Tender Is the Night (50 page)

“Nicole, comment vas-
tu
?”

“Dick’s home.”

He
groaned.

“Meet me
here in
Cannes
,”
he suggested. “I’ve got to talk to you.”

“I
can’t.”

“Tell me
you love me.” Without speaking she nodded at the receiver; he repeated, “Tell
me you love me.”

“Oh, I
do,” she assured him.
“But there’s nothing to be done right
now.”

“Of
course there is,” he said impatiently. “Dick sees it’s over between you
two—it’s obvious he has quit. What does he expect you to do?”

“I don’t
know. I’ll have to—” She stopped herself from saying “—to wait until I can ask
Dick,” and instead finished with: “I’ll write and I’ll phone you to-morrow.”

She
wandered about the house rather contentedly, resting on her achievement. She
was a mischief, and that was a satisfaction; no longer was she a huntress of
corralled game. Yesterday came back to her now in innumerable detail—detail
that began to overlay her memory of similar moments when her love for Dick was
fresh and intact. She began to slight that love, so that it seemed to have been
tinged with sentimental habit from the first. With the opportunistic memory of
women she scarcely recalled how she had felt when she and Dick had possessed
each other in secret places around the corners of the world, during the month
before they were married. Just so had she lied to Tommy last night, swearing to
him that never before had she so entirely, so completely, so utterly. . .
.

. . .
then
remorse for this moment of betrayal, which so
cavalierly belittled a decade of her life, turned her walk toward Dick’s sanctuary.

Approaching
noiselessly she saw him behind his cottage, sitting in a steamer chair by the
cliff wall, and for a moment she regarded him silently. He was thinking, he was
living a world completely his own and in the small motions of his face, the brow
raised or lowered, the eyes narrowed or widened, the lips set and reset, the
play of his hands, she saw him progress from phase to phase of his own story
spinning out inside him, his own, not hers. Once he clenched his fists and
leaned forward, once it brought into his face an expression of torment and
despair—when this passed its stamp lingered in his eyes. For almost the first
time in her life she was sorry for him—it is hard for those who have once been
mentally afflicted to be sorry for those who are well, and though Nicole often
paid lip service to the fact that he had led her back to the world she had
forfeited, she had thought of him really as an inexhaustible energy, incapable
of fatigue—she forgot the troubles she caused him at the moment when she forgot
the troubles of her own that had prompted her. That he no longer controlled
her—did he know that? Had he willed it all?—she felt as sorry for him as she
had sometimes felt for Abe North and his ignoble destiny, sorry as for the
helplessness of infants and the old.

She went
up putting her arm around his shoulder and touching their heads together said:

“Don’t
be sad.”

He
looked at her coldly.

“Don’t
touch me!” he said.

Confused
she moved a few feet away.

“Excuse
me,” he continued abstractedly. “I was just thinking what I thought of you—”

“Why not
add the new classification to your book?”

“I have
thought of it—‘Furthermore and beyond the psychoses and the neuroses—’”

“I
didn’t come over here to be disagreeable.”

“Then
why DID you come, Nicole? I can’t do anything for you
any
more
. I’m trying to save myself.”

“From my contamination?”

“Profession
throws me in contact with questionable company sometimes.”

She wept
with anger at the abuse.

“You’re
a coward! You’ve made a failure of your life, and you want to blame it on me.”

While he
did not answer she began to feel the old hypnotism of his intelligence,
sometimes exercised without power but always with substrata of truth under
truth which she could not break or even crack. Again she struggled with it, fighting
him with her small, fine eyes, with the plush arrogance of a top dog, with her
nascent transference to another man, with the accumulated resentment of years;
she fought him with her money and her faith that her sister disliked him and
was behind her now; with the thought of the new enemies he was making with his
bitterness, with her quick guile against his wine-
ing
and dine-
ing
slowness, her health and beauty against
his physical deterioration, her unscrupulousness against his moralities—for
this inner battle she used even her weaknesses— fighting bravely and
courageously with the old cans and crockery and bottles, empty receptacles of
her expiated sins, outrages, mistakes. And suddenly, in the space of two
minutes she achieved her victory and justified herself to herself without lie
or
subterfuge,
cut the cord forever. Then she
walked,
weak in the legs, and sobbing coolly, toward the
household that was hers at last.

Dick
waited until she was out of sight. Then he leaned his head forward on the
parapet. The case was finished. Doctor Diver was at liberty.

At
two o’clock
that night the phone woke
Nicole and she heard Dick answer it from what they called the restless bed, in
the next room.

“
Oui
,
oui
. . .
mais
à qui
est-ce-que
je
parle
?
. . .
Oui
. . .” His voice woke up with
surprise. “But can I speak to one of the ladies, Sir the Officer? They are both
ladies of the very highest prominence, ladies of connections that might cause
political complications of the most serious. . . . It is a fact, I swear to you.
. . . Very well, you will see.”

He got
up and, as he absorbed the situation, his self-knowledge assured him that he
would undertake to deal with it—the old fatal
pleasingness
,
the old forceful charm, swept back with its cry of “Use me!” He would have to
go fix this thing that he didn’t care a damn about, because it had early become
a habit to be loved, perhaps from the moment when he had realized that he was
the last hope of a decaying clan. On an almost parallel occasion, back in
Dohmler’s
clinic on the
Zurichsee
,
realizing this power, he had made his choice, chosen Ophelia, chosen the sweet
poison and drunk it. Wanting above all to be brave and kind, he had wanted,
even more than that, to be loved. So it had been. So it would ever be, he saw,
simultaneously with the slow archaic tinkle from the phone box as he rang off.

There
was a long pause. Nicole called, “What is it? Who is it?”

Dick had
begun to dress even as he hung up the phone.

“It’s
the
poste
de police in
Antibes
—they’re holding Mary North and
that Sibley-Biers
. It’s something serious—the agent wouldn’t
tell me; he kept saying ‘pas de
mortes
—pas
d’automobiles
’ but he implied it was just about everything
else.”

“Why on
earth did they call on YOU? It sounds very peculiar to me.”

“They’ve
got to get out on bail to save their faces; and only some property owner in the
Alpes
Maritimes can give bail.”

“They
had their nerve.”

“I don’t
mind. However I’ll pick up
Gausse
at the hotel—”

Nicole
stayed awake after he had departed wondering what offense they could have
committed; then she slept. A little after three when Dick came in she sat up
stark awake saying, “What?” as if to a character in her dream.

“It was
an extraordinary story—” Dick said. He sat on the foot of her bed, telling her
how he had roused old
Gausse
from an Alsatian coma,
told him to clean out his cash drawer, and driven with him to the police
station.

“I don’t
like to do something for that
Anglaise
,”
Gausse
grumbled.

Mary
North and Lady Caroline, dressed in the costume of French sailors, lounged on a
bench outside the two dingy cells. The latter had the outraged air of a Briton
who momentarily expected the Mediterranean fleet to steam up to her assistance.
Mary
Minghetti
was in a condition of panic and
collapse—she literally flung herself at Dick’s stomach as though that were the
point of greatest association, imploring him to do something. Meanwhile the
chief of police explained the matter to
Gausse
who
listened to each word with reluctance, divided between being properly
appreciative of the officer’s narrative gift and showing that, as the perfect
servant, the story had no shocking effect on him. “It was merely a lark,” said
Lady Caroline with scorn. “We were pretending to be sailors on leave, and we
picked up two silly girls. They got the wind up and made a rotten scene in a
lodging house.”

Dick
nodded gravely, looking at the stone floor, like a priest in the
confessional—he was torn between a tendency to ironic laughter and another
tendency to order fifty stripes of the cat and a fortnight of bread and water.
The lack, in Lady Caroline’s face, of any sense of evil, except the evil
wrought by cowardly
Provençal
girls and stupid
police, confounded him; yet he had long concluded that certain classes of
English people lived upon a concentrated essence of the anti-social that, in
comparison, reduced the
gorgings
of New York to
something like a child contracting indigestion from ice cream.

“I’ve
got to get out before
Hosain
hears about this,” Mary
pleaded. “Dick, you can always arrange things—you always could. Tell ’
em
we’ll go right
home,
tell ’
em
we’ll pay anything.”

“I shall
not,” said Lady Caroline disdainfully. “Not a shilling. But I shall jolly well
find out what the Consulate in
Cannes
has to say about this.”

“No,
no!” insisted Mary. “We’ve got to get out to-night.”

“I’ll
see what I can do,” said Dick, and added, “but money will certainly have to
change hands.” Looking at them as though they were the innocents that he knew
they were not, he shook his head: “Of all the crazy stunts!”

Lady
Caroline smiled complacently.

“You’re
an insanity doctor, aren’t you? You ought to be able to help us—and
Gausse
has GOT to!”

At this
point Dick went aside with
Gausse
and talked over the
old man’s findings. The affair was more serious than had been indicated—one of
the girls whom they had picked up was of a respectable family. The
family were
furious, or pretended to be; a settlement would
have to be made with them. The other one, a girl of the port, could be more
easily dealt with. There were French statutes that would make conviction
punishable by imprisonment or, at the very least, public expulsion from the
country. In addition to the difficulties, there was a growing difference in
tolerance between such townspeople as benefited by the foreign colony and the
ones who were annoyed by the consequent rise of prices.
Gausse
,
having summarized the situation, turned it over to Dick. Dick called the chief
of police into conference.

“Now you
know that the French government wants to encourage American touring—so much so
that in
Paris
this summer there’s an order that Americans can’t be arrested except for the
most serious offenses.”

“This is
serious enough, my God.”

“But
look now—you have their
Cartes
d’Identité
?”

“They
had none. They had nothing—two hundred francs and some rings. Not even
shoe-laces that they could have hung themselves with!”

Relieved
that there had been no
Cartes
d’Identité
Dick continued.

“The
Italian Countess is still an American citizen. She is the grand-daughter—” he
told a string of lies slowly and portentously, “of John D. Rockefeller Mellon.
You have heard of him?”

“Yes, oh heavens, yes.
You mistake me for
a nobody
?”

“In
addition she is the niece of Lord Henry Ford and so connected with the Renault
and Citroën companies—” He thought he had better stop here. However the
sincerity of his voice had begun to affect the officer, so he continued: “To
arrest her is just as if you arrested a great royalty of
England
. It
might mean—War!”

“But how about the Englishwoman?”

“I’m
coming to that. She is affianced to the brother of the Prince of Wales—the Duke
of Buckingham.”

“She
will be an exquisite bride for him.”