the dust from smoky carpets and cushions.
Chasseurs tore through the corridors, liberated and disembodied, moving for the moment in pure space.
The sit-down bar for women, across from the bar proper, seemed very small—it was hard to imagine what throngs it could accommodate in the afternoon.
The famous Paul, the concessionaire, had not arrived, but Claude, who was checking stock, broke off his work with no improper surprise to make Abe a pick-me-up.
Abe sat on a bench against a wall.
After two drinks he began to feel better—so much better that he mounted to the barber’s shop and was shaved.
When he returned to the bar Paul had arrived—in his custom-built motor, from which he had disembarked correctly at the Boulevard des Capucines.
Paul liked Abe and came over to talk.
“I was supposed to ship home this morning,” Abe said.
“I mean yesterday morning, or whatever this is.”
“Why din you?” asked Paul.
Abe considered, and happened finally to a reason:
“I was reading a serial in Liberty and the next installment was due here in Paris— so if I’d sailed I’d have missed it—then I never would have read it.”
“It must be a very good story.”