"It's a nice night."
"I was worried."
"Oh, you were worried?"
"Oh, don't talk that way. It would give me so much pleasure to think of a little something I could do for you, Dick."
He turned away from her, toward the veil of starlight over Africa.
"I believe that's true, Nicole. And sometimes I believe that the littler it was, the more pleasure it would give you."
"Don't talk like that--don't say such things."
His face, wan in the light that the white spray caught and tossed back to the brilliant sky had none of the lines of annoyance she had expected. It was even detached; his eyes focussed upon her gradually as upon a chessman to be moved; in the same slow manner he caught her wrist and drew her near.
"You ruined me, did you?" he inquired blandly. "Then we're both ruined. So----"
Cold with terror she put her other wrist into his grip. All right, she would go with him--again she felt the beauty of the night vividly in one moment of complete response and abnegation--all right, then----
--But now she was unexpectedly free and Dick turned his back sighing: "Tch! tch!"
Tears streamed down Nicole's face--in a moment she heard some one approaching; it was Tommy.
"You found him! Nicole thought maybe you jumped overboard, Dick," he said, "because that little English poule slanged you."
"It'd be a good setting to jump overboard," said Dick mildly.
"Wouldn't it?" agreed Nicole hastily. "Let's borrow life-preservers and jump over. I think we should do something spectacular. I feel that all our lives have been too restrained."
Tommy sniffed from one to the other trying to breathe in the situation with the night. "We'll go ask the Lady Beer-and-Ale what to do--she should know the latest things. And we should memorize her song 'There was a young lady from l'enfer.' I shall translate it, and make a fortune from its success at the Casino."
"Are you rich, Tommy?" Dick asked him, as they retraced the length of the boat.
"Not as things go now. I got tired of the brokerage business and went away. But I have good stocks in the hands of friends who are holding it for me. All goes well."
"Dick's getting rich," Nicole said. In reaction her voice had begun to tremble.
On the after deck Golding had fanned three pairs of dancers into action with his colossal paws. Nicole and Tommy joined them and Tommy remarked: "Dick seems to be drinking."
"Only moderately," she said loyally.
"There are those who can drink and those who can't. Obviously Dick can't. You ought to tell him not to."
"I!" she exclaimed in amazement. "I tell Dick what he should do or shouldn't do!"
But in a reticent way Dick was still vague and sleepy when they reached the pier at Cannes. Golding buoyed him down into the launch of the Margin whereupon Lady Caroline shifted her place conspicuously. On the dock he bowed good-by with exaggerated formality, and for a moment he seemed about to speed her with a salty epigram, but the bone of Tommy's arm went into the soft part of his and they walked to the attendant car.
"I'll drive you home," Tommy suggested.
"Don't bother--we can get a cab."
"I'd like to, if you can put me up."
On the back seat of the car Dick remained quiescent until the yellow monolith of Golfe-Juan was passed, and then the constant carnival at Juan-les-Pins where the night was musical and strident in many languages. When the car turned up the hill toward Tarmes, he sat up suddenly, prompted by the tilt of the vehicle, and delivered a peroration:
"A charming representative of the--" he stumbled momentarily, "--a firm of--bring me brains addled a l'Anglaise." Then he went into an appeased sleep, belching now and then contentedly into the soft warm darkness.
VI
NEXT morning Dick came early into Nicole's room. "I waited till I heard you up. Needless to say I feel badly about the evening--but how about no post-mortems?"
"I'm agreed," she answered coolly, carrying her face to the mirror.
"Tommy drove us home? Or did I dream it?"
"You know he did."
"Seems probable," he admitted, "since I just heard him coughing. I think I'll call on him."
She was glad when he left her, for almost the first time in her life--his awful faculty of being right seemed to have deserted him at last.
Tommy was stirring in his bed, waiting for cafe au lait.
"Feel all right?" Dick asked.
When Tommy complained of a sore throat he seized at a professional attitude.
"Better have a gargle or something."
"You have one?"
"Oddly enough I haven't--probably Nicole has."
"Don't disturb her."
"She's up."
"How is she?"
Dick turned around slowly. "Did you expect her to be dead because I was tight?" His tone was pleasant. "Nicole is now made of--of Georgia pine, which is the hardest wood known, except lignum vitae from New Zealand----"
Nicole, going downstairs, heard the end of the conversation. She knew, as she had always known, that Tommy loved her; she knew he had come to dislike Dick, and that Dick had realized it before he did, and would react in some positive way to the man's lonely passion. This thought was succeeded by a moment of sheerly feminine satisfaction. She leaned over her children's breakfast table and told off instructions to the governess, while upstairs two men were concerned about her.
Later in the garden she was happy; she did not want anything to happen, but only for the situation to remain in suspension as the two men tossed her from one mind to another; she had not existed for a long time, even as a ball.
"Nice, rabbits, isn't it--Or is it? Hey, rabbit--hey you! Is it nice?--hey? Or does it sound very peculiar to you?"
The rabbit, after an experience of practically nothing else and cabbage leaves, agreed after a few tentative shiftings of the nose.
Nicole went on through her garden routine. She left the flowers she cut in designated spots to be brought to the house later by the gardener. Reaching the sea wall she fell into a communicative mood and no one to communicate with; so she stopped and deliberated. She was somewhat shocked at the idea of being interested in another man--but other women have lovers--why not me? In the fine spring morning the inhibitions of the male world disappeared and she reasoned as gaily as a flower, while the wind blew her hair until her head moved with it. Other women have had lovers--the same forces that last night had made her yield to Dick up to the point of death, now kept her head nodding to the wind, content and happy with the logic of, Why shouldn't I?
She sat upon the low wall and looked down upon the sea. But from another sea, the wide swell of fantasy, she had fished out something tangible to lay beside the rest of her loot. If she need not, in her spirit, be forever one with Dick as he had appeared last night, she must be something in addition, not just an image on his mind, condemned to endless parades around the circumference of a medal.
Nicole had chosen this part of the wall on which to sit, because the cliff shaded to a slanting meadow with a cultivated vegetable garden. Through a cluster of boughs she saw two men carrying rakes and spades and talking in a counterpoint of Nicois and Provencal. Attracted by their words and gestures she caught the sense:
"I laid her down here."
"I took her behind the vines there."
"She doesn't care--neither does he. It was that sacred dog. Well, I laid her down here----"
"You got the rake?"
"You got it yourself, you clown."
"Well, I don't care where you laid her down. Until that night I never even felt a woman's breast against my chest since I married--twelve years ago. And now you tell me----"
"But listen about the dog----"
Nicole watched them through the boughs; it seemed all right what they were saying--one thing was good for one person, another for another. Yet it was a man's world she had overheard; going back to the house she became doubtful again.
Dick and Tomm
y were on the terrace. She walked through them and into the house, brought out a sketch pad and began a head of Tommy.
"Hands never idle--distaff flying," Dick said lightly. How could he talk so trivially with the blood still drained down from his cheeks so that the auburn lather of beard showed red as his eyes? She turned to Tommy saying:
"I can always do something. I used to have a nice active little Polynesian ape and juggle him around for hours till people began to make the most dismal rough jokes----"
She kept her eyes resolutely away from Dick. Presently he excused himself and went inside--she saw him pour himself two glasses of water, and she hardened further.
"Nicole--" Tommy began but interrupted himself to clear the harshness from his throat.
"I'm going to get you some special camphor rub," she suggested. "It's American--Dick believes in it. I'll be just a minute."
"I must go really."
Dick came out and sat down. "Believes in what?" When she returned with the jar neither of the men had moved, though she gathered they had had some sort of excited conversation about nothing.
The chauffeur was at the door, with a bag containing Tommy's clothes of the night before. The sight of Tommy in clothes borrowed from Dick moved her sadly, falsely, as though Tommy were not able to afford such clothes.
"When you get to the hotel rub this into your throat and chest and then inhale it," she said.
"Say, there," Dick murmured as Tommy went down the steps, "don't give Tommy the whole jar--it has to be ordered from Paris--it's out of stock down here."
Tommy came back within hearing and the three of them stood in the sunshine, Tommy squarely before the car so that it seemed by leaning forward he would tip it upon his back.
Nicole stepped down to the path.
"Now catch it," she advised him. "It's extremely rare."
She heard Dick grow silent at her side; she took a step off from him and waved as the car drove off with Tommy and the special camphor rub. Then she turned to take her own medicine.
"There was no necessity for that gesture," Dick said. "There are four of us here--and for years whenever there's a cough----"
They looked at each other.
"We can always get another jar--" then she lost her nerve and presently followed him upstairs where he lay down on his own bed and said nothing.
"Do you want lunch to be brought up to you?" she asked.
He nodded and continued to lie quiescent, staring at the ceiling. Doubtfully she went to give the order. Upstairs again she looked into his room--the blue eyes, like searchlights, played on a dark sky. She stood a minute in the doorway, aware of the sin she had committed against him, half afraid to come in.... She put out her hand as if to rub his head, but he turned away like a suspicious animal. Nicole could stand the situation no longer; in a kitchen-maid's panic she ran downstairs, afraid of what the stricken man above would feed on while she must still continue her dry suckling at his lean chest.
In a week Nicole forgot her flash about Tommy--she had not much memory for people and forgot them easily. But in the first hot blast of June she heard he was in Nice. He wrote a little note to them both--and she opened it under the parasol, together with other mail they had brought from the house. After reading it she tossed it over to Dick, and in exchange he threw a telegram into the lap of her beach pajamas:
"Dears will be at Gausses tomorrow unfortunately without mother am counting on seeing you.
ROSEMARY"
"I'll be glad to see her," said Nicole, grimly.
VII
BUT she went to the beach with Dick next morning with a renewal of her apprehension that Dick was contriving at some desperate solution. Since the evening on Golding's yacht she had sensed what was going on. So delicately balanced was she between an old foothold that had always guaranteed her security, and the imminence of a leap from which she must alight changed in the very chemistry of blood and muscle, that she did not dare bring the matter into the true forefront of consciousness. The figures of Dick and herself, mutating, undefined, appeared as spooks caught up into a fantastic dance. For months every word had seemed to have an overtone of some other meaning, soon to be resolved under circumstances that Dick would determine. Though this state of mind was perhaps more hopeful--the long years of sheer being had had an enlivening effect on the parts of her nature that early illness had killed, that Dick had not reached, through no fault of his but simply because no one nature can extend entirely inside another--it was still disquieting. The most unhappy aspect of their relations was Dick's growing indifference, at present personified by too much drink; Nicole did not know whether she was to be crushed or spared--Dick's voice, throbbing with insincerity, confused the issue; she couldn't guess how he was going to behave next upon the tortuously slow unrolling of the carpet, nor what would happen at the end, at the moment of the leap.
For what might occur thereafter she had no anxiety--she suspected that that would be the lifting of a burden, an un-blinding of eyes. Nicole had been designed for change, for flight, with money as fins and wings. The new state of things would be no more than if a racing chassis, concealed for years under the body of a family limousine, should be stripped to its original self. Nicole could feel the fresh breeze already--the wrench it was she feared, and the dark manner of its coming.
The Divers went out on the beach with her white suit and his white trunks very white against the color of their bodies. Nicole saw Dick peer about for the children among the confused shapes and shadows of many umbrellas, and as his mind temporarily left her, ceasing to grip her, she looked at him with detachment, and decided that he was seeking his children, not protectively but for protection. Probably it was the beach he feared, like a deposed ruler secretly visiting an old court. She had come to hate his world with its delicate jokes and politenesses, forgetting that for many years it was the only world open to her. Let him look at it--his beach, perverted now to the tastes of the tasteless; he could search it for a day and find no stone of the Chinese Wall he had once erected around it, no footprint of an old friend.
For a moment Nicole was sorry it was so; remembering the glass he had raked out of the old trash heap, remembering the sailor trunks and sweaters they had bought in a Nice back street--garments that afterward ran through a vogue in silk among the Paris couturiers, remembering the simple little French girls climbing on the breakwaters crying "Dites donc! Dites donc!" like birds, and the ritual of the morning time, the quiet restful extraversion toward sea and sun--many inventions of his, buried deeper than the sand under the span of so few years....
Now the swimming place was a "club," though, like the international society it represented, it would be hard to say who was not admitted.
Nicole hardened again as Dick knelt on the straw mat and looked about for Rosemary. Her eyes followed his, searching among the new paraphernalia, the trapezes over the water, the swinging rings, the portable bathhouses, the floating towers, the searchlights from last night's fetes, the modernistic buffet, white with a hackneyed motif of endless handlebars.
The water was almost the last place he looked for Rosemary, because few people swam any more in that blue paradise, children and one exhibitionistic valet who punctuated the morning with spectacular dives from a fifty-foot rock--most of Gausse's guests stripped the concealing pajamas from their flabbiness only for a short hangover dip at one o'clock.
"There she is," Nicole remarked.
She watched Dick's eyes following Rosemary's track from raft to raft; but the sigh that rocked out of her bosom was something left over from five years ago.
"Let's swim out and speak to Rosemary," he suggested.
"You go."
"We'll both go." She struggled a moment against hi, pronouncement, but eventually they swam out together, tracing Rosemary by the school of little fish who followed her, taking their dazzle from her, the shining spoon of a trout hook.
Nicole stayed in the water while Dick hoisted himself up beside Rosemary, and the
two sat dripping and talking, exactly as if they had never loved or touched each other. Rosemary was beautiful--her youth was a shock to Nicole, who rejoiced, however, that the young girl was less slender by a hairline than herself. Nicole swam around in little rings, listening to Rosemary who was acting amusement, joy, and expectation--more confident than she had been five years ago.
"I miss Mother so, but she's meeting me in Paris, Monday."
"Five years ago you came here," said Dick. "And what a funny little thing you were, in one of those hotel peignoirs!"
"How you remember things! You always did--and always the nice things."
Nicole saw the old game of flattery beginning again and she dove under water, coming up again to hear:
"I'm going to pretend it's five years ago and I'm a girl of eighteen again. You could always make me feel some you know, kind of, you know, kind of happy way--you and Nicole. I feel as if you're still on the beach there, under one of those umbrellas--the nicest people I'd ever known, maybe ever will."
Swimming away, Nicole saw that the cloud of Dick's heartsickness had lifted a little as he began to play with Rosemary, bringing out his old expertness with people, a tarnished object of art; she guessed that with a drink or so he would have done his stunts on the swinging rings for her, fumbling through stunts he had once done with ease. She noticed that this summer, for the first time, he avoided high diving.
Later, as she dodged her way from raft to raft, Dick overtook her.
"Some of Rosemary's friends have a speed boat, the one out there. Do you want to aquaplane? I think it would be amusing."
Remembering that once he could stand on his hands on a chair at the end of a board, she indulged him as she might have indulged Lanier. Last summer on the Zugersee they had played at that pleasant water game, and Dick had lifted a two-hundred-pound man from the board onto his shoulders and stood up. But women marry all their husbands' talents and naturally, afterwards, are not so impressed with them as they may keep up the pretense of being. Nicole had not even pretended to be impressed, though she had said "Yes" to him, and "Yes, I thought so too."
Tender Is the Night Page 34