Tender Is the Night (8 page)

“Mrs.
McKisco
, please don’t talk further about Mrs. Diver.”

“I
wasn’t talking to you,” she objected.

“I think
it’s better to leave them out.”

“Are
they so sacred?”

“Leave
them out. Talk about something else.”

He was
sitting on one of the two little seats beside Campion. Campion told me the
story.

“Well,
you’re pretty high-handed,” Violet came back.

You know
how conversations are in cars late at night, some people murmuring and some not
caring, giving up after the party, or bored or asleep. Well, none of them knew
just what happened until the car stopped and
Barban
cried in a voice that shook everybody, a voice for cavalry.

“Do you
want to step out here—we’re only a mile from the hotel and you can walk it or
I’ll drag you there. YOU’VE GOT TO SHUT UP AND SHUT YOUR WIFE UP!”

“You’re
a bully,” said
McKisco
. “You know you’re stronger
muscularly than I am. But I’m not afraid of you—what they ought to have is the
code duello—”

There’s
where he made his mistake because Tommy, being French, leaned over and clapped
him one, and then the chauffeur drove on. That was where you passed them. Then
the women began. That was still the state of things when the car got to the
hotel.

Tommy
telephoned some man in
Cannes
to act as second and
McKisco
said he wasn’t going to
be seconded by Campion, who wasn’t crazy for the job anyhow, so he telephoned
me not to say anything but to come right down. Violet
McKisco
collapsed and Mrs. Abrams took her to her room and gave her a bromide whereupon
she fell comfortably asleep on the bed. When I got there I tried to argue with
Tommy but the latter wouldn’t accept anything short of an apology and
McKisco
rather
spunkily
wouldn’t
give it.

When Abe
had finished Rosemary asked thoughtfully:

“Do the
Divers know it was about them?”

“No—and
they’re not ever going to know they had anything to do with it. That damn
Campion had no business talking to you about it, but since he did—I told the
chauffeur I’d get out the old musical saw if he opened his mouth about it. This
fight’s between two men—what Tommy needs is a good war.”

“I hope
the Divers don’t find out,” Rosemary said.

Abe
peered at his watch.

“I’ve
got to go up and see
McKisco
—do you want to come?—he
feels sort of friendless—I bet he hasn’t slept.”

Rosemary
had a vision of the desperate vigil that high-strung, badly organized man had
probably kept. After a moment balanced between pity and repugnance she agreed,
and full of morning energy, bounced upstairs beside Abe.

McKisco
was sitting on his bed with his alcoholic combativeness vanished, in spite of
the glass of champagne in his hand. He seemed very puny and
cross
and white. Evidently he had been writing and drinking all night. He stared
confusedly at Abe and Rosemary and asked:

“Is it
time?”

“No, not for half an hour.”

The
table was covered with papers which he assembled with some difficulty into a
long letter; the writing on the last pages was very large and illegible. In the
delicate light of electric lamps fading, he scrawled his name at the bottom,
crammed it into an envelope and handed it to Abe.
“For my
wife.”

“You
better souse your head in cold water,” Abe suggested.

“You
think I’d better?” inquired
McKisco
doubtfully. “I
don’t want to get too sober.”

“Well,
you look terrible now.”

Obediently
McKisco
went into the bathroom.

“I’m
leaving everything in an awful mess,” he called. “I don’t know how Violet will
get back to
America
.
I don’t carry any insurance. I never got around to it.”

“Don’t
talk
nonsense,
you’ll be right here eating breakfast
in an hour.”

“Sure, I
know.” He came back with his hair wet and looked at Rosemary as if he saw her
for the first time. Suddenly tears stood in his eyes. “I never have finished my
novel. That’s what makes me so sore. You don’t like me,” he said to Rosemary,
“but that can’t be helped. I’m primarily a literary man.” He made a vague
discouraged sound and shook his head helplessly. “I’ve made lots of mistakes in
my life—many of them. But I’ve been one of the most prominent—in some ways—”

He gave
this up and puffed at a dead cigarette.

“I do
like you,” said Rosemary, “but I don’t think you ought to fight a duel.”

“Yeah, I
should have tried to beat him up, but it’s done now. I’ve let myself be drawn
into something that I had no right to be. I have a very violent temper—” He
looked closely at Abe as if he expected the statement to be challenged. Then
with an
aghast
laugh he raised the cold cigarette butt
toward his mouth. His breathing quickened.

“The
trouble was I suggested the duel—if Violet had only kept her mouth shut
I
could have fixed it. Of course even now I can just leave,
or sit back and laugh at the whole thing—but I don’t think Violet would ever
respect me again.”

“Yes,
she would,” said Rosemary. “She’d respect you more.”

“No—you
don’t know Violet. She’s very hard when she gets an advantage over you. We’ve
been married twelve years, we had a little girl seven years old and she died
and after that you know how it is. We both played around on the side a little,
nothing serious but drifting apart—she called me a coward out there tonight.”

Troubled,
Rosemary didn’t answer.

“Well,
we’ll see there’s as little damage done as possible,” said Abe. He opened the
leather case. “These are
Barban’s
duelling
pistols—I borrowed them so you could get familiar with them. He carries them in
his suitcase.” He weighed one of the archaic weapons in his hand. Rosemary gave
an exclamation of uneasiness and
McKisco
looked at
the pistols anxiously.

“Well—it
isn’t as if we were going to stand up and pot each other with forty-fives,” he
said.

“I don’t
know,” said Abe cruelly; “the idea is you can sight better along a long
barrel.”

“How
about distance?” asked
McKisco
.

“I’ve
inquired about that. If one or the other parties has to be definitely
eliminated they make it eight paces, if they’re just good and sore it’s twenty
paces, and if it’s only to vindicate their honor it’s forty paces. His second
agreed with me to make it forty.”

“That’s
good.”

“There’s
a wonderful duel in a novel of Pushkin’s,” recollected Abe. “Each man stood on
the edge of a precipice, so if he was hit at all he was done for.”

This
seemed very remote and academic to
McKisco
, who
stared at him and said, “What?”

“Do you
want to take a quick dip and freshen up?”

“No—no, I
couldn
t swim.”
He sighed. “I don’t see what it’s
all about,” he said helplessly. “I don’t see why I’m doing it.”

It was
the first thing he had ever done in his life. Actually he was one of those for
whom the sensual world does not exist, and faced with a concrete fact he
brought to it a vast surprise.

“We
might as well be going,” said Abe, seeing him fail a little.

“All right.”
He drank off a stiff drink of brandy, put the flask in his pocket, and
said with almost a savage air: “What’ll happen if I kill him—will they throw me
in jail?”

“I’ll
run you over the Italian border.”

He
glanced at Rosemary—and then said apologetically to Abe:

“Before
we start there’s one thing I’d like to see you about alone.”

“I hope
neither of you gets hurt,” Rosemary said. “I think it’s very foolish and you
ought to try to stop it.”

XI

She
found Campion downstairs in the deserted lobby.

“I saw
you go upstairs,” he said excitedly. “Is he all right? When is the duel going
to be?”

“I don’t
know.” She resented his speaking of it as a circus, with
McKisco
as the tragic clown.

“Will
you go with me?” he demanded, with the air of having seats. “I’ve hired the
hotel car.”

“I don’t
want to go.”

“Why not?
I imagine it’ll take years off my life but I wouldn’t miss it for worlds. We
could watch it from quite far away.”

“Why
don’t you get Mr.
Dumphry
to go with you?”

His
monocle fell out, with no whiskers to hide in—he drew himself up.

“I never
want to see him again.”

“Well,
I’m afraid I can’t go. Mother wouldn’t like it.”

As
Rosemary entered her room Mrs. Speers stirred sleepily and called to her:

“Where’ve
you been?”

“I just
couldn’t sleep. You go back to sleep, Mother.”

“Come in
my room.” Hearing her sit up in bed, Rosemary went in and told her what had
happened.

“Why
don’t you go and see it?” Mrs. Speers suggested. “You needn’t go up close and
you might be able to help afterwards.”

Rosemary
did not like the picture of herself looking on and she demurred, but Mrs.
Speer’s consciousness was still clogged with sleep and she was reminded of
night calls to death and calamity when she was the wife of a doctor. “I like you
to go places and do things on your own initiative without me—you did much
harder things for
Rainy’s
publicity stunts.”

Still
Rosemary did not see why she should go, but she obeyed the sure, clear voice
that had sent her into the stage entrance of the Odeon in
Paris
when she was twelve and greeted her
when she came out again.

She
thought she was reprieved when from the steps she saw Abe and
McKisco
drive away—but after a moment the hotel car came
around the corner. Squealing delightedly Luis Campion pulled her in beside him.

“I hid
there because they might not let us come. I’ve got my movie camera, you see.”

She
laughed helplessly. He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only
dehumanized.

“I
wonder why Mrs.
McKisco
didn’t like the Divers?” she said.
“They were very nice to her.”

“Oh, it
wasn’t that. It was something she saw. We never did find exactly what it was
because of
Barban
.”

“Then
that wasn’t what made you so sad.”

“Oh,
no,” he said, his voice breaking, “that was something else that happened when
we got back to the hotel. But now I don’t care— I wash my hands of it
completely.”

They
followed the other car east along the shore past Juan les Pins, where the
skeleton of the new Casino was rising. It was past four and under a blue-gray
sky the first fishing boats were creaking out into a
glaucous
sea. Then they turned off the main road and into the back country.

“It’s
the golf course,” cried Campion, “I’m sure that’s where it’s going to be.”

He was
right. When Abe’s car pulled up ahead of them the east was crayoned red and
yellow, promising a sultry day. Ordering the hotel car into a grove of pines
Rosemary and Campion kept in the shadow of a wood and skirted the bleached
fairway where Abe and
McKisco
were walking up and
down, the latter raising his head at intervals like a rabbit scenting.
Presently there were moving figures over by a farther tee and the watchers made
out
Barban
and his French second—the latter carried
the box of pistols under his arm.

Somewhat
appalled,
McKisco
slipped behind Abe and took a long
swallow of brandy. He walked on choking and would have marched directly up into
the other party, but Abe stopped him and went forward to talk to the Frenchman.
The sun was over the horizon.

Campion
grabbed Rosemary’s arm.

“I can’t
stand it,” he squeaked, almost voiceless. “It’s too much. This will cost me—”

“Let
go,” Rosemary said peremptorily. She breathed a frantic prayer in French.

The
principals faced each other,
Barban
with the sleeve
rolled up from his arm. His eyes gleamed restlessly in the sun, but his motion
was deliberate as he wiped his palm on the seam of his trousers.
McKisco
, reckless with brandy, pursed his lips in a whistle
and pointed his long nose about nonchalantly, until Abe stepped forward with a
handkerchief in his hand. The French second stood with his face turned away.
Rosemary caught her breath in terrible pity and gritted her teeth with hatred
for
Barban
; then: