Tender Is the Night (6 page)

“I was
watching you,” he said, and she knew he meant it. “We’ve grown very fond of
you.”

“I fell
in love with you the first time I saw you,” she said quietly. He pretended not
to have heard, as if the compliment were purely formal.

“New
friends,” he said, as if it were an important
point,
“can often have a better time together than old friends.”

With
that remark, which she did not understand precisely, she found herself at the
table, picked out by slowly emerging lights against the dark dusk. A chord of
delight struck inside her when she saw that Dick had taken her mother on his
right hand; for herself she was between Luis Campion and Brady.

Surcharged
with her emotion she turned to Brady with the intention of confiding in him,
but at her first mention of Dick a hard-boiled sparkle in his eyes gave her to
understand that he refused the fatherly office. In turn she was equally firm
when he tried to monopolize her hand, so they talked shop or rather she
listened while he talked shop, her polite eyes never leaving his face, but her
mind was so definitely elsewhere that she felt he must guess the fact.
Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from
her subconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle with
only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind.

VII

In a
pause Rosemary looked away and up the table where Nicole sat between Tommy
Barban
and Abe North, her chow’s hair foaming and frothing
in the candlelight. Rosemary listened, caught sharply by the rich clipped voice
in infrequent speech:

“The
poor man,” Nicole exclaimed. “Why did you want to saw him in two?”

“Naturally
I wanted to see what was inside a waiter. Wouldn’t you like to know what was
inside a waiter?”

“Old
menus,” suggested Nicole with a short laugh.
“Pieces of
broken china and tips and pencil stubs.”

“Exactly—but
the thing was to prove it scientifically. And of course doing it with that
musical saw would have eliminated any sordidness.”

“Did you
intend to play the saw while you performed the operation?” Tommy inquired.

“We
didn’t get quite that far. We were alarmed by the screams. We thought he might
rupture something.”

“All
sounds very peculiar to me,” said Nicole. “Any musician that’ll use another
musician’s saw to—”

They had
been at table half an hour and a perceptible change had set in—person by person
had given up something, a preoccupation, an anxiety, a suspicion, and now they
were only their best selves and the Divers’ guests. Not to have been friendly
and interested would have seemed to reflect on the Divers, so now they were all
trying, and seeing this, Rosemary liked everyone—except
McKisco
,
who had contrived to be the unassimilated member of the party. This was less
from ill will than from his determination to sustain with wine the good spirits
he had enjoyed on his arrival. Lying back in his place between Earl Brady, to
whom he had addressed several withering remarks about the movies, and Mrs.
Abrams, to whom he said nothing, he stared at Dick Diver with an expression of
devastating irony, the effect being occasionally interrupted by his attempts to
engage Dick in a cater-cornered conversation across the table.

“Aren’t
you a friend of Van Buren
Denby
?” he would say.

“I don’t
believe I know him.”

“I
thought you were a friend of his,” he persisted irritably.

When the
subject of Mr.
Denby
fell of its own weight, he
essayed other equally irrelative themes, but each time the very deference of
Dick’s attention seemed to paralyze him, and after a moment’s stark pause the
conversation that he had interrupted would go on without him. He tried breaking
into other dialogues, but it was like continually shaking hands with a glove
from which the hand had been withdrawn—so finally, with a resigned air of being
among children, he devoted his attention entirely to the champagne.

Rosemary’s
glance moved at intervals around the table, eager for the others’ enjoyment, as
if they were her future stepchildren. A gracious table light, emanating from a
bowl of spicy pinks, fell upon Mrs. Abrams’ face, cooked to a turn in
Veuve
Cliquot
, full of vigor,
tolerance, adolescent good will; next to her sat Mr. Royal
Dumphry
,
his girl’s comeliness less startling in the pleasure world of evening. Then
Violet
McKisco
, whose prettiness had been piped to
the surface of her, so that she ceased her struggle to make tangible to herself
her shadowy position as the wife of an arriviste who had not
arrived
.

Then
came
Dick, with his arms full of the slack he had taken up
from others, deeply merged in his own party.

Then her
mother, forever perfect.

Then
Barban
talking to her mother with an
urbane fluency that made Rosemary like him again.
Then Nicole.
Rosemary saw her suddenly in a new way and found her one of the most beautiful
people she had ever known. Her face, the face of a saint, a
viking
Madonna, shone through the faint motes that
snowed across the candlelight, drew down its flush from the wine-colored
lanterns in the pine. She was still as still.

Abe
North was talking to her about his moral code: “Of course I’ve got one,” he
insisted, “—a man can’t live without a moral code. Mine is that I’m against the
burning of witches. Whenever they burn a witch I get all hot under the collar.”
Rosemary knew from Brady that he was a musician who after a brilliant and
precocious start had composed nothing for seven years.

Next was
Campion, managing somehow to restrain his most blatant effeminacy, and even to
visit upon those near him a certain disinterested motherliness. Then Mary North
with a face so merry that it was impossible not to smile back into the white
mirrors of her teeth—the whole area around her parted lips was a lovely little
circle of delight.

Finally
Brady, whose heartiness became, moment by moment, a social thing instead of a
crude assertion and reassertion of his own mental health, and his preservation
of it by a detachment from the frailties of
others.

Rosemary,
as dewy with belief as a child from one of Mrs. Burnett’s vicious tracts, had a
conviction of homecoming, of a return from the derisive and salacious
improvisations of the frontier. There were fireflies riding on the dark
air
and a dog baying on some low and far-away ledge of the
cliff. The table seemed to have risen a little toward the sky like a mechanical
dancing platform, giving the people around it a sense of being alone with each
other in the dark universe, nourished by its only food, warmed by its only
lights. And, as if a curious hushed laugh from Mrs.
McKisco
were a signal that such a detachment from the world had been attained, the two
Divers began suddenly to warm and glow and expand, as if to make up to their
guests, already so subtly assured of their importance, so flattered with
politeness, for anything they might still miss from that country well left
behind. Just for a moment they seemed to speak to
every one
at the table, singly and together, assuring them of their friendliness, their
affection. And for a moment the faces turned up toward them were like the faces
of poor children at a Christmas tree. Then abruptly the table broke up—the
moment when the guests had been daringly lifted above conviviality into the
rarer atmosphere of sentiment, was over before it could be irreverently
breathed, before they had half realized it was there.

But the
diffused magic of the hot sweet South had withdrawn into them—the soft-pawed
night and the ghostly wash of the
Mediterranean
far below—the magic left these things and melted into the two Divers and became
part of them. Rosemary watched Nicole pressing upon her mother a yellow evening
bag she had admired, saying, “I think things ought to belong to the people that
like them”—and then sweeping into it all the yellow articles she could find, a
pencil, a lipstick, a little note book, “because they all go together.”

Nicole
disappeared and presently Rosemary noticed that Dick was no longer there; the
guests distributed themselves in the garden or drifted in toward the terrace.

“Do you
want,” Violet
McKisco
asked Rosemary, “to go to the
bathroom?”

Not at
that precise moment.

“I
want,” insisted Mrs.
McKisco
, “to go to the
bathroom.” As a frank outspoken woman she walked toward the house, dragging her
secret after her, while Rosemary looked after with reprobation. Earl Brady
proposed that they walk down to the sea wall but she felt that this was her
time to have a share of Dick Diver when he reappeared, so she stalled,
listening to
McKisco
quarrel with
Barban
.

“Why do
you want to fight the Soviets?”
McKisco
said. “The
greatest experiment ever made by humanity?
And the Riff?
It seems to me it would be more heroic to fight on the just side.”

“How do
you find out which it is?” asked
Barban
dryly.

“Why—usually
everybody intelligent knows.”

“Are you
a Communist?”

“I’m a
Socialist,” said
McKisco
, “I sympathize with
Russia
.”

“Well,
I’m a soldier,”
Barban
answered pleasantly. “My
business is to kill people. I fought against the Riff because I am a European,
and I have fought the Communists because they want to take my property from
me.”

“Of all
the narrow-minded excuses,”
McKisco
looked around to
establish a derisive liaison with
some one
else, but
without success. He had no idea what he was up against in
Barban
,
neither of the simplicity of the other man’s bag of ideas nor of the complexity
of his training.
McKisco
knew what ideas were, and as
his mind grew he was able to recognize and sort an increasing number of
them—but faced by a man whom he considered “dumb,” one in whom he found no
ideas he could recognize as such, and yet to whom he could not feel personally
superior, he jumped at the conclusion that
Barban
was
the end product of an archaic world, and as such, worthless.
McKisco’s
contacts with the princely classes in America had
impressed upon him their uncertain and fumbling snobbery, their delight in
ignorance and their deliberate rudeness, all lifted from the English with no
regard paid to factors that make English philistinism and rudeness purposeful,
and applied in a land where a little knowledge and civility buy more than they
do anywhere else—an attitude which reached its apogee in the “Harvard manner”
of about 1900. He thought that this
Barban
was of
that type, and being drunk rashly forgot that he was in awe of him—this led up
to the trouble in which he presently found himself.

Feeling
vaguely ashamed for
McKisco
, Rosemary waited, placid
but inwardly on fire, for Dick Diver’s return. From her chair at the deserted
table with
Barban
,
McKisco
,
and Abe she looked up along the path edged with shadowy myrtle and fern to the
stone terrace, and falling in love with her mother’s profile against a lighted
door, was about to go there when Mrs.
McKisco
came
hurrying down from the house.

She
exuded excitement. In the very silence with which she pulled out a chair and
sat down, her eyes staring, her mouth working a little, they all recognized a
person crop-f of news, and her husband’s “What’s the matter, Vi?” came
naturally, as all eyes turned toward her.

“My dear—”
she said at large, and then addressed Rosemary, “my dear—it’s nothing. I really
can’t say a word.”

“You’re
among friends,” said Abe.

“Well,
upstairs I came upon a scene, my dears—”

Shaking
her head cryptically she broke off just in time, for Tommy arose and addressed
her politely but sharply:

“It’s
inadvisable to comment on what goes on in this house.”

VIII

Violet
breathed loud and hard once and with an effort brought another expression into
her face.

Dick
came finally and with a sure instinct he separated
Barban
and the
McKiscos
and became excessively ignorant and
inquisitive about literature with
McKisco
—thus giving
the latter the moment of superiority which he required. The others helped him
carry lamps up—who would not be pleased at carrying lamps helpfully through the
darkness? Rosemary helped, meanwhile responding patiently to Royal
Dumphry’s
inexhaustible curiosity about
Hollywood
.