II
A little more than two years after the Kellys’ first visit to Monte Carlo, Nicole woke up one morning into what, though it bore the same name, had become to her a different place altogether.
In spite of hurried months in Paris or Biarritz, it was now home to them. They had a villa, they had a large acquaintance among the spring and summer crowd--a crowd which, naturally, did not include people on charted trips or the shore parties from Mediterranean cruises; these latter had become for them “tourists.”
They loved the Riviera in full summer with many friends there and the nights open and full of music. Before the maid drew the curtains this morning to shut out the glare, Nicole saw from her window the yacht of T. F. Golding, placid among the swells of the Monacan Bay, as if constantly bound on a romantic voyage not dependent upon actual motion.
The yacht had taken the slow tempo of the coast; it had gone no farther than to Cannes and back all summer, though it might have toured the world. The Kellys were dining on board that night.
Nicole spoke excellent French; she had five new evening dresses and four others that would do; she had her husband; she had two men in love with her, and she felt sad for one of them. She had her pretty face. At 10:30 she was meeting a third man, who was just beginning to be in love with her “in a harmless way.” At one she was having a dozen charming people to luncheon. All that.
“I’m happy,” she brooded toward the bright blinds. “I’m young and good-looking, and my name is often in the paper as having been here and there, but really I don’t care about shi-shi. I think it’s all awfully silly, but if you do want to see people, you might as well see the chic, amusing ones; and if people call you a snob, it’s envy, and they know it and everybody knows it.”
She repeated the substance of this to Oscar Dane on the Mont Agel golf course two hours later, and he cursed her quietly.
“Not at all,” he said. “You’re just getting to be an old snob. Do you call that crowd of drunks you run with amusing people? Why, they’re not even very swell. They’re so hard that they’ve shifted down through Europe like nails in a sack of wheat, till they stick out of it a little into the Mediterranean Sea.”
Annoyed, Nicole fired a name at him, but he answered: “Class C. A good solid article for beginners.”
“The Colbys--anyway, her.”
“Third flight.”
“Marquis and Marquise de Kalb.”
“If she didn’t happen to take dope and he didn’t have other peculiarities.”
“Well, then, where are the amusing people?” she demanded impatiently.
“Off by themselves somewhere. They don’t hunt in herds, except occasionally.”
“How about you? You’d snap up an invitation from every person I named. I’ve heard stories about you wilder than any you can make up. There’s not a man that’s known you six months that would take your check for ten dollars. You’re a sponge and a parasite and everything--”
“Shut up for a minute,” he interrupted. “I don’t want to spoil this drive. . . . I just don’t like to see you kid yourself,” he continued. “What passes with you for international society is just about as hard to enter nowadays as the public rooms at the Casino; and if I can make my living by sponging off it, I’m still giving twenty times more than I get. We dead heats are about the only people in it with any stuff, and we stay with it because we have to.”
She laughed, liking him immensely, wondering how angry Nelson would be when he found that Oscar had walked off with his nail scissors and his copy of the New York Herald this morning.
“Anyhow,” she thought afterward, as she drove home toward luncheon, “we’re getting out of it all soon, and we’ll be serious and have a baby. After this last summer.”
Stopping for a moment at a florist’s, she saw a young woman coming out with an armful of flowers. The young woman glanced at her over the heap of color, and Nicole perceived that she was extremely smart, and then that her face was familiar. It was someone she had known once, but only slightly; the name had escaped her, so she did not nod, and forgot the incident until that afternoon.
They were twelve for luncheon: The Goldings’ party from the yacht, Liddell and Cardine Miles, Mr. Dane--seven different nationalities she counted; among them an exquisite young French-woman, Madame Delauney, whom Nicole referred to lightly as “Nelson’s girl.” Noel Delauney was perhaps her closest friend; when they made up foursomes for golf or for trips, she paired off with Nelson; but today, as Nicole introduced her to someone as “Nelson’s girl,” the bantering phrase filled Nicole with distaste.
She said aloud at luncheon: “Nelson and I are going to get away from it all.”
Everybody agreed that they, too, were going to get away from it all.
“It’s all right for the English,” someone said, “because they’re doing a sort of dance of death--you know, gayety in the doomed fort, with the Sepoys at the gate. You can see it by their faces when they dance--the intensity. They know it and they want it, and they don’t see any future. But you Americans, you’re having a rotten time. If you want to wear the green hat or the crushed hat, or whatever it is, you always have to get a little tipsy.”
“We’re going to get away from it all,” Nicole said firmly, but something within her argued: “What a pity--this lovely blue sea, this happy time.” What came afterward? Did one just accept a lessening of tension? It was somehow Nelson’s business to answer that. His growing discontent that he wasn’t getting anywhere ought to explode into a new life for both of them, or rather a new hope and content with life. That secret should be his masculine contribution.
“Well, children, good-by.”
“It was a great luncheon.”
“Don’t forget about getting away from it all.”
“See you when--”
The guests walked down the path toward their cars. Only Oscar, just faintly flushed on liqueurs, stood with Nicole on the veranda, talking on and on about the girl he had invited up to see his stamp collection. Momentarily tired of people, impatient to be alone, Nicole listened for a moment and then, taking a glass vase of flowers from the luncheon table, went through the French windows into the dark, shadowy villa, his voice following her as he talked on and on out there.
It was when she crossed the first salon, still hearing Oscar’s monologue on the veranda, that she began to hear another voice in the next room, cutting sharply across Oscar’s voice.
“Ah, but kiss me again,” it said, stopped; Nicole stopped, too, rigid in the silence, now broken only by the voice on the porch.
“Be careful.” Nicole recognized the faint French accent of Noel Delauney.
“I’m tired of being careful. Anyhow, they’re on the veranda.”
“No, better the usual place.”
“Darling, sweet darling.”
The voice of Oscar Dane on the veranda grew weary and stopped and, as if thereby released from her paralysis, Nicole took a step--forward or backward, she did not know which. At the sound of her heel on the floor, she heard the two people in the next room breaking swiftly apart.
Then she went in. Nelson was lighting a cigarette; Noel, with her back turned, was apparently hunting for hat or purse on a chair. With blind horror rather than anger, Nicole threw, or rather pushed away from her, the glass vase which she carried. If at anyone, it was at Nelson she threw it, but the force of her feeling had entered the inanimate thing; it flew past him, and Noel Delauney, just turning about, was struck full on the side of her head and face.
“Say, there!” Nelson cried. Noel sank slowly into the chair before which she stood, her hand slowly rising to cover the side of her face. The jar rolled unbroken on the thick carpet, scattering its flowers.
“You look out!” Nelson was at Noel’s side, trying to take the hand away to see what had happened.
“C’est liquide,” gasped Noel in a whisper. “Est-ce que c’est le sang?”
He forced her hand away, and cried breathlessly, “No, it’s just water
!” and then, to Oscar, who had appeared in the doorway: “Get some cognac!” and to Nicole: “You fool, you must be crazy!”
Nicole, breathing hard, said nothing. When the brandy arrived, there was a continuing silence, like that of people watching an operation, while Nelson poured a glass down Noel’s throat. Nicole signaled to Oscar for a drink, and, as if afraid to break the silence without it, they all had a brandy. Then Noel and Nelson spoke at once:
“If you can find my hat--”
“This is the silliest--”
“--I shall go immediately.”
“--thing I ever saw; I--”
They all looked at Nicole, who said: “Have her car drive right up to the door.” Oscar departed quickly.
“Are you sure you don’t want to see a doctor?” asked Nelson anxiously.
“I want to go.”
A minute later, when the car had driven away, Nelson came in and poured himself another glass of brandy. A wave of subsiding tension flowed over him, showing in his face; Nicole saw it, and saw also his gathering will to make the best he could of it.
“I want to know just why you did that,” he demanded. “No, don’t go, Oscar.” He saw the story starting out into the world.
“What possible reason--”
“Oh, shut up!” snapped Nicole.
“If I kissed Noel, there’s nothing so terrible about it. It’s of absolutely no significance.”
She made a contemptuous sound. “I heard what you said to her.”
“You’re crazy.”
He said it as if she were crazy, and wild rage filled her.
“You liar! All this time pretending to be so square, and so particular what I did, and all the time behind my back you’ve been playing around with that little--”
She used a serious word, and as if maddened with the sound of it, she sprang toward his chair. In protection against this sudden attack, he flung up his arm quickly, and the knuckles of his open hand struck across the socket of her eye. Covering her face with her hand as Noel had done ten minutes previously, she fell sobbing to the floor.
“Hasn’t this gone far enough?” Oscar cried.
“Yes,” admitted Nelson, “I guess it has.”
“You go on out on the veranda and cool off.”
He got Nicole to a couch and sat beside her, holding her hand.
“Brace up--brace up, baby,” he said, over and over. “What are you--Jack Dempsey? You can’t go around hitting French women; they’ll sue you.”
“He told her he loved her,” she gasped hysterically. “She said she’d meet him at the same place. . . . Has he gone there now?”
“He’s out on the porch, walking up and down, sorry as the devil that he accidentally hit you, and sorry he ever saw Noel Delauney.”
“Oh, yes!”
“You might have heard wrong, and it doesn’t prove a thing, anyhow.”
After twenty minutes, Nelson came in suddenly and sank down on his knees by the side of his wife. Mr. Oscar Dane, reënforced in his idea that he gave much more than he got, backed discreetly and far from unwillingly to the door.
In another hour, Nelson and Nicole, arm in arm, emerged from their villa and walked slowly down to the Café de Paris. They walked instead of driving, as if trying to return to the simplicity they had once possessed, as if they were trying to unwind something that had become visibly tangled. Nicole accepted his explanations, not because they were credible, but because she wanted passionately to believe them. They were both very quiet and sorry.
The Café de Paris was pleasant at that hour, with sunset drooping through the yellow awnings and the red parasols as through stained glass. Glancing about, Nicole saw the young woman she had encountered that morning. She was with a man now, and Nelson placed them immediately as the young couple they had seen in Algeria, almost three years ago.
“They’ve changed,” he commented. “I suppose we have, too, but not so much. They’re harder-looking and he looks dissipated. Dissipation always shows in light eyes rather than in dark ones. The girl is tout ce qu’il y a de chic, as they say, but there’s a hard look in her face too.”
“I like her.”
“Do you want me to go and ask them if they are that same couple?”
“No! That’d be like lonesome tourists do. They have their own friends.”
At that moment people were joining them at their table.
“Nelson, how about tonight?” Nicole asked a little later. “Do you think we can appear at the Goldings’ after what’s happened?”
“We not only can but we’ve got to. If the story’s around and we’re not there, we’ll just be handing them a nice juicy subject of conversation. . . . Hello! What on earth--”
Something strident and violent had happened across the café; a woman screamed and the people at one table were all on their feet, surging back and forth like one person. Then the people at the other tables were standing and crowding forward; for just a moment the Kellys saw the face of the girl they had been watching, pale now, and distorted with anger. Panic-stricken, Nicole plucked at Nelson’s sleeve.
“I want to get out. I can’t stand any more today. Take me home. Is everybody going crazy?”
On the way home, Nelson glanced at Nicole’s face and perceived with a start that they were not going to dinner on the Goldings’ yacht after all. For Nicole had the beginnings of a well-defined and unmistakable black eye--an eye that by eleven o’clock would be beyond the aid of all the cosmetics in the principality. His heart sank and he decided to say nothing about it until they reached home.
III
There is some wise advice in the catechism about avoiding the occasions of sin, and when the Kellys went up to Paris a month later they made a conscientious list of the places they wouldn’t visit any more and the people they didn’t want to see again. The places included several famous bars, all the night clubs except one or two that were highly decorous, all the early-morning clubs of every description, and all summer resorts that made whoopee for its own sake--whoopee triumphant and unrestrained--the main attraction of the season.
The people they were through with included three-fourths of those with whom they had passed the last two years. They did this not in snobbishness, but for self-preservation, and not without a certain fear in their hearts that they were cutting themselves off from human contacts forever.
But the world is always curious, and people become valuable merely for their inaccessibility. They found that there were others in Paris who were only interested in those who had separated from the many. The first crowd they had known was largely American, salted with Europeans; the second was largely European, peppered with Americans. This latter crowd was “society,” and here and there it touched the ultimate milieu, made up of individuals of high position, of great fortune, very occasionally of genius, and always of power. Without being intimate with the great, they made new friends of a more conservative type. Moreover, Nelson began to paint again; he had a studio, and they visited the studios of Brancusi and Leger and Deschamps. It seemed that they were more part of something than before, and when certain gaudy rendezvous were mentioned, they felt a contempt for their first two years in Europe, speaking of their former acquaintances as “that crowd” and as “people who waste your time.”
So, although they kept their rules, they entertained frequently at home and they went out to the houses of others. They were young and handsome and intelligent; they came to know what did go and what did not go, and adapted themselves accordingly. Moreover, they were naturally generous and willing, within the limits of common sense, to pay.
When one went out one generally drank. This meant little to Nicole, who had a horror of losing her soigné air, losing a touch of bloom or a ray of admiration, but Nelson, thwarted somewhere, found himself quite as tempted to drink at these small dinners as in the more frankly rowdy world. He was not a drunk, he did nothing conspicuous or sodden, but he was no longer willing to go out socially without the stimulus of liqu
or. It was with the idea of bringing him to a serious and responsible attitude that Nicole decided after a year in Paris, that the time had come to have a baby.
This was coincidental with their meeting Count Chiki Sarolai. He was an attractive relic of the Austrian court, with no fortune or pretense to any, but with solid social and financial connections in France. His sister was married to the Marquis de la Clos d’Hirondelle, who, in addition to being of the ancient noblesse, was a successful banker in Paris. Count Chiki roved here and there, frankly sponging, rather like Oscar Dane, but in a different sphere.
His penchant was Americans; he hung on their words with a pathetic eagerness, as if they would sooner or later let slip their mysterious formula for making money. After a casual meeting, his interest gravitated to the Kellys. During Nicole’s months of waiting he was in the house continually, tirelessly interested in anything that concerned American crime, slang, finance or manners. He came in for a luncheon or dinner when he had no other place to go, and with tacit gratitude he persuaded his sister to call on Nicole, who was immensely flattered.
It was arranged that when Nicole went to the hospital he would stay at the appartement and keep Nelson company--an arrangement of which Nicole didn’t approve, since they were inclined to drink together. But the day on which it was decided, he arrived with news of one of his brother-in-law’s famous canal-boat parties on the Seine, to which the Kellys were to be invited and which, conveniently enough, was to occur three weeks after the arrival of the baby. So, when Nicole moved out to the American Hospital Count Chiki moved in.
The baby was a boy. For a while Nicole forgot all about people and their human status and their value. She even wondered at the fact that she had become such a snob, since everything seemed trivial compared with the new individual that, eight times a day, they carried to her breast.
After two weeks she and the baby went back to the apartment, but Chiki and his valet stayed on. It was understood, with that subtlety the Kellys had only recently begun to appreciate, that he was merely staying until after his brother-in-law’s party, but the apartment was crowded and Nicole wished him gone. But her old idea, that if one had to see people they might as well be the best, was carried out in being invited to the De la Clos d’Hirondelles’.
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 289