Tender is the Night (48 page)

“That was very considerate of you.” Nicole felt surer of herself now.

“I wanted to find out if she had anything to offer—the only way was to see her alone.”

“Did she have—anything to offer?”

“Rosemary didn't grow up,” he answered. “It's probably better that way. What have you been doing?”

She felt her face quiver like a rabbit's.

“I went dancing last night—with Tommy Barban. We went——”

He winced, interrupting her.

“Don't tell me about it. It doesn't matter what you do, only I don't want to know anything definitely.”

“There isn't anything to know.”

“All right, all right.” Then as if he had been away a week: “How are the children?”

The phone rang in the house.

“If it's for me I'm not home,” said Dick turning away quickly. “I've got some things to do over in the work-room.”

Nicole waited till he was out of sight behind the well; then she went into the house and took up the phone.

“Nicole, comment vas-tu?”

“Dick's home.”

He groaned.

“Met 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.

A
T
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 Zürichsee, 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 Sibly-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 tonight.”

“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.”

“Now we are prepared to give—” Dick calculated quickly, “one thousand francs to each of the girls—and an additional thousand to the father of the ‘serious' one. Also two thousand in addition, for you to distribute as you think best—” he shrugged his shoulders, “—among the men who made the arrest, the lodging-house keeper and so forth. I shall hand you the five thousand and expect you to do the negotiating immediately. Then they can be released on bail on some charge like disturbing the peace, and whatever fine there is will be paid before the magistrate to-morrow—by messenger.”

Before the officer spoke Dick saw by his expression that it would be all right. The man said hesitantly, “I have made no entry because they have no Cartes d'Identité. I must see—give me the money.”

An hour later Dick and M. Gausse dropped the women by the Majestic Hotel, where Lady Caroline's chauffeur slept in her landaulet.

“Remember,” said Dick, “you owe Monsieur Gausse a hundred dollars apiece.”