Tender Is the Night (12 page)

“We
lived there,” Rosemary suddenly pointed to a building in the Rue des Saints-
Péres
.

“That’s
strange. Because when I was twelve Mother and Baby and I once spent a winter
there,” and she pointed to a hotel directly across the street. The two dingy
fronts stared at them, gray echoes of girlhood.

“We’d
just built our
Lake Forest
house and we were economizing,” Nicole continued. “At least Baby and I and the
governess economized and Mother travelled.”

“We were
economizing too,” said Rosemary, realizing that the word meant different things
to them.

“Mother
always spoke of it very carefully as a small hotel—” Nicole gave her quick
magnetic little laugh, “—I mean instead of saying a ‘cheap’ hotel. If any
swanky friends asked us our address we’d never say, ‘We’re in a dingy little
hole over in the apache quarter where we’re glad of running water,’—we’d say
‘We’re in a small hotel.’ As if all the big ones were too noisy and vulgar for
us. Of course the friends always saw through us and told everyone about it, but
Mother always said it showed we knew our way around
Europe
.
She did, of course: she was born a German citizen.
But her
mother was American, and she was brought up in
Chicago
, and she was more American than
European.”

They
were meeting the others in two minutes, and Rosemary reconstructed herself once
more as they got out of the taxi in the Rue
Guynemer
,
across from the
Luxembourg
Gardens
. They were
lunching in the
Norths
’ already dismantled apartment
high above the green mass of leaves. The day seemed different to Rosemary from
the day before—
When
she saw him face to face their
eyes met and brushed like birds’ wings. After that everything was all right,
everything was
wonderful,
she knew that he was
beginning to fall in love with her. She felt wildly happy, felt the warm sap of
emotion being pumped through her body. A cool, clear confidence deepened and
sang in her. She scarcely looked at Dick but she knew everything was all right.

After
luncheon the Divers and the
Norths
and Rosemary went
to the Franco-American Films, to be joined by Collis Clay, her young man from
New Haven
, to whom she
had telephoned. He was a Georgian, with the peculiarly regular, even
stencilled
ideas of Southerners who are educated in the
North. Last winter she had thought him attractive—once they held hands in an
automobile going from
New Haven
to
New York
;
now he no longer existed for her.

In the
projection room she sat between Collis Clay and Dick while the mechanic mounted
the reels of Daddy’s Girl and a French executive fluttered about her trying to
talk American slang. “Yes, boy,” he said when there was trouble with the
projector, “I have not any
benenas
.” Then the lights went
out, there was the sudden click and a flickering noise and she was alone with
Dick at last. They looked at each other in the half darkness.

“Dear
Rosemary,” he murmured. Their shoulders touched. Nicole stirred restlessly at
the end of the row and Abe coughed convulsively and blew his nose; then they
all settled down and the picture ran.

There
she was—the school girl of a year ago, hair down her back and rippling out
stiffly like the solid hair of a
tanagra
figure;
there she was—SO young and innocent—the product of her mother’s loving care;
there she was—embodying all the immaturity of the race, cutting a new cardboard
paper doll to pass before its empty harlot’s mind. She remembered how she had
felt in that dress, especially fresh and new under the fresh young silk.

Daddy’s girl.
Was it
a
‘itty-bitty
bravekins
and did it suffer?
Ooo
-
ooo
-tweet,
de
tweetest
thing, wasn’t she
dest
too tweet? Before her tiny fist the forces of lust and corruption rolled away;
nay, the very march of destiny stopped; inevitable became evitable, syllogism,
dialectic, all rationality fell away. Women would forget the dirty dishes at
home and weep, even within the picture one woman wept so long that she almost
stole the film away from Rosemary. She wept all over a set that cost a fortune,
in a Duncan Phyfe dining-room, in an aviation port, and during a yacht-race
that was only used in two flashes, in a subway and finally in a bathroom. But
Rosemary triumphed. Her fineness of character, her courage and steadfastness
intruded upon by the vulgarity of the world, and Rosemary showing what it took
with a face that had not yet become mask-like—yet it was actually so moving
that the emotions of the whole row of people went out to her at intervals
during the picture. There was a break once and the light went on and after the
chatter of applause Dick said to her sincerely: “I’m simply astounded. You’re
going to be one of the best actresses on the stage.”

Then
back to Daddy’s Girl: happier days now, and a lovely shot of Rosemary and her
parent united at the last in a father complex so apparent that Dick winced for
all psychologists at the vicious sentimentality. The screen vanished, the
lights went on,
the
moment had come.

“I’ve
arranged one other thing,” announced Rosemary to the company at large, “I’ve
arranged a test for Dick.”

“A what?”

“A
screen test, they’ll take one now.”

There
was an awful silence—then an irrepressible chortle from the
Norths
.
Rosemary watched Dick comprehend what she meant, his face moving first in an
Irish way; simultaneously she realized that she had made some mistake in the
playing of her trump and still she did not suspect that the card was at fault.

“I don’t
want a test,” said Dick firmly; then, seeing the situation as a whole, he
continued lightly, “Rosemary, I’m disappointed. The pictures make a fine career
for a woman—but my God, they can’t photograph me. I’m an old scientist all
wrapped up in his private life.”

Nicole
and Mary urged him ironically to seize the opportunity; they teased him, both
faintly annoyed at not having been asked for a sitting. But Dick closed the
subject with a somewhat tart discussion of actors: “The strongest guard is
placed at the gateway to nothing,” he said.
“Maybe because
the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.”

In the
taxi with Dick and Collis Clay—they were dropping Collis, and Dick was taking
Rosemary to a tea from which Nicole and the
Norths
had resigned in order to do the things Abe had left undone till the last—in the
taxi Rosemary reproached him.

“I
thought if the test turned out to be good I could take it to
California
with me. And then maybe if they
liked it you’d come out and be my leading man in a picture.”

He was
overwhelmed. “It was a darn sweet thought, but I’d rather look at YOU. You were
about the nicest sight I ever looked at.”

“That’s
a great picture,” said Collis. “I’ve seen it four times. I know one boy at
New Haven
who’s seen it a
dozen times—he went all the way to
Hartford
to see it one time. And when I brought Rosemary up to
New Haven
he was so shy he wouldn’t meet her.
Can you beat that? This little girl knocks them cold.”

Dick and
Rosemary looked at each other, wanting to be alone, but Collis failed to
understand.

“I’ll
drop you where you’re going,” he suggested. “I’m staying at the
Lutetia
.”

“We’ll
drop you,” said Dick.

“It’ll
be easier for me to drop you. No trouble at all.”

“I think
it will be better if we drop you.”

“But—”
began Collis; he grasped the situation at last and began discussing with
Rosemary when he would see her again.

Finally,
he was gone, with the shadowy unimportance but the offensive bulk of the third
party. The car stopped unexpectedly, unsatisfactorily, at the address Dick had
given. He drew a long breath.

“Shall
we go in?”

“I don’t
care,” Rosemary said. “I’ll do anything you want.”

He
considered.

“I
almost have to go in—she wants to buy some pictures from a friend of mine who
needs the money.”

Rosemary
smoothed the brief expressive disarray of her hair.

“We’ll
stay just five minutes,” he decided. “You’re not going to like these people.”

She
assumed that they were dull and stereotyped people, or gross and drunken
people, or tiresome, insistent people, or any of the sorts of people that the
Divers avoided. She was entirely unprepared for the impression that the scene
made on her.

XVII

It was a
house hewn from the frame of Cardinal de Retz’s palace in the Rue Monsieur, but
once inside the door there was nothing of the past, nor of any present that
Rosemary knew. The outer shell, the masonry, seemed rather to enclose the
future so that it was an electric-like shock, a definite nervous experience,
perverted as a breakfast of oatmeal and hashish, to cross that threshold, if it
could be so called, into the long
hall
of blue steel,
silver-gilt, and the myriad facets of many oddly
bevelled
mirrors. The effect was unlike that of any part of the Decorative Arts
Exhibition—for there were people IN it, not in front of it. Rosemary had the
detached false-and-exalted feeling of being on a set and she guessed that
every one
else present had that feeling too.

There
were about thirty people, mostly women, and all fashioned by Louisa M. Alcott
or Madame de
Ségur
; and they functioned on this set
as cautiously, as precisely, as does a human hand picking up jagged broken
glass. Neither individually nor as a crowd could they be said to dominate the
environment, as one comes to dominate a work of art he may possess, no matter
how esoteric, no one knew what this room meant because it was evolving into
something else, becoming everything a room was not; to exist in it was as
difficult as walking on a highly polished moving stairway, and no one could
succeed at all save with the aforementioned qualities of a hand moving among
broken glass—which qualities limited and defined the majority of those present.

These
were of two sorts. There were the Americans and English who had been
dissipating all spring and summer, so that now everything they did had a purely
nervous inspiration. They were very quiet and lethargic at certain hours and
then they exploded into sudden quarrels and breakdowns and seductions. The
other class, who might be called the exploiters, was formed by the sponges, who
were sober, serious people by comparison, with a purpose in life and no time
for fooling. These kept their balance best in that environment, and what tone
there was, beyond the apartment’s novel organization of light values, came from
them.

The
Frankenstein took down Dick and Rosemary at a gulp—it separated them
immediately and Rosemary suddenly discovered herself to be an insincere little
person, living all in the upper registers of her throat and wishing the
director would come. There was however such a wild beating of wings in the room
that she did not feel her position was more incongruous than
any one
else’s. In addition, her training told and after a
series of semi-military turns, shifts, and marches she found herself presumably
talking to a neat, slick girl with a lovely boy’s face, but actually absorbed
by a conversation taking place on a sort of gun-metal ladder diagonally opposite
her and four feet away.

There
was a trio of young women sitting on the bench. They were all tall and slender
with small heads groomed like manikins’ heads, and as they talked the heads
waved gracefully about above their dark tailored suits, rather like
long-stemmed flowers and rather like cobras’ hoods.

“Oh,
they give a good show,” said one of them, in a deep rich voice. “Practically
the best show in
Paris
—I’d
be the last one to deny that. But after all—” She sighed. “Those phrases he
uses over and over—‘Oldest inhabitant gnawed by rodents.’ You laugh once.”

“I
prefer people whose lives have more corrugated surfaces,” said the second, “and
I don’t like her.”

“I’ve
never really been able to get very excited about
them,
or their entourage either. Why, for example, the entirely liquid Mr. North?”

“He’s
out,” said the first girl. “But you must admit that the party in question can
be one of the most charming human beings you have ever met.”

It was
the first hint Rosemary had had that they were talking about the Divers, and
her body grew tense with indignation. But the girl talking to her, in the
starched blue shirt with the bright blue eyes and the red cheeks and the very
gray suit, a poster of a girl, had begun to play up. Desperately she kept
sweeping things from between them, afraid that Rosemary couldn’t see her,
sweeping them away until presently there was not so much as a veil of brittle
humor hiding the girl, and with distaste Rosemary saw her plain.