"Do you like what you see?" she murmured.
"Parle francais."
"Very well," and she asked again in French. "Do you like what you see?"
He pulled her closer.
"I like whatever I see about you." He hesitated. "I thought I knew your face but it seems there are some things I didn't know about it. When did you begin to have white crook's eyes?"
She broke away, shocked and indignant, and cried in English:
"Is that why you wanted to talk French?" Her voice quieted as the butler came with sherry. "So you could be offensive more accurately?"
She parked her small seat violently on the cloth-of-silver chair cushion.
"I have no mirror here," she said, again in French, but decisively, "but if my eyes have changed it's because I'm well again. And being well perhaps I've gone back to my true self--I suppose my grandfather was a crook and I'm a crook by heritage, so there we are. Does that satisfy your logical mind?"
He scarcely seemed to know what she was talking about.
"Where's Dick--is he lunching with us?"
Seeing that his remark had meant comparatively little to him she suddenly laughed away its effect.
"Dick's on a tour," she said. "Rosemary Hoyt turned up, and either they're together or she upset him so much that he wants to go away and dream about her."
"You know, you're a little complicated after all."
"Oh no," she assured him hastily. "No, I'm not really--I'm just a--I'm just a whole lot of different simple people."
Marius brought out melon and an ice pail, and Nicole, thinking irresistibly about her crook's eyes, did not answer; he gave one an entire nut to crack, this man, instead of giving it in fragments to pick at for meat.
"Why didn't they leave you in your natural state?" Tommy demanded presently. "You are the most dramatic person I have known."
She had no answer.
"All this taming of women!" he scoffed.
"In any society there are certain--" She felt Dick's ghost prompting at her elbow but she subsided at Tommy's overtone:
"I've brutalized many men into shape but I wouldn't take a chance on half the number of women. Especially this 'kind' bullying--what good does it do anybody?--you or him or anybody?"
Her heart leaped and then sank faintly with a sense of what she owed Dick
"I suppose I've got----"
"You've got too much money," he said impatiently. "That's the crux of the matter. Dick can't beat that."
She considered while the melons were removed.
"What do you think I ought to do?"
For the first time in ten years she was under the sway of a personality other than her husband's. Everything Tommy said to her became part of her forever.
They drank the bottle of wine while a faint wind rocked the pine needles and the sensuous heat of early afternoon made blinding freckles on the checkered luncheon cloth. Tommy came over behind her and laid his arms along hers, clasping her hands. Their cheeks touched and then their lips and she gasped half with passion for him, half with the sudden surprise of its force....
"Can't you send the governess and the children away for the afternoon?"
"They have a piano lesson. Anyhow I don't want to stay here."
"Kiss me again."
A little later, riding toward Nice, she thought: So I have white crook's eyes, have I? Very well then, better a sane crook than a mad puritan.
His assertion seemed to absolve her from all blame or responsibility and she had a thrill of delight in thinking of herself in a new way. New vistas appeared ahead, peopled with the faces of many men, none of whom she need obey or even love. She drew in her breath, hunched her shoulders with a wriggle and turned to Tommy.
"Have we got to go all the way to your hotel at Monte Carlo?"
He brought the car to a stop with a squeak of tires.
"No!" he answered. "And, my God, I have never been so happy as I am this minute."
They had passed through Nice following the blue coast and begun to mount to the middling-high Corniche. Now Tommy turned sharply down to the shore, ran out a blunt peninsula, and stopped in the rear of a small shore hotel.
Its tangibility frightened Nicole for a moment. At the desk an American was arguing interminably with the clerk about the rate of exchange. She hovered, outwardly tranquil but inwardly miserable, as Tommy filled out the police blanks--his real, hers false. Their room was a Mediterranean room, almost ascetic, almost clean, darkened to the glare of the sea. Simplest of pleasures--simplest of places. Tommy ordered two cognacs, and when the door closed behind the waiter, he sat in the only chair, dark, scarred and handsome, his eyebrows arched and upcurling, a fighting Puck, an earnest Satan.
Before they had finished the brandy they suddenly moved together and met standing up; then they were sitting on the bed and he kissed her hardy knees. Struggling a little still, like a decapitated animal, she forgot about Dick and her new white eyes, forgot Tommy himself and sank deeper and deeper into the minutes and the moment.
... When he got up to open a shutter and find out what caused the increasing clamor below their windows, his figure was darker and stronger than Dick's, with high lights along the rope-twists of muscle. Momentarily he had forgotten her too--almost in the second of his flesh breaking from hers she had a foretaste that things were going to be different than she had expected. She felt the nameless fear which precedes all emotions, joyous or sorrowful, inevitably as a hum of thunder precedes a storm.
Tommy peered cautiously from the balcony and reported.
"All I can see is two women on the balcony below this. They're talking about weather and tipping back and forth in American rocking-chairs."
"Making all that noise?"
"The noise is coming from somewhere below them. Listen."
"Oh, way down South in the land of cotton
Hotels bum and business rotten
Look away----"
"It's Americans."
Nicole flung her arms wide on the bed and stared at the ceiling; the powder had dampened on her to make a milky surface. She liked the bareness of the room, the sound of the single fly navigating overhead. Tommy brought the chair over to the bed and swept the clothes off it to sit down; she liked the economy of the weightless dress and espadrilles that mingled with his ducks upon the floor.
He inspected the oblong white torso joined abruptly to the brown limbs and head, and said, laughing gravely:
"You are all new like a baby."
"With white eyes."
"I'll take care of that."
"It's very hard taking care of white eyes--especially the ones made in Chicago."
"I know all the old Languedoc peasant remedies."61
"Kiss me, on the lips, Tommy."
"That's so American," he said, kissing her nevertheless. "When I was in America last there were girls who would tear you apart with their lips, tear themselves too, until their faces were scarlet with the blood around the lips all brought out in a patch--but nothing further."
Nicole leaned up on one elbow.
"I like this room," she said.
He looked around.
"I find it somewhat meagre. Darling, I'm glad you wouldn't wait until we got to Monte Carlo."
"Why only meagre? Why, this is a wonderful room, Tommy--like the bare tables in so many Cezannes and Picassos."
"I don't know." He did not try to understand her. "There's that noise again. My God, has there been a murder?"
He went to the window and reported once more:
"It seems to be two American sailors fighting and a lot more cheering them on. They are from your battleship off shore." He wrapped a towel around himself and went farther out on the balcony. "They have poules with them. I have heard about this now--the women follow them from place to place wherever the ship goes. But what women! One would think with their pay they could find better women! Why the women who followed Korniloff! Why we never looked at anything less than a ballerina!
&n
bsp; Nicole was glad he had known so many women, so that the word itself meant nothing to him; she would be able to hold him so long as the person in her transcended the universals of her body.
"Hit him where it hurts!"
"Yah-h-h-h!"
"Hey, what I tell you get inside that right!"
"Come on, Dulschmit, you son!"
"Yaa-Yaa!"
"YA-YEH-YAH!"
Tommy turned away.
"This place seems to have outlived its usefulness, you agree?"
She agreed, but they clung together for a moment before dressing, and then for a while longer it seemed as good enough a palace as any....
Dressing at last Tommy exclaimed:
"My God, those two women in the rocking-chairs on the balcony below us haven't moved. They're trying to talk this matter out of existence. They're here on an economical holiday, and all the American navy and all the whores in Europe couldn't spoil it."
He came over gently and surrounded her, pulling the shoulder strap of her slip into place with his teeth; then a sound split the air outside: Cr-ACK--BOOM-M-m-m! It was the battleship sounding a recall.
Now, down below their window, it was pandemonium indeed--for the boat was moving to shores as yet unannounced. Waiters called accounts and demanded settlements in impassioned voices, there were oaths and denials; the tossing of bills too large and change too small; passouts were assisted to the boats, and the voices of the naval police chopped with quick commands through all voices. There were cries, tears, shrieks, promises as the first launch shoved off and the women crowded forward on the wharf, screaming and waving.
Tommy saw a girl rush out upon the balcony below waving a napkin, and before he could see whether or not the rocking Englishwomen gave in at last and acknowledged her presence, there was a knock at their own door. Outside, excited female voices made them agree to unlock it, disclosing two girls, young, thin and barbaric, unfound rather than lost, in the hall. One of them wept chokingly.
"Kwee wave off your porch?" implored the other in passionate American. "Kwee please? Wave at the boy friends? Kwee, please. The other rooms is all locked."
"With pleasure," Tommy said.
The girls rushed out on the balcony and presently their voices struck a loud treble over the din.
"'By, Charlie! Charlie, look up!"
"Send a wire gen'al alivery Nice!"
"Charlie! He don't see me."
One of the girls hoisted her skirt suddenly, pulled and ripped at her pink step-ins and tore them to a sizable flag; then, screaming "Ben! Ben!" she waved it wildly. As Tommy and Nicole left the room it still fluttered against the blue sky. Oh, say can you see the tender color of remembered flesh?--while at the stern of the battleship arose in rivalry the Star-Spangled Banner.
They dined at the new Beach Casino at Monte Carlo ... much later they swam in Beaulieu in a roofless cavern of white moonlight formed by a circlet of pale boulders about a cup of phosphorescent water, facing Monaco and the blur of Menton. She liked his bringing her there to the eastward vision and the novel tricks of wind and water; it was all as new as they were to each other. Symbolically she lay across his saddle-bow as surely as if he had wolfed her away from Damascus and they had come out upon the Mongolian plain. Moment by moment all that Dick had taught her fell away and she was ever nearer to what she had been in the beginning, prototype of that obscure yielding up of swords that was going on in the world about her. Tangled with love in the moonlight she welcomed the anarchy of her lover.
They awoke together finding the moon gone down and the air cool. She struggled up demanding the time and Tommy called it roughly at three.
"I've got to go home then."
"I thought we'd sleep in Monte Carlo."
"No. There's a governess and the children. I've got to roll in before daylight."
"As you like."
They dipped for a second, and when he saw her shivering he rubbed her briskly with a towel. As they got into the car with their heads still damp, their skins fresh and glowing, they were loath to start back. It was very bright where they were and as Tommy kissed her she felt him losing himself in the whiteness of her cheeks and her white teeth and her cool brow and the hand that touched his face. Still attuned to Dick, she waited for interpretation or qualification; but none was forthcoming. Reassured sleepily and happily that none would be, she sank low in the seat and drowsed until the sound of the motor changed and she felt them climbing toward Villa Diana. At the gate she kissed him an almost automatic good-by. The sound of her feet on the walk was changed, the night noises of the garden were suddenly in the past but she was glad, none the less, to be back. The day had progressed at a staccato rate, and in spite of its satisfactions she was not habituated to such strain.
IX
AT four o'clock next afternoon a station taxi stopped at the gate and Dick got out. Suddenly off balance, Nicole ran from the terrace to meet him, breathless with her effort at self-control.
"Where's the car?" she asked.
"I left it in Arles. I didn't feel like driving any more."
"I thought from your note that you'd be several days."
"I ran into a mistral and some rain."
"Did you have fun?"
"Just as much fun as anybody has running away from things. I drove Rosemary as far as Avignon and put her on her train there." They walked toward the terrace together, where he deposited his bag. "I didn't tell you in the note because I thought you'd imagine a lot of things."
"That was very considerate of you." Nicole felt surer of herself now.
"I wanted to find out if she had anything to offer--the only way was to see her alone."
"Did she have--anything to offer?"
"Rosemary didn't grow up," he answered. "It's probably better that way. What have you been doing?"
She felt her face quiver like a rabbit's.
"I went dancing last night--with Tommy Barban. We went----"
He winced, interrupting her.
"Don't tell me about it. It doesn't matter what you do, only I don't want to know anything definitely."
"There isn't anything to know."
"All right, all right." Then as if he had been away a week: "How are the children?"
The phone rang in the house.
"If it's for me I'm not home," said Dick turning away quickly. "I've got some things to do over in the work-room."
Nicole waited till he was out of sight behind the well; then she went into the house and took up the phone.
"Nicole, comment vas-tu?"
"Dick's home."
He groaned.
"Met me here in Cannes," he suggested. "I've got to talk to you."
"I can't."
"Tell me you love me." Without speaking she nodded at the receiver; he repeated, "Tell me you love me."
"Oh, I do," she assured him. "But there's nothing to be done right now."
"Of course there is," he said impatiently. "Dick sees it's over between you two--it's obvious he has quit. What does he expect you to do?"
"I don't know. I'll have to--" She stopped herself from saying "--to wait until I can ask Dick," and instead finished with; "I'll write and I'll phone you tomorrow."
She wandered about the house rather contentedly, resting on her achievement. She was a mischief, and that was a satisfaction; no longer was she a huntress of corralled game. Yesterday came back to her now in innumerable detail--detail that began to overlay her memory of similar moments when her love for Dick was fresh and intact. She began to slight that love, so that it seemed to have been tinged with sentimental habit from the first. With the opportunistic memory of women she scarcely recalled how she had felt when she and Dick had possessed each other in secret places around the corners of the world, during the month before they were married. Just so had she lied to Tommy last night, swearing to him that never before had she so entirely, so completely, so utterly....
... then remorse for this moment of betrayal, which so cavalierly belittled a
decade of her life, turned her walk toward Dick's sanctuary.
Approaching noiselessly she saw him behind his cottage, sitting in a steamer chair by the cliff wall, and for a moment she regarded him silently. He was thinking, he was living a world completely his own and in the small motions of his face, the brow raised or lowered, the eyes narrowed or widened, the lips set and reset, the play of his hands, she saw him progress from phase to phase of his own story spinning out inside him, his own, not hers. Once he clenched his fists and leaned forward, once it brought into his face an expression of torment and despair--when this passed its stamp lingered in his eyes. For almost the first time in her life she was sorry for him--it is hard for those who have once been mentally afflicted to be sorry for those who are well, and though Nicole often paid lip service to the fact that he had led her back to the world she had forfeited, she had thought of him really as an inexhaustible energy, incapable of fatigue--she forgot the troubles she caused him at the moment when she forgot the troubles of her own that had prompted her. That he no longer controlled her--did he know that? Had he willed it all?--she felt as sorry for him as she had sometimes felt for Abe North and his ignoble destiny, sorry as for the helplessness of infants and the old.
She went up putting her arm around his shoulder and touching their heads together said:
"Don't be sad."
He looked at her coldly.
"Don't touch me!" he said.
Confused she moved a few feet away.
"Excuse me," he continued abstractedly. "I was just thinking what I thought of you----"
"Why not add the new classification to your book?"
"I have thought of it--'Furthermore and beyond the psychoses and the neuroses----' "
"I didn't come over here to be disagreeable."
"Then why did you come, Nicole? I can't do anything for you any more. I'm trying to save myself."
"From my contamination?"
"Profession throws me in contact with questionable company sometimes."
She wept with anger at the abuse.
"You're a coward! You've made a failure of your life, and you want to blame it on me."
While he did not answer she began to feel the old hypnotism of his intelligence, sometimes exercised without power but always with substrata of truth under truth which she could not break or even crack. Again she struggled with it, fighting him with her small, fine eyes, with the plush arrogance of a top dog, with her nascent transference to another man, with the accumulated resentment of years; she fought him with her money and her faith that her sister disliked him and was behind her now; with the thought of the new enemies he was making with his bitterness, with her quick guile against his wine-ing and dine-ing slowness, her health and beauty against his physical deterioration, her unscrupulousness against his moralities--for this inner battle she used even her weaknesses--fighting bravely and courageously with the old cans and crockery and bottles, empty receptacles of her expiated sins, outrages, mistakes. And suddenly, in the space of two minutes she achieved her victory and justified herself to herself without lie or subterfuge, cut the cord forever. Then she walked, weak in the legs, and sobbing coolly, toward the household that was hers at last.
Tender Is the Night Page 36
