Tender Is the Night (52 page)

Then he
decided to leave his bags by the station in
Cannes
and take a last look at
Gausse’s
Beach.

The
beach was peopled with only an advance guard of children when Nicole and her
sister arrived that morning. A white sun, chivied of outline by a white sky, boomed
over a windless day. Waiters were putting extra ice into the bar; an American
photographer from the A. and P. worked with his equipment in a precarious shade
and looked up quickly at every footfall descending the stone steps. At the
hotel his prospective subjects slept late in darkened rooms upon their recent
opiate of dawn.

When
Nicole started out on the beach she saw Dick, not dressed for swimming, sitting
on a rock above. She shrank back in the shadow of her dressing-tent. In a
minute Baby joined her, saying:

“Dick’s
still there.”

“I saw
him.”

“I think
he might have the delicacy to go.”

“This is
his place—in a way, he discovered it. Old
Gausse
always says he owes everything to Dick.”

Baby
looked calmly at her sister.

“We
should have let him confine himself to his bicycle excursions,” she remarked.
“When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how
charming a bluff they put up.”

“Dick
was a good husband to me for six years,” Nicole said. “All that time I never
suffered a minute’s pain because of him, and he always did his best never to
let anything hurt me.”

Baby’s
lower jaw projected slightly as she said:

“That’s
what he was educated for.”

The
sisters sat in silence; Nicole wondering in a tired way about things; Baby considering
whether or not to marry the latest candidate for her hand and money, an
authenticated Hapsburg. She was not quite THINKING about it. Her affairs had
long shared such
a sameness
, that, as she dried out,
they were more important for their conversational value than for themselves.
Her emotions had their truest existence in the telling of them.

“Is he
gone?” Nicole asked after a while. “I think his train leaves at
noon
.”

Baby
looked.

“No.
He’s moved up higher on the terrace and he’s talking to some women. Anyhow
there are so many people now that he doesn’t HAVE to see us.”

He had
seen them though, as they left their pavilion, and he followed them with his
eyes until they disappeared again. He sat with Mary
Minghetti
,
drinking anisette.

“You
were like you used to be the night you helped us,” she was saying, “except at
the end, when you were horrid about Caroline. Why aren’t you nice like that
always? You can be.”

It
seemed fantastic to Dick to be in a position where Mary North could tell him
about things.

“Your
friends still like you, Dick. But you say awful things to people when you’ve
been drinking. I’ve spent most of my time defending you this summer.”

“That
remark is one of Doctor Eliot’s classics.”

“It’s
true. Nobody cares whether you drink or not—” She hesitated, “even when Abe
drank hardest, he never offended people like you do.”

“You’re
all so dull,” he said.

“But
we’re all there is!” cried Mary. “If you don’t like nice people, try the ones
who aren’t nice, and see how you like that! All people want is to have a good
time and if you make them unhappy you cut yourself off from nourishment.”

“Have I
been nourished?” he asked.

Mary was
having a good time, though she did not know it, as she had sat down with him
only out of fear. Again she refused a drink and said: “Self-indulgence is back
of it. Of course, after Abe you can imagine how I feel about it—since I watched
the progress of a good man toward alcoholism—”

Down the
steps tripped Lady Caroline
Sibly
-Biers with blithe
theatricality.

Dick
felt fine—he was already well in advance of the day; arrived at where a man
should be at the end of a good dinner, yet he showed only a fine, considered,
restrained interest in Mary. His eyes, for the moment clear as a child’s, asked
her sympathy and stealing over him he felt the old necessity of convincing her
that he was the last man in the world and she was the last woman.

. . .
Then he would not have to look at those two other figures, a man and a woman,
black and white and metallic against the sky. . . .

“You
once liked me, didn’t you?” he asked.

“LIKED
you—I LOVED you. Everybody loved you. You could’ve had anybody you wanted for
the asking—”

“There
has always been something between you and me.”

She bit
eagerly. “Has there, Dick?”

“Always—I
knew your troubles and how brave you were about them.” But the old interior
laughter had begun inside him and he knew he couldn’t keep it up much longer.

“I
always thought you knew a lot,” Mary said enthusiastically. “More about me than
any one has ever known. Perhaps that’s why I was so afraid of you when we
didn’t get along so well.”

His
glance fell soft and kind upon hers, suggesting an emotion underneath; their
glances married suddenly, bedded, strained together. Then, as the laughter
inside of him became so loud that it seemed as if Mary must hear it, Dick
switched off the light and they were back in the
Riviera
sun.

“I must
go,” he said. As he stood up he swayed a little; he did not feel well any
more—his blood raced slow. He raised his right hand and with a papal cross he
blessed the beach from the high terrace. Faces turned upward from several
umbrellas.

“I’m
going to him.” Nicole got to her knees.

“No,
you’re not,” said Tommy, pulling her down firmly. “Let well enough alone.”

XIII

Nicole
kept in touch with Dick after her new marriage; there were letters on business
matters, and about the children. When she said, as she often did, “I loved Dick
and I’ll never forget him,” Tommy answered, “Of course not—why should you?”

Dick
opened an office in
Buffalo
,
but evidently without success. Nicole did not find what the trouble was, but
she heard a few months later that he was in a little town named
Batavia
,
N.Y.
,
practising
general medicine, and later that he was in
Lockport
, doing
the same thing. By accident she heard more about his life there than anywhere:
that he bicycled a lot, was much admired by the ladies, and always had a big
stack of papers on his desk that were known to be an important treatise on some
medical subject, almost in process of completion. He was considered to have
fine manners and once made a good speech at a public health meeting on the
subject of drugs; but he became entangled with a girl who worked in a grocery
store, and he was also involved in a lawsuit about some medical question; so he
left
Lockport
.

After
that he didn’t ask for the children to be sent to
America
and didn’t answer when
Nicole wrote asking him if he needed money. In the last letter she had from him
he told her that he was
practising
in
Geneva
,
New York
,
and she got the impression that he had settled down with
some
one
to keep house for him. She looked up
Geneva
in an atlas and found it was in the
heart of the Finger Lakes Section and considered a pleasant place. Perhaps, so
she liked to think, his career was biding its time, again like Grant’s in
Galena; his latest note was post-marked from Hornell, New York, which is some
distance from Geneva and a very small town; in any case he is almost certainly
in that section of the country, in one town or another.