“Is it time?”
“No, not for half an hour[83].”
The table was covered with papers which he assembled with some difficulty into a long letter; the writing on the last pages was very large and illegible. In the delicate light of electric lamps fading, he scrawled his name at the bottom, crammed it into an envelope and handed it to Abe. “For my wife.”
“You better souse your head in cold water,” Abe suggested.
“You think I’d better?” inquired McKisco doubtfully. “I don’t want to get too sober.”
“Well, you look terrible now.”
Obediently McKisco went into the bathroom.
“I’m leaving everything in an awful mess,” he called. “I don’t know how Violet will get back to America. I don’t carry any insurance. I never got around to it.”
“Don’t talk nonsense, you’ll be right here eating breakfast in an hour.”
“Sure, I know.” He came back with his hair wet and looked at Rosemary as if he saw her for the first time. Suddenly tears stood in his eyes. “I never have finished my novel. That’s what makes me so sore. You don’t like me,” he said to Rosemary, “but that can’t be helped. I’m primarily a literary man.” He made a vague discouraged sound and shook his head helplessly. “I’ve made lots of mistakes in my life – many of them. But I’ve been one of the most prominent – in some ways —”
He gave this up and puffed at a dead cigarette.
“I do like you,” said Rosemary, “but I don’t think you ought to fight a duel.”
“Yeah, I should have tried to beat him up, but it’s done now. I’ve let myself be drawn into something that I had no right to be. I have a very violent temper —” He looked closely at Abe as if he expected the statement to be challenged. Then with an aghast laugh he raised the cold cigarette butt toward his mouth. His breathing quickened.
“The trouble was I suggested the duel – if Violet had only kept her mouth shut I could have fixed it. Of course even now I can just leave, or sit back and laugh at the whole thing – but I don’t think Violet would ever respect me again.”
“Yes, she would,” said Rosemary. “She’d respect you more.”
“No – you don’t know Violet. She’s very hard when she gets an advantage over you. We’ve been married twelve years, we had a little girl seven years old and she died and after that you know how it is. We both played around on the side a little[84], nothing serious but drifting apart – she called me a coward out there to-night.”
Troubled, Rosemary didn’t answer.
“Well, we’ll see there’s as little damage done as possible,” said Abe. He opened the leather case. “These are Barban’s duelling pistols – I borrowed them so you could get familiar with them. He carries them in his suitcase.” He weighed one of the archaic weapons in his hand. Rosemary gave an exclamation of uneasiness and McKisco looked at the pistols anxiously.
“Well – it isn’t as if we were going to stand up and pot each other with forty-fives[85],” he said.
“I don’t know,” said Abe cruelly; “the idea is you can sight better along a long barrel.”
“How about distance?” asked McKisco.
“I’ve inquired about that. If one or the other parties has to be definitely eliminated they make it eight paces, if they’re just good and sore it’s twenty paces, and if it’s only to vindicate their honor it’s forty paces. His second agreed with me to make it forty.”
“That’s good.”
“There’s a wonderful duel in a novel of Pushkin’s[86],” recollected Abe. “Each man stood on the edge of a precipice, so if he was hit at all he was done for.”
This seemed very remote and academic to McKisco, who stared at him and said, “What?”
“Do you want to take a quick dip[87] and freshen up?”
“No – no, I couldn’t swim.” He sighed. “I don’t see what it’s all about,” he said helplessly. “I don’t see why I’m doing it.”
It was the first thing he had ever done in his life. Actually he was one of those for whom the sensual world does not exist, and faced with a concrete fact he brought to it a vast surprise.
“We might as well be going[88],” said Abe, seeing him fail a little.
“All right.” He drank off a stiff drink of brandy, put the flask in his pocket, and said with almost a savage air: “What’ll happen if I kill him – will they throw me in jail?”
“I’ll run you over the Italian border.”
He glanced at Rosemary – and then said apologetically to Abe:
“Before we start there’s one thing I’d like to see you about alone[89].”
“I hope neither of you gets hurt,” Rosemary said. “I think its very foolish and you ought to try to stop it.”
XI
She found Campion downstairs in the deserted lobby.
“I saw you go upstairs,” he said excitedly. “Is he all right? When is the duel going to be?”
“I don’t know.” She resented his speaking of it as a circus, with McKisco as the tragic clown.
“Will you go with me?” he demanded, with the air of having seats. “I’ve hired the hotel car.”
“I don’t want to go.”
“Why not? I imagine it’ll take years off my life but I wouldn’t miss it for words[90]. We could watch it from quite far away.”
“Why don’t you get Mr. Dumphry to go with you?”
His monocle fell out, with no whiskers to hide in[91] – he drew himself up.
“I never want to see him again.”
“Well, I’m afraid I can’t go. Mother wouldn’t like it.”
As Rosemary entered her room Mrs. Speers stirred sleepily and called to her:
“Where’ve you been?”
“I just couldn’t sleep. You go back to sleep, Mother.”
“Come in my room.” Hearing her sit up in bed, Rosemary went in and told her what had happened.
“Why don’t you go and see it?” Mrs. Speers suggested. “You needn’t go up close and you might be able to help afterwards.”
Rosemary did not like the picture of herself looking on and she demurred, but Mrs. Speers’ consciousness was still clogged with sleep and she was reminded of night calls to death and calamity when she was the wife of a doctor. “I like you to go places and do things on your own initiative without me – you did much harder things for Rainy’s publicity stunts.”
Still Rosemary did not see why she should go, but she obeyed the sure, clear voice that had sent her into the stage entrance of the Odéon[92] in Paris when she was twelve and greeted her when she came out again.
She thought she was reprieved when from the steps she saw Abe and McKisco drive away – but after a moment the hotel car came around the corner.