Tender Is the Night (3 page)

“Then
you like it here?” she asked.

“It
might be fun if we knew those people. There were some other people, but they
weren’t nice. They recognized me—no matter where we go everybody’s seen
‘Daddy’s Girl.’”

Mrs.
Speers waited for the glow of egotism to subside; then she said in a
matter-of-fact way: “That reminds me, when
are you
going to see Earl Brady?”

“I
thought we might go this afternoon—if you’re rested.”

“You
go—I’m not going.”

“We’ll
wait till to-morrow then.”

“I want
you to go alone. It’s only a short way—it isn’t as if you didn’t speak French.”

“Mother—aren’t
there some things I don’t have to do?”

“Oh,
well then go later—but some day before we leave.”

“All
right, Mother.”

After
lunch they were both overwhelmed by the sudden flatness that comes over
American
travellers
in quiet foreign places. No
stimuli worked upon them, no voices called them from without, no fragments of
their own thoughts came suddenly from the minds of others, and missing the
clamor of Empire they felt that life was not continuing here.

“Let’s
only stay three days, Mother,” Rosemary said when they were back in their
rooms. Outside a light wind blew the heat around, straining it through the
trees and sending little hot gusts through the shutters.

“How
about the man you fell in love with on the beach?”

“I don’t
love anybody but you, Mother, darling.”

Rosemary
stopped in the lobby and spoke to
Gausse
père
about trains. The concierge, lounging in light-brown
khaki by the desk, stared at her rigidly,
then
suddenly remembered the manners of his métier. She took the bus and rode with a
pair of obsequious waiters to the station, embarrassed by their deferential
silence, wanting to urge them: “Go on, talk,
enjoy
yourselves. It doesn’t bother me.”

The
first-class compartment was stifling; the vivid advertising cards of the
railroad companies—The Pont du
Gard
at Arles, the
Amphitheatre at Orange, winter sports at Chamonix—were fresher than the long
motionless sea outside. Unlike American trains that were absorbed in an intense
destiny of their own, and scornful of people on another world less swift and
breathless, this train was part of the country through which it passed. Its
breath stirred the dust from the palm leaves, the cinders mingled with the dry
dung in the gardens. Rosemary was sure she could
lean
from the window and pull flowers with her hand.

A dozen
cabbies slept in their hacks outside the
Cannes
station. Over on the promenade the Casino, the smart shops, and the great
hotels turned blank iron masks to the summer sea. It was unbelievable that
there could ever have been a “season,” and Rosemary, half in the grip of
fashion, became a little self- conscious, as though she were displaying an
unhealthy taste for the moribund; as though people were wondering why she was
here in the lull between the gaiety of last winter and next winter, while up
north the true world thundered by.

As she
came out of a drug store with a bottle of
cocoanut
oil, a woman, whom she recognized as Mrs. Diver, crossed her path with arms
full of sofa cushions, and went to a car parked down the street. A long, low
black dog barked at her, a dozing chauffeur woke with a start. She sat in the
car, her lovely face set, controlled, her eyes brave and watchful, looking
straight ahead toward nothing. Her dress was bright red and her brown legs were
bare. She had thick, dark, gold hair like a chow’s.

With
half an hour to wait for her train Rosemary sat down in the Café des
Alliés
on the
Croisette
, where
the trees made a green twilight over the tables and an orchestra wooed an
imaginary public of cosmopolites with the Nice Carnival Song and last year’s
American tune. She had bought Le Temps and The Saturday Evening Post for her
mother, and as she drank her
citronade
she opened the
latter at the memoirs of a Russian princess, finding the dim conventions of the
nineties realer and nearer than the headlines of the French paper. It was the
same feeling that had oppressed her at the hotel—accustomed to seeing the
starkest grotesqueries of a continent heavily underlined as comedy or tragedy,
untrained to the task of separating out the essential for herself, she now
began to feel that French life was empty and stale. This feeling was surcharged
by listening to the sad tunes of the orchestra, reminiscent of the melancholy
music played for acrobats in vaudeville. She was glad to go back to
Gausse’s
Hotel.

Her
shoulders were too burned to swim with the next day, so she and her mother
hired a car—after much haggling, for Rosemary had formed her valuations of
money in France—and drove along the Riviera, the delta of many rivers. The
chauffeur, a Russian Czar of the period of Ivan the Terrible, was a
self-appointed guide, and the resplendent names—Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo—began
to glow through their torpid camouflage, whispering of old kings come here to
dine or die, of rajahs tossing Buddha’s eyes to English ballerinas, of Russian
princes turning the weeks into Baltic twilights in the lost
caviare
days. Most of all, there was the scent of the Russians along the coast—their
closed book shops and grocery stores. Ten years ago, when the season ended in
April, the doors of the Orthodox Church were locked, and the sweet champagnes
they favored were put away until their return. “We’ll be back next season,”
they said, but this was premature, for they were never coming back any more.

It was
pleasant to drive back to the hotel in the late afternoon, above a sea as
mysteriously colored as the agates and
cornelians
of
childhood, green as green milk, blue as laundry water, wine dark. It was
pleasant to pass people eating outside their doors, and to hear the fierce
mechanical pianos behind the vines of country estaminets. When they turned off
the
Corniche
d’Or and down to
Gausse’s
Hotel through the darkening banks of trees, set one behind another in many
greens, the moon already hovered over the ruins of the aqueducts. . . .

Somewhere
in the hills behind the hotel there was a dance, and Rosemary listened to the
music through the ghostly moonshine of her mosquito net, realizing that there
was gaiety too somewhere about, and she thought of the nice people on the
beach. She thought she might meet them in the morning, but they obviously
formed a self- sufficient little group, and once their umbrellas, bamboo rugs,
dogs, and children were set out in place the part of the
plage
was literally fenced in. She resolved in any case not to spend her last two
mornings with the other ones.

IV

The
matter was solved for her. The
McKiscos
were not yet
there and she had scarcely spread her peignoir when two men—the man with the
jockey cap and the tall blonde man, given to sawing waiters in two— left the
group and came down toward her.

“Good
morning,” said Dick Diver. He broke down. “Look—sunburn or no sunburn, why did
you stay away yesterday? We worried about you.”

She sat
up and her happy little laugh welcomed their intrusion.

“We
wondered,” Dick Diver said, “if you wouldn’t come over this morning. We go
in,
we take food and drink, so it’s a substantial
invitation.”

He
seemed kind and charming—his voice promised that he would take care of her, and
that a little later he would open up whole new worlds for her, unroll an
endless succession of magnificent possibilities. He managed the introduction so
that her name wasn’t mentioned and then let her know easily that everyone knew
who she was but were respecting the completeness of her private life—a courtesy
that Rosemary had not met with save from professional people since her success.

Nicole
Diver, her brown back hanging from her pearls, was looking through a recipe
book for chicken
Maryland
.
She was about twenty- four, Rosemary guessed—her face could have been described
in terms of conventional prettiness, but the effect was that it had been made
first on the heroic scale with strong structure and marking, as if the features
and vividness of brow and coloring, everything we associate with temperament
and character had been molded with a
Rodinesque
intention, and then chiseled away in the direction of prettiness to a point
where a single slip would have irreparably diminished its force and quality.
With the mouth the sculptor had taken desperate chances—it was the cupid’s bow
of a magazine cover, yet it shared the distinction of the rest.

“Are you
here for a long time?” Nicole asked. Her voice was low, almost harsh.

Suddenly
Rosemary let the possibility enter her mind that they might stay another week.

“Not
very long,” she answered vaguely. “We’ve been abroad a long time—we landed in
Sicily
in March and
we’ve been slowly working our way north. I got pneumonia making a picture last
January and I’ve been recuperating.”

“Mercy!
How did that happen?”

“Well,
it was from swimming,” Rosemary was rather reluctant at embarking upon personal
revelations. “One day I happened to have the grippe and didn’t know it, and
they were taking a scene where I dove into a canal in
Venice
. It was a very expensive set, so I had
to dive and dive and dive all morning. Mother had a doctor right there, but it
was no use—I got pneumonia.” She changed the subject determinedly before they
could speak. “Do you like it here—this place?”

“They
have to like it,” said Abe North slowly. “They invented it.” He turned his
noble head slowly so that his eyes rested with tenderness and affection on the
two Divers.

“Oh, did
you?”

“This is
only the second season that the hotel’s been open in summer,” Nicole explained.
“We persuaded
Gausse
to keep on a cook and a
garçon
and a chasseur—it paid its way and this year it’s
doing even better.”

“But
you’re not in the hotel.”

“We
built a house, up at
Tarmes
.”

“The
theory is,” said Dick, arranging an umbrella to clip a square of sunlight off
Rosemary’s shoulder, “that all the northern places, like Deauville, were picked
out by Russians and English who don’t mind the cold, while half of us Americans
come from tropical climates—that’s why we’re beginning to come here.”

The
young man of Latin aspect had been turning the pages of The New York Herald.

“Well,
what nationality are these people?” he demanded, suddenly, and read with a
slight French intonation, “‘Registered at the Hotel Palace at
Vevey
are Mr.
Pandely
Vlasco
, Mme.
Bonneasse
’—I don’t
exaggerate—‘
Corinna
Medonca
,
Mme.
Pasche
, Seraphim
Tullio
,
Maria
Amalia
Roto
Mais
,
Moises
Teubel
,
Mme.
Paragoris
, Apostle
Alexandre
,
Yolanda
Yosfuglu
and
Geneveva
de Momus!’ She attracts me most—
Geneveva
de Momus.
Almost worth running up to
Vevey
to take
a look at
Geneveva
de Momus.”

He stood
up with sudden restlessness, stretching himself with one sharp movement. He was
a few years younger than Diver or North. He was tall and his body was hard but
overspare
save
for the bunched force gathered in his shoulders and upper arms. At first glance
he seemed conventionally handsome—but there was a faint disgust always in his
face
which marred the full fierce
lustre
of his brown eyes. Yet one remembered them afterward, when one had forgotten
the inability of the mouth to endure boredom and the young forehead with its
furrows of fretful and unprofitable pain.

“We
found some fine ones in the news of Americans last week,” said Nicole. “Mrs.
Evelyn Oyster and—what were the others?”

“There
was Mr. S. Flesh,” said Diver, getting up also. He took his rake and began to
work seriously at getting small stones out of the sand.

“Oh,
yes—S. Flesh—doesn’t he give you the creeps?”

It was
quiet alone with Nicole—Rosemary found it even quieter than with her mother.
Abe North and
Barban
, the Frenchman, were talking
about
Morocco
,
and Nicole having copied her recipe picked up a piece of sewing. Rosemary
examined their appurtenances—four large parasols that made a canopy of shade, a
portable bath house for dressing, a pneumatic rubber horse, new things that
Rosemary had never seen, from the first burst of luxury manufacturing after the
War, and probably in the hands of the first of purchasers. She had gathered
that they were fashionable people, but though her mother had brought her up to
beware such people as drones, she did not feel that way here. Even in their
absolute immobility, complete as that of the morning, she felt a purpose, a
working over something, a direction, an act of creation different from any she
had known. Her immature mind made no speculations upon the nature of their
relation to each other, she was only concerned with their attitude toward
herself—but she perceived the web of some pleasant interrelation, which she
expressed with the thought that they seemed to have a very good time.