Tender is the Night (44 page)

They moved into the dining salon and Dick was placed next to Lady Caroline. Nicole saw that his usually ruddy face was drained of blood; he talked in a dogmatic voice, of which only snatches reached Nicole:

“… It's all right for you English, you're doing a dance of death…. Sepoys in the ruined fort, I mean Sepoys at the gate and gaiety in the fort and all that. The green hat, the crushed hat, no future.”

Lady Caroline answered him in short sentences spotted with the terminal “What?” the double-edged “Quite!” the depressing “Cheerio!” that always had a connotation of imminent peril, but Dick appeared oblivious to the warning signals. Suddenly he made a particularly vehement pronouncement, the purport of which eluded Nicole, but she saw the young woman turn dark and sinewy, and heard her answer sharply:

“After all a chep's a chep and a chum's a chum.”

Again he had offended some one—couldn't he hold his tongue a little longer? How long? To death then.

At the piano, a fair-haired young Scotsman from the orchestra (entitled by its drum “The Ragtime College Jazzes of Edinboro”) had begun singing in a Danny Deever
⁶⁰
monotone, accompanying himself with low chords on the piano. He pronounced his words with great precision, as though they impressed him almost intolerably.

“
There was a young lady from hell
,

 Who jumped at the sound of a bell
,

 Because she was bad
—
bad
—
bad
,

 She jumped at the sound of a bell
,

           
From hell
(BOOMBOOM)

           
From hell
(TOOTTOOT)

           
There was a young lady from hell
——”

“What is all this?” whispered Tommy to Nicole.

The girl on the other side of him supplied the answer:

“Caroline Sibly-Biers wrote the words. He wrote the music.”

“Quelle enfanterie!” Tommy murmured as the next verse began, hinting at the jumpy lady's further predilections. “On dirait qu'il récite Racine!”

On the surface at least, Lady Caroline was paying no attention to the performance of her work. Glancing at her again Nicole found herself impressed, neither with the character nor the personality, but with the sheer strength derived from an attitude; Nicole thought that she was formidable, and she was confirmed in this point of view as the party rose from table. Dick remained in his seat wearing an odd expression; then he crashed into words with a harsh ineptness.

“I don't like innuendo in these deafening English whispers.”

Already half-way out of the room Lady Caroline turned and walked back to him; she spoke in a low clipped voice purposely audible to the whole company.

“You came to me asking for it—disparaging my countrymen, disparaging my friend, Mary Minghetti. I simply said you were observed associating with a questionable crowd in Lausanne. Is that a deafening whisper? Or does it simply deafen
you?
”

“It's still not loud enough,” said Dick, a little too late. “So I am actually a notorious——”

Golding crushed out the phrase with his voice saying:

“What! What!” and moved his guests on out, with the threat of his powerful body. Turning the corner of the door Nicole saw that Dick was still sitting at the table. She was furious at the woman for her preposterous statement, equally furious at Dick for having brought them here, for having become fuddled, for having untipped the capped barbs of his irony, for having come off humiliated—she was a little more annoyed because she knew that her taking possession of Tommy Barban on their arrival had first irritated the Englishwoman.

A moment later she saw Dick standing in the gangway, apparently in complete control of himself as he talked with
Golding; then for half an hour she did not see him anywhere about the deck and she broke out of an intricate Malay game, played with string and coffee beans, and said to Tommy:

“I've got to find Dick.”

Since dinner the yacht had been in motion westward. The fine night streamed away on either side, the Diesel engines pounded softly, there was a spring wind that blew Nicole's hair abruptly when she reached the bow, and she had a sharp lesion of anxiety at seeing Dick standing hi the angle by the flagstaff. His voice was serene as he recognized her.

“It's a nice night.”

“I was worried.”

“Oh, you were worried?”

“Oh, don't talk that way. It would give me so much pleasure to think of a little something I could do for you, Dick.”

He turned away from her, toward the veil of starlight over Africa.

“I believe that's true, Nicole. And sometimes I believe that the littler it was, the more pleasure it would give you.”

“Don't talk like that—don't say such things.”

His face, wan in the light that the white spray caught and tossed back to the brilliant sky had none of the lines of annoyance she had expected. It was even detached; his eyes focussed upon her gradually as upon a chessman to be moved; in the same slow manner he caught her wrist and drew her near.

“You ruined me, did you?” he inquired blandly. “Then we're both ruined. So——”

Cold with terror she put her other wrist into his grip. All right, she would go with him—again she felt the beauty of the night vividly in one moment of complete response and abnegation—all right, then——

—But now she was unexpectedly free and Dick turned his back sighing: “Tch! tch!”

Tears streamed down Nicole's face—in a moment she heard some one approaching; it was Tommy.

“You found him! Nicole thought maybe you jumped overboard, Dick,” he said, “because that little English poule slanged you.”

“It'd be a good setting to jump overboard,” said Dick mildly.

“Wouldn't it?” agreed Nicole hastily. “Let's borrow life-preservers and jump over. I think we should do something spectacular. I feel that all our lives have been too restrained.”

Tommy sniffed from one to the other trying to breathe in the situation with the night. “We'll go ask the Lady Beer-and-Ale what to do—she should know the latest things. And we should memorize her song ‘There was a young lady from l'enfer.' I shall translate it, and make a fortune from its success at the Casino.”

“Are you rich, Tommy?” Dick asked him, as they retraced the length of the boat.

“Not as things go now. I got tired of the brokerage business and went away. But I have good stocks in the hands of friends who are holding it for me. All goes well.”

“Dick's getting rich,” Nicole said. In reaction her voice had begun to tremble.

On the after deck Golding had fanned three pairs of dancers into action with his colossal paws. Nicole and Tommy joined them and Tommy remarked: “Dick seems to be drinking.”

“Only moderately,” she said loyally.

“There are those who can drink and those who can't. Obviously Dick can't. You ought to tell him not to.”

“I!” she exclaimed in amazement. “
I
tell Dick what he should do or shouldn't do!”

But in a reticent way Dick was still vague and sleepy when they reached the pier at Cannes. Golding buoyed him down into the launch of the Margin whereupon Lady Caroline shifted her place conspicuously. On the dock he bowed good-by with exaggerated formality, and for a moment he seemed about to speed her with a salty epigram, but the bone of Tommy's arm went into the soft part of his and they walked to the attendant car.

“I'll drive you home,” Tommy suggested.

“Don't bother—we can get a cab.”

“I'd like to, if you can put me up.”

On the back seat of the car Dick remained quiescent until the yellow monolith of Golfe-Juan was passed, and then the constant carnival at Juan-les-Pins where the night was musical and strident in many languages. When the car turned up the hill toward Tarmes, he sat up suddenly, prompted by the tilt of the vehicle, and delivered a peroration:

“A charming representative of the—” he stumbled momentarily, “—a firm of—bring me brains addled à l'Anglaise.” Then he went into an appeased sleep, belching now and then contentedly into the soft warm darkness.

N
EXT
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 post-mortems?”

“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, waiting 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 vitae 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 Niçois 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.