Tender Is the Night (28 page)

“If what
you say is true I don’t think it did her any harm.” He was keeping up to the
end the pretense that he could still think objectively about Rosemary. “She’s
over it already. Still—so many of the important times in life begin by seeming
incidental.”

“This
wasn’t incidental,” Mrs. Speers insisted. “You were the first man—you’re an
ideal to her. In every letter she says that.”

“She’s
so polite.”

“You and
Rosemary are the politest people I’ve ever known, but she means this.”

“My
politeness is a trick of the heart.”

This was
partly true. From his father Dick had learned the somewhat conscious good
manners of the young Southerner coming north after the Civil War. Often he used
them and just as often he despised them because they were not a protest against
how unpleasant selfishness was but against how unpleasant it looked.

“I’m in
love with Rosemary,” he told her suddenly. “It’s a kind of self-indulgence
saying that to you.”

It
seemed very strange and official to him, as if the very tables and chairs in
the Café des
Alliées
would remember it forever.
Already he felt her absence from these skies: on the beach he could only
remember the sun-torn flesh of her shoulder; at
Tarmes
he crushed out her footprints as he crossed the garden; and now the orchestra
launching into the Nice Carnival Song, an echo of last year’s vanished
gaieties, started the little dance that went on all about her. In a hundred
hours she had come to possess all the world’s dark magic; the blinding
belladonna, the
caffein
converting physical into
nervous energy, the
mandragora
that imposes harmony.

With an
effort he once more accepted the fiction that he shared Mrs. Speers’
detachment.

“You and
Rosemary aren’t really alike,” he said. “The wisdom she got from you is all
molded up into her persona, into the mask she faces the world with. She doesn’t
think; her real depths are Irish and romantic and illogical.”

Mrs.
Speers knew too that Rosemary, for all her delicate surface, was a young
mustang, perceptibly by Captain Doctor Hoyt, U.S.A. Cross-sectioned, Rosemary
would have displayed an enormous heart, liver and soul, all crammed close
together under the lovely shell.

Saying
good-by, Dick was aware of Elsie Speers’ full charm, aware that she meant
rather more to him than merely a last unwillingly relinquished fragment of
Rosemary. He could possibly have made up Rosemary—he could never have made up
her mother. If the cloak, spurs and brilliants in which Rosemary had walked off
were things with which he had endowed her, it was nice in contrast to watch her
mother’s grace knowing it was surely something he had not evoked. She had an
air of seeming to wait, as if for a man to get through with something more
important than
herself
, a battle or an operation,
during which he must not be hurried or interfered with. When the man had
finished she would be waiting, without fret or impatience, somewhere on a
highstool
, turning the pages of a newspaper.

“Good-by—and
I want you both to remember always how fond of you Nicole and I have grown.”

Back at
the Villa Diana, he went to his work-room, and opened the shutters, closed
against the mid-day glare. On his two long tables, in ordered confusion, lay
the materials of his book. Volume I, concerned with Classification, had
achieved some success in a small subsidized edition. He was negotiating for its
reissue. Volume II was to be a great amplification of his first little book, A
Psychology for Psychiatrists. Like so many men he had found that he had only
one or two ideas—that his little collection of pamphlets now in its fiftieth
German edition contained the germ of all he would ever think or know.

But he
was currently uneasy about the whole thing. He resented the wasted years at
New Haven
, but mostly he
felt a discrepancy between the growing luxury in which the Divers lived, and
the need for display which apparently went along with it. Remembering his
Rumanian friend’s story, about the man who had worked for years on the brain of
an armadillo, he suspected that patient Germans were sitting close to the libraries
of
Berlin
and
Vienna
callously anticipating him. He had about decided to brief the work in its
present condition and publish it in an undocumented volume of a hundred
thousand words as an introduction to more scholarly volumes to follow.

He
confirmed this decision walking around the rays of late afternoon in his
work-room. With the new plan he could be through by spring. It seemed to him
that when a man with his energy was pursued for a year by increasing doubts, it
indicated some fault in the plan.

He laid
the bars of gilded metal that he used as paperweights along the sheaves of
notes. He swept up, for no servant was allowed in here, treated his washroom
sketchily with Bon Ami, repaired a screen and sent off an order to a publishing
house in
Zurich
.
Then he drank an ounce of gin
with twice as much water
.

He saw
Nicole in the garden. Presently he must encounter her and the prospect gave him
a leaden feeling. Before her he must keep up a perfect front, now and
to-morrow, next week and next year. All night in Paris he had held her in his
arms while she slept light under the
luminol
; in the
early morning he broke in upon her confusion before it could form, with words
of tenderness and protection, and she slept again with his face against the
warm scent of her hair. Before she woke he had arranged everything at the phone
in the next room. Rosemary was to move to another hotel. She was to be “Daddy’s
Girl” and even to give up saying good-by to them. The proprietor of the hotel,
Mr.
McBeth
, was to be the three Chinese monkeys.
Packing amid the piled boxes and tissue paper of many purchases, Dick and
Nicole left for the
Riviera
at
noon
.

Then
there was a reaction. As they settled down in the wagon-lit Dick saw that
Nicole was waiting for it, and it came quickly and desperately, before the
train was out of the
ceinture
—his only instinct was
to step off while the train was still going slow, rush back and see where
Rosemary was, what she was doing. He opened a book and bent his pince-nez upon
it, aware that Nicole was watching him from her pillow across the compartment.
Unable to read, he pretended to be tired and shut his eyes but she was still
watching him, and though still she was half asleep from the hangover of the
drug, she was relieved and almost happy that he was hers again.

It was
worse with his eyes shut for it gave a rhythm of finding and losing, finding
and losing; but so as not to appear restless he lay like that until
noon
. At luncheon things were
better—it was always a fine meal; a thousand lunches in inns and restaurants,
wagon-
lits
, buffets, and
aeroplanes
were a mighty collation to have taken together. The familiar hurry of the train
waiters, the little bottles of wine and mineral water, the excellent food of
the Paris-Lyons-
Méditerranee
gave them the illusion
that everything was the same as before, but it was almost the first trip he had
ever taken with Nicole that was a going away rather than a going toward. He
drank a whole bottle of wine save for Nicole’s single glass; they talked about
the house and the children. But once back in the compartment a silence fell
over them like the silence in the restaurant across from the
Luxembourg
.
Receding from a grief, it seems necessary to retrace the same steps that
brought us there. An unfamiliar impatience settled on Dick; suddenly Nicole
said:

“It
seemed too bad to leave Rosemary like that—do you suppose she’ll be all right?”

“Of course.
She could take care of herself anywhere—” Lest this belittle Nicole’s
ability to do likewise, he added, “After all, she’s an actress, and even though
her mother’s in the background she HAS to look out for herself.”

“She’s
very attractive.”

“She’s
an infant.”

“She’s
attractive though.”

They
talked aimlessly back and forth, each speaking for the other.

“She’s
not as intelligent as I thought,” Dick offered.

“She’s
quite smart.”

“Not
very, though—there’s a persistent aroma of the nursery.”

“She’s
very—very pretty,” Nicole said in a detached, emphatic way, “and I thought she
was very good in the picture.”

“She was
well directed. Thinking it over, it wasn’t very individual.”

“I
thought it was. I can see how she’d be very attractive to men.”

His
heart twisted.
To what men?
How many men?

—Do you
mind if I pull down the curtain?

—Please
do, it’s too light in here.

Where
now?
And with whom?

“In a
few years she’ll look ten years older than you.”

“On the contrary.
I sketched her one night on a theatre program, I think she’ll last.”

They
were both restless in the night. In a day or two Dick would try to banish the
ghost of Rosemary before it became walled up with them, but for the moment he
had no force to do it. Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than
of a pleasure and the memory so possessed him that for the moment there was
nothing to do but to pretend. This was more difficult because he was currently
annoyed with Nicole, who, after all these years, should recognize symptoms of
strain in herself and guard against them. Twice within a fortnight she had
broken up: there had been the night of the dinner at
Tarmes
when he had found her in her bedroom dissolved in crazy laughter telling Mrs.
McKisco
she could not go in the bathroom because the key
was thrown down the well. Mrs.
McKisco
was astonished
and resentful, baffled and yet in a way comprehending. Dick had not been
particularly alarmed then, for afterward Nicole was repentant. She called at
Gausse’s
Hotel but the
McKiscos
were gone.

The
collapse in
Paris
was another matter, adding significance to the first one. It prophesied
possibly a new cycle, a new
pousse
of the malady. Having
gone through unprofessional agonies during her long relapse following
Topsy’s
birth, he had, perforce, hardened himself about
her, making a cleavage between Nicole sick and Nicole well. This made it
difficult now to distinguish between his self- protective professional
detachment and some new coldness in his heart. As an indifference cherished, or
left to atrophy, becomes
an emptiness
, to this extent
he had learned to become empty of Nicole, serving her against his will with
negations and emotional neglect. One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel
to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an
individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick
but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a
finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute
in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.

XII

He found
Nicole in the garden with her arms folded high on her shoulders. She looked at
him with straight gray eyes, with a child’s searching wonder.

“I went
to
Cannes
,” he
said. “I ran into Mrs. Speers. She’s leaving to-morrow. She wanted to come up
and say good-by to you, but I slew the idea.”

“I’m
sorry. I’d like to have seen her. I like her.”

“Who
else do you think I saw—Bartholomew
Tailor.
”

“You
didn’t.”

“I
couldn’t have missed that face of his, the old experienced weasel. He was
looking over the ground for
Ciro’s
Menagerie— they’ll
all be down next year. I suspected Mrs. Abrams was a sort of outpost.”

“And
Baby was outraged the first summer we came here.”

“They
don’t really give a damn where they are, so I don’t see why they don’t stay and
freeze in
Deauville
.”

“Can’t
we start rumors about cholera or something?”

“I told
Bartholomew that some categories died off like flies here— I told him the life
of a suck was as short as the life of a machine-gunner in the war.”

“You
didn’t.”

“No, I
didn’t,” he admitted. “He was very pleasant. It was a beautiful sight, he and I
shaking hands there on the boulevard.
The meeting of Sigmund
Freud and Ward McAllister.”

Dick
didn’t want to talk—he wanted to be alone so that his thoughts about work and
the future would overpower his thoughts of love and to-day. Nicole knew about
it but only darkly and tragically, hating him a little in an animal way, yet
wanting to rub against his shoulder.