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's7 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 faraway 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But the diffused magic of the hot sweet South had withdrawn into them--the soft-pawed night and the ghostly wash of the Mediterranean far below--the magic left these things and melted into the two Divers and became part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?8 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-full 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?9 Rosemary helped, meanwhile responding patiently to Royal Dumphry's inexhaustible curiosity about Hollywood.
Now--she was thinking--I've earned a time alone with him. He must know that because his laws are like the laws Mother taught me.
Rosemary was right--presently he detached her from the company on the terrace, and they were alone together, borne away from the house toward the seaside wall with what were less steps than irregularly spaced intervals through some of which she was pulled, through others blown.
They looked out over the Mediterranean. Far below, the last excursion boat from the Iles de Lerins floated across the bay like a Fourth-of-July balloon foot-loose in the heavens. Between the black isles it floated, softly parting the dark tide.
"I understand why you speak as you do of your mother," he said. "Her attitude toward you is very fine, I think. She has a sort of wisdom that's rare in America."
"Mother is perfect," she prayed.
"I was talking to her about a plan I have--she told me that how long you both stayed in France depended on you."
On you, Rosemary all but said aloud.
"So since things are over down here----"
"Over?" she inquired.
"Well, this is over--this part of the summer is over. Last week Nicole's sister left, to-morrow Tommy Barban leaves, Monday Abe and Mary North are leaving. Maybe we'll have more fun this summer but this particular fun is over. I want it to die violently instead of fading out sentimentally--that's why I gave this party. What I'm coming to is--Nicole and I are going up to Paris to see Abe North off for America--I wonder if you'd like to go with us."
"What did Mother say?"
"She seemed to think it would be fine. She doesn't want to go herself. She wants you to go alone."
"I haven't seen Paris since I've been grown,"
said Rosemary. "I'd love to see it with you."
"That's nice of you." Did she imagine that his voice was suddenly metallic? "Of course we've been excited about you from the moment you came on the beach. That vitality, we were sure it was professsional--especially Nicole was. It'd never use itself up on any one person or group."
Her instinct cried out to her that he was passing her along slowly toward Nicole and she put her own brakes on, saying with an equal hardness:
"I wanted to know all of you too--especially you. I told you I fell in love with you the first time I saw you."
She was right going at it that way. But the space between heaven and earth had cooled his mind, destroyed the impulsiveness that had led him to bring her here, and made him aware of the too obvious appeal, the struggle with an unrehearsed scene and unfamiliar words.
He tried now to make her want to go back to the house and it was difficult, and he did not quite want to lose her. She felt only the draft blowing as he joked with her good-humoredly.
"You don't know what you want. You go and ask your mother what you want."
She was stricken. She touched him, feeling the smooth cloth of his dark coat like a chasuble. She seemed about to fall to her knees--from that position she delivered her last shot.
"I think you're the most wonderful person I ever met--except my mother."
"You have romantic eyes."
His laughter swept them on up toward the terrace where he delivered her to Nicole....
Too soon it had become time to go and the Divers helped them all to go quickly. In the Divers' big Isotta there would be Tommy Barban and his baggage--he was spending the night at the hotel to catch an early train--with Mrs. Abrams, the McKiscos and Campion. Earl Brady was going to drop Rosemary and her mother on his way to Monte Carlo, and Royal Dumphry rode with them because the Divers' car was crowded. Down in the garden lanterns still glowed over the table where they had dined, as the Divers stood side by side in the gate, Nicole blooming away and filling the night with graciousness, and Dick bidding good-by to everyone by name. To Rosemary it seemed very poignant to drive away and leave them in their house. Again she wondered what Mrs. McKisco had seen in the bathroom.
IX
IT was a limpid black night, hung as in a basket from a single dull star. The horn of the car ahead was muffled by the resistance of the thick air. Brady's chauffeur drove slowly; the tail-light of the other car appeared from time to time at turnings--then not at all. But after ten minutes it came into sight again, drawn up at the side of the road. Brady's chauffeur slowed up behind but immediately it began to roll forward slowly and they passed it. In the instant they passed it they heard a blur of voices from behind the reticence of the limousine and saw that the Divers' chauffeur was grinning. Then they went on, going fast through the alternating banks of darkness and thin night, descending at last in a series of roller-coaster swoops, to the great bulk of Gausse's Hotel.
Rosemary dozed for three hours and then lay awake, suspended in the moonshine. Cloaked by the erotic darkness she exhausted the future quickly, with all the eventualities that might lead up to a kiss, but with the kiss itself as blurred as a kiss in pictures. She changed position in bed deliberately, the first sign of insomnia she had ever had, and tried to think with her mother's mind about the question. In this process she was often acute beyond her experience, with remembered things from old conversations that had gone into her half-heard.
Rosemary had been brought up with the idea of work. Mrs. Speers had spent the slim leavings of the men who had widowed her on her daughter's education, and when she blossomed out at sixteen with that extraordinary hair, rushed her to Aix-les-Bains and marched her unannounced into the suite of an American producer who was recuperating there. When the producer went to New York they went too. Thus Rosemary had passed her entrance examinations. With the ensuing success and the promise of comparative stability that followed, Mrs. Speers had felt free to tacitly imply tonight:
"You were brought up to work--not especially to marry. Now you've found your first nut to crack and it's a good nut--go ahead and put whatever happens down to experience. Wound yourself or him--whatever happens it can't spoil you because economically you're a boy, not a girl."
Rosemary had never done much thinking, save about the illimitability of her mother's perfections, so this final severance of the umbilical cord disturbed her sleep. A false dawn sent the sky pressing through the tall French windows, and getting up she walked out on the terrace, warm to her bare feet. There were secret noises in the air, an insistent bird achieved an ill-natured triumph with regularity in the trees above the tennis court; footfalls followed a round drive in the rear of the hotel, taking their tone in turn from the dust road, the crushed-stone walk, the cement steps, and then reversing the process in going away. Beyond the inky sea and far up that high, black shadow of a hill lived the Divers. She thought of them both together, heard them still singing faintly a song like rising smoke, like a hymn, very remote in time and far away. Their children slept, their gate was shut for the night.
She went inside and dressing in a light gown and espadrilles went out her window again and along the continuous terrace toward the front door, going fast since she found that other private rooms, exuding sleep, gave upon it. She stopped at the sight of a figure seated on the wide white stairway of the formal entrance--then she saw that it was Luis Campion and that he was weeping.
He was weeping hard and quietly and shaking in the same parts as a weeping woman. A scene in a role she had played last year swept over her irresistibly and advancing she touched him on the shoulder. He gave a little yelp before he recognized her.
"What is it?" Her eyes were level and kind and not slanted into him with hard curiosity. "Can I help you?"
"Nobody can help me. I knew it. I have only myself to blame. It's always the same."
"What is it--do you want to tell me?"
He looked at her to see.
"No," he decided. "When you're older you'll know what people who love suffer. The agony. It's better to be cold and young than to love. It's happened to me before but never like this--so accidental--just when everything was going well."
His face was repulsive in the quickening light. Not by a flicker of her personality, a movement of the smallest muscle, did she betray her sudden disgust with whatever it was. But Campion's sensitivity realized it and he changed the subject rather suddenly.
"Abe North is around here somewhere."
"Why, he's staying at the Divers'!"
"Yes, but he's up--don't you know what happened?"
A shutter opened suddenly in a room two stories above and an English voice spat distinctly:
"Will you kaindlay stup tucking!"
Rosemary and Luis Campion went humbly down the steps and to a bench beside the road to the beach.
"Then you have no idea what's happened? My dear, the most extraordinary thing--" He was warming up now, hanging on to his revelation. "I've never seen a thing come so suddenly--I have always avoided violent people--they upset me so I sometimes have to go to bed for days."
He looked at her triumphantly. She had no idea what he was talking about.
"My dear," he burst forth, leaning toward her with his whole body as he touched her on the upper leg, to show it was no mere irresponsible venture of his hand--he was so sure of himself. "There's going to be a duel."
"Wh-at?"
"A duel with--we don't know what yet."
"Who's going to duel?"
"I'll tell you from the beginning." He drew a long breath and then said, as if it were rather to her discredit but he wouldn't hold it against her. "Of course, you were in the other automobile. Well, in a way you were lucky--I lost at least two years of my life, it came so suddenly."
"What came?" she demanded.
"I don't know what began it. First she began to talk----"
"Who?"
"Violet McKisco." He lowered his voice as if there were people under the bench. "But don't me
ntion the Divers because he made threats against anybody who mentioned it."
"Who did?"
"Tommy Barban, so don't you say I so much as mentioned them. None of us ever found out anyhow what it was Violet had to say because he kept interrupting her, and then her husband got into it and now, my dear, we have the duel. This morning--at five o'clock--in an hour." He sighed suddenly thinking of his own griefs. "I almost wish it were I. I might as well be killed now I have nothing to live for." He broke off and rocked to and fro with sorrow.
Again the iron shutter parted above and the same British voice said:
"Rilly, this must stup immejetely."
Simultaneously Abe North, looking somewhat distracted, came out of the hotel, perceived them against the sky, white over the sea. Rosemary shook her head warningly before he could speak and they moved another bench further down the road. Rosemary saw that Abe was a little tight.
"What are you doing up?" he demanded.
"I just got up." She started to laugh, but remembering the voice above, she restrained herself.
"Plagued by the nightingale,"10 Abe suggested, and repeated, "probably plagued by the nightingale. Has this sewing-circle member told you what happened?"
Campion said with dignity:
"I only know what I heard with my own ears."
He got up and walked swiftly away; Abe sat down beside Rosemary.
"Why did you treat him so badly?"
"Did I?" he asked surprised. "He's been weeping around here all morning."
"Well, maybe he's sad about something."
"Maybe he is."
"What about a duel? Who's going to duel? I thought there was something strange in that car. Is it true?"
"It certainly is coo-coo but it seems to be true."
X
THE trouble began at the time Earl Brady's car passed the Divers' car stopped on the road--Abe's account melted impersonally into the thronged night--Violet McKisco was telling Mrs. Abrams something she had found out about the Divers--she had gone upstairs in their house and she had come upon something there which had made a great impression on her. But Tommy is a watch-dog about the Divers. As a matter of fact she is inspiring and formidable--but it's a mutual thing, and the fact of The Divers together is more important to their friends than many of them realize. Of course it's done at a certain sacrifice--sometimes they seem just rather charming figures in a ballet, and worth just the attention you give a ballet, but it's more than that--you'd have to know the story. Anyhow Tommy is one of those men that Dick's passed along to Nicole and when Mrs. McKisco kept hinting at her story, he called them on it. He said:
Tender Is the Night Page 9
