It took Clifford a month to recover completely.
By the end of the first week, however, Elliott had officially declared him convalescent. Elliott considered himself something of an authority on such matters.
Clifford’s recovery was also helped by the way Rue Barrée now responded to him.
Whenever she passed him on the street, she no longer ignored his solemn salute. Instead, she would lower her eyes, smile, and sometimes even blush.
Forty times a day, Clifford thanked heaven that she had refused him.
And forty times a day, that same refusal tortured him.
Elliott noticed the change.
He was annoyed by Clifford’s silence, and even more annoyed by the strange thaw in Rue Barrée’s attitude.
They often encountered her on the rue de Seine. She would come walking along with a music roll under one arm and a large straw hat on her head, while Clifford and his friends headed east toward the Café Vachette.
Whenever the group passed her, they would respectfully remove their hats.
And whenever Clifford did so, Rue Barrée would blush and smile.
Elliott watched all this with growing suspicion.
But he could never discover what was really going on.
Eventually, he gave up.
“You’re an idiot,” he told Clifford.
Then he shook his head.
“As for that girl, I’ll reserve judgment.”
All the while, Selby was jealous.
At first, he refused to admit it even to himself.
He tried to escape the feeling by spending a day in the country instead of going to the studio.
It was a mistake.
The woods and fields only made things worse.
The little streams seemed to whisper about Rue Barrée.
The mowers shouted to one another across the fields, and somehow their voices seemed to end in the same maddening sound.
“Rue Bar-rée-e!”
By the time Selby returned to Paris, he was furious.
For an entire week he worked moodily at Julian’s, all the while wondering where Clifford was and what he was doing.
Finally, on Sunday, he could stand it no longer.
He went for a long, aimless walk.
Somehow he ended up at the flower market on the Pont au Change.
Then he wandered on to the morgue.
Then, without knowing why, he found himself back at the marble bridge.
This was absurd.
Selby knew it.
So he went to see Clifford.
He found him recovering in the garden over a glass of mint julep.
They sat together and discussed morality, human happiness, and every other subject except the one Selby actually wanted to discuss.
Selby tried several times to lead the conversation toward Rue Barrée.
Clifford noticed every attempt and found them extremely amusing.
But the juleps softened Selby’s jealousy.
They put a little hope back into his heart.
At last Selby stood up.
“I really ought to go.”
“So should I,” said Clifford.
Clifford went with him.
When they reached Selby’s door, Selby insisted on walking Clifford halfway home.
Then Clifford insisted on walking Selby halfway back.
Neither seemed willing to admit that they simply did not want to part.
Finally Clifford laughed.
“We may as well dine together.”
“And afterward?”
“We’ll flit.”
“Flit?”
“Yes. It’s a good word for the sort of trouble I intend to get into tonight.”
Dinner was ordered at Mignon’s.
While Selby went to discuss the food with the chef, Clifford kept a fatherly eye on the butler.
The dinner was a success.
Or, at least, it was the sort of dinner people generally called a success afterward.
By dessert, Selby vaguely heard someone say from a great distance:
“Kid Selby, drunk as a lord.”
A group of people passed near their table.
Selby thought he shook hands with several of them.
He thought he laughed a great deal.
Everyone seemed extraordinarily clever.
Clifford sat opposite him, declaring that his friendship with Selby would last forever.
There seemed to be other people around them too.
Some sat beside them.
Others kept passing through the room, their skirts whispering over the polished floor.
The perfume of roses filled the air.
Fans fluttered.
Bare arms brushed against him.
Laughter floated around him.
Everything became softer and less distinct.
The room seemed to disappear into a mist.
Then, suddenly, everything snapped into sharp focus.
The faces were horribly distorted.
The voices became shrill and piercing.
Selby straightened himself.
He became very still.
He was drunk.
He knew perfectly well that he was drunk.
And that knowledge made him intensely suspicious of himself.
He watched his own movements as carefully as though he were watching a thief standing beside him.
Somehow, that self-control saved him.
Clifford eventually held his head under running water, and Selby managed to get them both out into the street.
Clifford was much worse off than Selby realized.
For a while Selby remained remarkably controlled.
His face was only slightly paler than usual.
His expression was only a little tighter.
His speech was slower and more careful.
Around midnight, he left Clifford peacefully asleep in someone’s armchair.
Clifford had a long suede glove dangling from one hand and a feathered boa wrapped around his neck to protect him from the draft.
Selby walked through the hall and down the stairs.
A moment later he found himself standing on a sidewalk in a neighborhood he did not recognize.
He looked up at the street sign.
The name meant nothing to him.
He turned toward a cluster of lights at the far end of the street.
They seemed close.
They were not.
After walking for what felt like an hour, Selby came to a disturbing conclusion.
His eyes, he decided, had somehow been removed from their proper positions and placed on either side of his head like a bird’s.
The inconvenience of this troubled him deeply.
He tilted his head from side to side like a chicken, trying to see whether his neck still worked.
Then despair came over him.
His eyes filled with tears.
His heart seemed to melt.
And he walked directly into a tree.
The impact brought him back to reality.
He suppressed the sudden tenderness in his heart, picked up his hat, and continued walking.
His mouth was pale and tight.
His teeth were clenched.
For the most part, he managed to keep moving in a straight line.
After an enormous amount of time, he came upon a row of cabs.
Their lamps glowed red, yellow, and green.
The lights annoyed him.
He thought it might be satisfying to smash them all with his cane.
He resisted the temptation.
Then another thought occurred to him.
A cab would be much easier.
He turned around.
But by now the cabs seemed impossibly far away, and their bright lamps confused him.
He abandoned the idea.
He pulled himself together and looked around.
A huge, shapeless shadow rose beside him.
He recognized it.
The Arc de Triomphe.
He stared at it solemnly and shook his cane.
“It is too big,” he told it.
Something clattered onto the pavement.
He assumed it was his cane.
He did not care.
After several minutes of struggle, he managed to regain control of his right leg, which seemed determined to go its own way.
He crossed the Place de la Concorde at a pace that threatened to carry him all the way to the Madeleine.
“This won’t do.”
He turned sharply.
He crossed the bridge, passed the Palais Bourbon at a trot, and turned onto the Boulevard Saint-Germain.
He was doing reasonably well until the size of the War Office offended him personally.
He also missed his cane.
It would have been pleasant to drag it along the iron railings as he walked.
He considered using his hat instead.
But when he found his hat, he forgot why he had wanted it.
So he solemnly put it back on his head.
Then he developed a powerful desire to sit down and cry.
This feeling lasted until he reached the rue de Rennes.
There he became fascinated by the dragon on the balcony above the Cour du Dragon.
He stared at it for so long that time seemed to disappear.
Eventually he remembered that he had no business standing there.
So he marched on.
Progress was slow.
His desire to sit down and cry had now changed into a desire for deep and solitary thought.
Then his right leg betrayed him again.
It attacked his left leg, outflanked it, and sent him crashing into a wooden barrier.
He tried to walk around it.
The street was blocked.
He tried to push the barrier down.
He could not.
Then he noticed a red lantern standing on a pile of paving stones behind it.
This was disturbing.
How was he supposed to get home if the boulevard was closed?
Then he realized something.
He wasn’t on the boulevard.
His treacherous right leg had taken him on a completely different route.
Behind him was the boulevard, stretching away beneath its endless line of lamps.
Ahead was a narrow, broken-down street filled with earth, mortar, and piles of stone.
Selby looked up.
Written in large black letters across the barrier were two words:
RUE BARRÉE.
He sat down.
Two policemen he knew happened to pass by.
“You’d better get up,” one of them advised.
Selby considered the suggestion.
“I prefer sitting.”
The policemen laughed and continued on.
Selby hardly noticed.
He was thinking about something much more important.
How could he see Rue Barrée?
She had to be somewhere inside that large house with the iron balconies.
The door was locked.
But that did not seem particularly important.
First he thought he might simply shout until she came down.
Then he decided he could hammer on the door until she appeared.
But both plans seemed unreliable.
Finally, he arrived at what he considered a perfectly sensible solution.
He would climb onto the balcony.
Then he would politely knock on the window and ask for Rue Barrée.
There was only one lighted window in the house.
It was on the second floor.
Selby stared at it.
Then he climbed onto the wooden barrier and scrambled over the piles of stones.
He reached the sidewalk and looked up at the building.
There seemed to be no possible way to climb it.
Then something changed inside him.
A sudden fury took hold.
It was blind, drunken determination.
Blood rushed into his head and thundered in his ears.
He clenched his teeth.
He jumped toward a windowsill and caught it.
He pulled himself upward and grabbed the iron bars.
After that, reason disappeared.
A thousand voices seemed to roar inside his head.
His heart hammered wildly.
He gripped every ledge and piece of stone he could reach.
He pulled himself along the wall.
He clung to pipes.
He grabbed shutters.
Slowly, desperately, he worked his way upward.
At last he reached the balcony.
He dragged himself over the railing and collapsed beside the lighted window.
His hat fell from his head and rolled against the glass.
For a moment he stood there, breathing heavily.
Then the window began to open from inside.
They stared at each other.
Neither spoke.
After a moment, the girl took two unsteady steps backward.
Selby saw her face turn completely red.
She sank into a chair beside the lamplit table.
Without saying a word, Selby followed her into the room and carefully closed the tall glass doors behind him.
Again they looked at each other in silence.
The room was small and white.
Everything was white.
The bed had white curtains.
The little washstand in the corner was white.
The walls were bare.
Even the china lamp was pale.
Selby looked at Rue’s face.
She was no longer white.
Her face and neck were flushed with color, as red as the rosebush blooming beside the fireplace.
Selby did not think of speaking.
She did not seem to expect him to.
His mind was occupied by the room itself.
The whiteness.
The simplicity.
The almost severe purity of everything around him.
As his eyes adjusted to the light, more details emerged.
There was a piano.
A coal scuttle.
A small iron trunk.
A bathtub.
Along one wall were wooden pegs behind a white chintz curtain, with clothes hanging underneath.
An umbrella and a large straw hat lay on the bed.
On the table was an open music roll, an inkstand, and several sheets of ruled paper.
Behind Selby stood a wardrobe with a mirror on its door.
For some reason, he did not want to look at himself.
But he was beginning to sober.
Rue sat quietly watching him.
Her face revealed almost nothing.
Only her lips trembled from time to time.
Her eyes, which looked wonderfully blue in daylight, now seemed dark and soft as velvet.
The color in her neck deepened whenever she breathed, then slowly faded.
She seemed smaller and more delicate than she had on the street.
There was something almost childlike in the curve of her cheek.
At last Selby turned.
He saw himself in the mirror.
The sight shocked him.
It was as though he had suddenly seen something shameful.
His thoughts became clearer.
His eyes met Rue’s for one brief moment.
Then he looked down.
His lips tightened.
He bowed his head.
Every nerve in his body seemed stretched to the breaking point.
And then the struggle ended.
Something inside him had spoken.
He listened.
He already knew what it was going to say.
In truth, the answer hardly mattered.
The ending would always be the same for him.
He understood that now.
Always the same.
For a long moment he stood there, listening to that quiet voice inside himself.
Then he rose.
Rue immediately rose too.
One small hand rested on the table.
Selby walked to the window and opened it.
He picked up his hat.
Then he closed the window again.
He went over to the rosebush and gently touched the blossoms with his face.
One rose stood in a glass of water on the table.
Rue reached for it.
She pulled it from the glass, pressed it softly to her lips, and laid it beside him.
Selby picked it up without saying a word.
He crossed the room and opened the door.
The landing outside was dark and silent.
Rue lifted the lamp.
She slipped past him and went quietly down the polished stairs.
At the bottom, she unfastened the bolts and opened the little iron gate.
Selby walked through it.
The rose was still in his hand.