Tender Is the Night (46 page)

“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.

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 postmortems?”

“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, waking for café 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
vitæ
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
Niçoise
and
Provençal
. 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
Tommy 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 to-morrow unfortunately without mother am counting on seeing
you.

“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
unblinding
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 fêtes, 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.