Tender Is the Night (5 page)

Along
the walls on the village side all was dusty, the wriggling vines, the lemon and
eucalyptus trees, the casual wheel-barrow, left only a moment since, but
already grown into the path, atrophied and faintly rotten. Nicole was
invariably somewhat surprised that by turning in the other direction past a bed
of peonies she walked into an area so green and cool that the leaves and petals
were curled with tender damp.

Knotted
at her throat she wore a lilac scarf that even in the achromatic sunshine cast
its color up to her face and down around her moving feet in a lilac shadow. Her
face was hard, almost stern, save for the soft gleam of piteous doubt that
looked from her green eyes. Her once fair hair had darkened, but she was
lovelier now at twenty-four than she had been at eighteen, when her hair was
brighter than she.

Following
a walk marked by an intangible mist of bloom that followed the white border
stones she came to a space overlooking the sea where there were lanterns asleep
in the fig trees and a big table and wicker chairs and a great market umbrella
from Sienna, all gathered about an enormous pine, the biggest tree in the
garden. She paused there a moment, looking absently at a growth of nasturtiums
and iris tangled at its foot, as though sprung from a careless handful of
seeds, listening to the plaints and accusations of some nursery squabble in the
house. When this died away on the summer air, she walked on, between
kaleidoscopic peonies massed in pink clouds, black and brown tulips and fragile
mauve-stemmed roses, transparent like sugar flowers in a confectioner’s window—
until, as if the scherzo of color could reach no further intensity, it broke
off suddenly in mid-air, and moist steps went down to a level five feet below.

Here
there was a well with the boarding around it dank and slippery even on the
brightest days. She went up the stairs on the other side and into the vegetable
garden; she walked rather quickly; she liked to be active, though at times she
gave an impression of repose that was at once static and evocative. This was
because she knew few words and believed in none, and in the world she was
rather silent, contributing just her share of urbane humor with a precision
that approached
meagreness
. But at the moment when
strangers tended to grow uncomfortable in the presence of this economy she
would seize the topic and rush off with it, feverishly surprised with
herself—then bring it back and relinquish it abruptly, almost timidly, like an
obedient retriever, having been adequate and something more.

As she
stood in the fuzzy green light of the vegetable garden, Dick crossed the path
ahead of her going to his work house. Nicole waited silently till he had
passed; then she went on through lines of prospective salads to a little
menagerie where pigeons and rabbits and a parrot made a medley of insolent
noises at her. Descending to another ledge she reached a low, curved wall and
looked down seven hundred feet to the
Mediterranean Sea
.

She
stood in the ancient hill
village
of
Tarmes
.
The villa and its grounds were made out of a row of peasant dwellings that
abutted on the cliff—five small houses had been combined to make the house and
four destroyed to make the garden. The exterior walls were untouched so that
from the road far below it was indistinguishable from the violet gray mass of
the town.

For a
moment Nicole stood looking down at the
Mediterranean
but there was nothing to do with that, even with her tireless hands. Presently
Dick came out of his one-room house carrying a telescope and looked east toward
Cannes
. In a
moment Nicole swam into his field of vision, whereupon he disappeared into his
house and came out with a megaphone. He had many light mechanical devices.

“Nicole,”
he shouted, “I forgot to tell you that as a final apostolic gesture I invited
Mrs. Abrams, the woman with the white hair.”

“I
suspected it. It’s an outrage.”

The ease
with which her reply reached him seemed to belittle his megaphone, so she
raised her voice and called, “Can you hear me?”

“Yes.”
He lowered the megaphone and then raised it stubbornly. “I’m going to invite
some more people too. I’m going to invite the two young men.”

“All
right,” she agreed placidly.

“I want
to give a really BAD party. I mean it. I want to give a party where there’s a
brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women
passed out in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see.”

He went
back into his house and Nicole saw that one of his most characteristic moods
was upon him, the excitement that swept everyone up into it and was inevitably
followed by his own form of melancholy, which he never displayed but at which
she guessed. This excitement about things reached
an
intensity
out of proportion to their importance, generating a really
extraordinary virtuosity with people. Save among a few of the tough-minded and
perennially suspicious, he had the power of arousing a fascinated and
uncritical love. The reaction came when he realized the waste and extravagance
involved. He sometimes looked back with awe at the carnivals of affection he
had given, as a general might gaze upon a massacre he had ordered to satisfy an
impersonal blood lust.

But to
be included in Dick Diver’s world for a while was a remarkable experience:
people believed he made special reservations about them, recognizing the proud
uniqueness of their destinies, buried under the compromises of how many years.
He won everyone quickly with an exquisite consideration and a politeness that
moved so fast and intuitively that it could be examined only in its effect.
Then, without caution, lest the first bloom of the relation wither, he opened
the gate to his amusing world. So long as they subscribed to it completely,
their happiness was his preoccupation, but at the first flicker of doubt as to
its all- inclusiveness he evaporated before their eyes, leaving little
communicable memory of what he had said or done.

At
eight-thirty that evening he came out to meet his first guests, his coat
carried rather ceremoniously, rather promisingly, in his hand, like a
toreador’s cape. It was characteristic that after greeting Rosemary and her
mother he waited for them to speak first, as if to allow them the reassurance
of their own voices in new surroundings.

To
resume Rosemary’s point of view it should be said that, under the spell of the
climb to
Tarmes
and the fresher air, she and her
mother looked about appreciatively. Just as the personal qualities of
extraordinary people can make themselves plain in an unaccustomed change of
expression, so the intensely calculated perfection of Villa Diana transpired
all at once through such minute failures as the chance apparition of a maid in
the background or the perversity of a cork. While the first guests arrived
bringing with them the excitement of the night, the domestic activity of the
day receded past them gently, symbolized by the Diver children and their
governess still at supper on the terrace.

“What a
beautiful garden!” Mrs. Speers exclaimed.

“Nicole’s
garden,” said Dick. “She won’t let it alone—she nags it all the time, worries
about its diseases. Any day now I expect to have her come down with Powdery
Mildew or Fly Speck, or Late Blight.” He pointed his forefinger decisively at
Rosemary, saying with a lightness seeming to conceal a paternal interest, “I’m
going to save your reason—I’m going to give you a hat to wear on the beach.”

He
turned them from the garden to the terrace, where he poured a cocktail. Earl
Brady arrived, discovering Rosemary with surprise. His manner was softer than
at the studio, as if his differentness had been put on at the gate, and
Rosemary, comparing him instantly with Dick Diver, swung sharply toward the
latter. In comparison Earl Brady seemed faintly gross, faintly ill-bred; once
more, though, she felt an electric response to his person.

He spoke
familiarly to the children who were getting up from their outdoor supper.

“Hello,
Lanier, how about a song? Will you and
Topsy
sing me
a song?”

“What
shall we sing?” agreed the little boy, with the odd chanting accent of American
children brought up in
France
.

“That song about ‘Mon Ami
Pierrot
.’”

Brother
and sister stood side by side without self-consciousness and their voices
soared sweet and shrill upon the evening air.

“Au
clair
de la
lune
Mon Ami
Pierrot
Prête-moi
ta
plume
Pour
écrire
un mot
Ma chandelle
est
morte
Je
n’ai
plus de
feu
Ouvre-moi
ta
porte
Pour
l’amour
de
Dieu
.”

The
singing ceased and the children, their faces aglow with the late sunshine,
stood smiling calmly at their success. Rosemary was thinking that the Villa
Diana was the centre of the world. On such a stage some memorable thing was
sure to happen. She lighted up higher as the gate tinkled open and the rest of
the guests arrived in a body—the
McKiscos
, Mrs.
Abrams, Mr.
Dumphry
, and Mr. Campion came up to the
terrace.

Rosemary
had a sharp feeling of disappointment—she looked quickly at Dick, as though to
ask an explanation of this incongruous mingling. But there was nothing unusual
in his expression. He greeted his new guests with a proud bearing and an
obvious deference to their infinite and unknown possibilities. She believed in
him so much that presently she accepted the rightness of the
McKiscos
’ presence as if she had expected to meet them all
along.

“I’ve
met you in
Paris
,”
McKisco
said to Abe North, who with his wife had
arrived on their heels, “in fact I’ve met you twice.”

“Yes, I
remember,” Abe said.

“Then
where was it?” demanded
McKisco
, not content to let
well enough alone.

“Why, I
think—” Abe got tired of the game, “I can’t remember.”

The
interchange filled a pause and Rosemary’s instinct was that something tactful
should be said by somebody, but Dick made no attempt to break up the grouping
formed by these late arrivals, not even to disarm Mrs.
McKisco
of her air of supercilious amusement. He did not solve this social problem
because he knew it was not of importance at the moment and would solve itself.
He was saving his newness for a larger effort, waiting a more significant
moment for his guests to be conscious of a good time.

Rosemary
stood beside Tommy
Barban
—he was in a particularly
scornful mood and there seemed to be some special stimulus working upon him. He
was leaving in the morning.

“Going
home?”

“Home?
I
have no home. I am going to a war.”

“What
war?”

“What
war?
Any war.
I haven’t seen a paper lately but I
suppose there’s a war—there always is.”

“Don’t
you care what you fight for?”

“Not at all—so long as I’m well treated.
When I’m in a rut I come to see
the Divers, because then I know that in a few weeks I’ll want to go to war.”

Rosemary
stiffened.

“You
like the Divers,” she reminded him.

“Of
course—especially her—but they make me want to go to war.”

She
considered this, to no avail. The Divers made her want to stay near them
forever.

“You’re
half American,” she said, as if that should solve the problem.

“Also
I’m half French, and I was educated in
England
and since I was eighteen
I’ve worn the uniforms of eight countries. But I hope I did not give you the
impression that I am not fond of the Divers— I am, especially of Nicole.”

“How
could
any one
help it?” she said simply.

She felt
far from him. The undertone of his words repelled her and she withdrew her
adoration for the Divers from the profanity of his bitterness. She was glad he
was not next to her at dinner and she was still thinking of his words
“especially her” as they moved toward the table in the garden.

For a
moment now she was beside Dick Diver on the path. Alongside his hard, neat
brightness everything faded into the surety that he knew everything. For a
year, which was forever, she had had money and a certain celebrity and contact
with the celebrated, and these latter had presented themselves merely as
powerful enlargements of the people with whom the doctor’s widow and her
daughter had associated in a
hôtel
-pension in Paris.
Rosemary was a romantic and her career had not provided many satisfactory
opportunities on that score. Her mother, with the idea of a career for
Rosemary, would not tolerate any such spurious substitutes as the excitations
available on all sides, and indeed Rosemary was already beyond that—she was
In
the movies but not at all At them. So when she had seen
approval of Dick Diver in her mother’s face it meant that he was “the real
thing”; it meant permission to go as far as she could.