Tender Is the Night (2 page)

The man
of the monocle and bottle spoke suddenly out of the sky above Rosemary.

“You are
a ripping swimmer.”

She
demurred.

“Jolly
good. My name is Campion. Here is a lady who says she saw you in
Sorrento
last week and
knows who you are and would so like to meet you.”

Glancing
around with concealed annoyance Rosemary saw the
untanned
people were waiting. Reluctantly she got up and went over to them.

“Mrs.
Abrams—Mrs.
McKisco
—Mr.
McKisco—Mr
.
Dumphry
—

“We know
who you are,” spoke up the woman in evening dress. “You’re Rosemary Hoyt and I
recognized you in
Sorrento
and asked the hotel clerk and we all think you’re perfectly
marvellous
and we want to know why you’re not back in
America
making another
marvellous
moving picture.”

They
made a superfluous gesture of moving over for her. The woman who had recognized
her was not a Jewess, despite her name. She was one of those elderly “good
sports” preserved by
an imperviousness
to experience
and a good digestion into another generation.

“We
wanted to warn you about getting burned the first day,” she continued cheerily,
“because YOUR skin is important, but there seems to be so darn much formality
on this beach that we didn’t know whether you’d mind.”

II

“We
thought maybe you were in the plot,” said Mrs.
McKisco
.
She was a shabby-eyed, pretty young woman with a disheartening intensity. “We
don’t know who’s in the plot and who isn’t. One man my husband had been
particularly nice to
turned
out to be a chief
character—practically the assistant hero.”

“The
plot?” inquired Rosemary, half understanding. “Is there a plot?”

“My
dear, we don’t KNOW,” said Mrs. Abrams, with a convulsive, stout woman’s
chuckle. “We’re not in it. We’re the gallery.”

Mr.
Dumphry
, a tow-headed effeminate young man, remarked: “Mama
Abrams is a plot in herself,” and Campion shook his monocle at him, saying:
“Now, Royal, don’t be too ghastly for words.” Rosemary looked at them all
uncomfortably, wishing her mother had come down here with her. She did not like
these people, especially in her immediate comparison of them with those who had
interested her at the other end of the beach. Her mother’s modest but compact
social gift got them out of unwelcome situations swiftly and firmly. But
Rosemary had been a celebrity for only six months, and sometimes the French
manners of her early adolescence and the democratic manners of
America
, these
latter superimposed, made
a certain
confusion and let
her in for just such things.

Mr.
McKisco
, a scrawny, freckle-and-red man of thirty, did not
find the topic of the “plot” amusing. He had been staring at the sea— now after
a swift glance at his wife he turned to Rosemary and demanded aggressively:

“Been
here long?”

“Only a day.”

“Oh.”

Evidently
feeling that the subject had been thoroughly changed, he looked in turn at the
others.

“Going
to stay all summer?” asked Mrs.
McKisco
, innocently.
“If you do you can watch the plot unfold.”

“For
God’s sake, Violet, drop the subject!” exploded her husband. “Get a new joke,
for God’s sake!”

Mrs.
McKisco
swayed toward Mrs. Abrams and breathed audibly:

“He’s
nervous.”

“I’m not
nervous,”
disagreed
McKisco
.
“It just happens I’m not nervous at all.”

He was
burning visibly—a grayish flush had spread over his face, dissolving all his
expressions into a vast ineffectuality. Suddenly remotely conscious of his
condition he got up to go in the water, followed by his wife, and seizing the
opportunity Rosemary followed.

Mr.
McKisco
drew a long breath, flung himself into the shallows
and began a stiff-armed batting of the
Mediterranean
,
obviously intended to suggest a crawl—his breath exhausted he arose and looked
around with an expression of surprise that he was still in sight of shore.

“I
haven’t learned to breathe yet. I never quite understood how they breathed.” He
looked at Rosemary inquiringly.

“I think
you breathe out under water,” she explained. “And every fourth beat you roll
your head over for air.”

“The
breathing’s the hardest part for me. Shall we go to the raft?”

The man
with the leonine head lay stretched out upon the raft, which tipped back and
forth with the motion of the water. As Mrs.
McKisco
reached for it a sudden tilt struck her arm up roughly, whereupon the man
started up and pulled her on board.

“I was
afraid it hit you.” His voice was slow and shy; he had one of the saddest faces
Rosemary had ever seen, the high cheekbones of an Indian, a long upper lip, and
enormous deep-set dark golden eyes. He had spoken out of the side of his mouth,
as if he hoped his words would reach Mrs.
McKisco
by
a circuitous and unobtrusive route; in a minute he had shoved off into the
water and his long body lay motionless toward shore.

Rosemary
and Mrs.
McKisco
watched him. When he had exhausted
his momentum he abruptly bent double, his thin thighs rose above the surface,
and he disappeared totally, leaving scarcely a fleck of foam behind.

“He’s a
good swimmer,” Rosemary said.

Mrs.
McKisco’s
answer came with surprising violence.

“Well,
he’s a rotten musician.” She turned to her husband, who after two unsuccessful
attempts had managed to climb on the raft, and having attained his balance was
trying to make some kind of compensatory flourish, achieving only an extra
stagger. “I was just saying that Abe North may be a good swimmer but he’s a
rotten musician.”

“Yes,”
agreed
McKisco
, grudgingly. Obviously he had created
his wife’s world, and allowed her few liberties in it.

“Antheil’s
my man.” Mrs.
McKisco
turned challengingly to
Rosemary, “
Anthiel
and Joyce. I don’t suppose you
ever hear much about those
sort
of people in
Hollywood
, but my husband
wrote the first criticism of Ulysses that ever appeared in
America
.”

“I wish
I had a cigarette,” said
McKisco
calmly. “That’s more
important to me just now.”

“He’s
got insides—don’t you think so, Albert?”

Her
voice faded off suddenly. The woman of the pearls had joined her two children
in the water, and now Abe North came up under one of them like a volcanic
island, raising him on his shoulders. The child yelled with fear and delight
and the woman watched with a lovely peace, without a smile.

“Is that
his wife?” Rosemary asked.

“No,
that’s Mrs. Diver. They’re not at the hotel.” Her eyes, photographic, did not
move from the woman’s face. After a moment she turned vehemently to Rosemary.

“Have
you been abroad before?”

“Yes—I
went to school in
Paris
.”

“Oh!
Well then you probably know that if you want to enjoy yourself here the thing
is to get to know some real French families. What do these people get out of
it?” She pointed her left shoulder toward shore. “They just stick around with
each other in little cliques. Of course, we had letters of introduction and met
all the best French artists and writers in
Paris
. That made it very nice.”

“I
should think so.”

“My
husband is finishing his first novel, you see.”

Rosemary
said: “Oh, he is?” She was not thinking anything special, except wondering
whether her mother had got to sleep in this heat.

“It’s on
the idea of Ulysses,” continued Mrs.
McKisco
. “Only
instead of taking twenty-four hours my husband takes a hundred years. He takes
a decayed old French aristocrat and puts him in contrast with the mechanical
age—”

“Oh, for
God’s sake, Violet, don’t go telling everybody the idea,” protested
McKisco
. “I don’t want it to get all around before the
book’s published.”

Rosemary
swam back to the shore, where she threw her peignoir over her already sore
shoulders and lay down again in the sun. The man with the jockey cap was now
going from umbrella to umbrella carrying a bottle and little glasses in his
hands; presently he and his friends grew livelier and closer together and now
they were all under a single assemblage of umbrellas—she gathered that
some one
was leaving and that this was a last drink on the
beach. Even the children knew that excitement was generating under that
umbrella and turned toward it—and it seemed to Rosemary that it all came from
the man in the jockey cap.

Noon
dominated sea and sky—even the
white line of
Cannes
,
five miles off, had faded to a mirage of what was fresh and cool; a
robin-breasted sailing boat pulled in behind it a strand from the outer, darker
sea. It seemed that there was no life anywhere in all this expanse of coast
except under the filtered sunlight of those umbrellas, where something went on
amid the color and the murmur.

Campion
walked near her, stood a few feet away and Rosemary closed her eyes, pretending
to be asleep; then she half-opened them and watched two dim, blurred pillars
that were legs. The man tried to edge his way into a sand-colored cloud, but
the cloud floated off into the vast hot sky. Rosemary fell really asleep.

She
awoke drenched with sweat to find the beach deserted save for the man in the
jockey cap, who was folding a last umbrella.
As Rosemary lay blinking, he walked nearer and said:

“I was
going to wake you before I left. It’s not good to get too burned right away.”

“Thank
you.” Rosemary looked down at her crimson legs.

“Heavens!”

She
laughed cheerfully, inviting him to talk, but Dick Diver was already carrying a
tent and a beach umbrella up to a waiting car, so she went into the water to
wash off the sweat. He came back and gathering up a rake, a shovel, and a
sieve, stowed them in a crevice of a rock. He glanced up and down the beach to
see if he had left anything.

“Do you
know what time it is?” Rosemary asked.

“It’s
about half-past one.”

They
faced the seascape together momentarily.

“It’s
not a bad time,” said Dick Diver. “It’s not one of worst times of the day.”

He
looked at her and for a moment she lived in the bright blue worlds of his eyes,
eagerly and confidently. Then he shouldered his last piece of junk and went up
to his car, and Rosemary came out of the water, shook out her peignoir and
walked up to the hotel.

III

It was
almost two when they went into the dining-room. Back and forth over the
deserted tables a heavy pattern of beams and shadows swayed with the motion of
the pines outside. Two waiters, piling plates and talking loud Italian, fell
silent when they came in and brought them a tired version of the table d’hôte
luncheon.

“I fell
in love on the beach,” said Rosemary.

“Who with?”

“First with a whole lot of people who looked nice.
Then with one man.”

“Did you
talk to him?”

“Just a little.
Very handsome.
With reddish
hair.”
She was eating, ravenously. “He’s married though—it’s usually the
way.”

Her
mother was her best friend and had put every last possibility into the guiding
of her, not so rare a thing in the theatrical profession, but rather special in
that Mrs. Elsie Speers was not recompensing herself for a defeat of her own.
She had no personal bitterness or resentments about life—twice satisfactorily
married and twice widowed, her cheerful stoicism had each time deepened. One of
her
husbands
had been a cavalry officer and one an
army
doctor,
and they both left something to her that
she tried to present intact to Rosemary. By not sparing Rosemary she had made
her hard—by not sparing her own labor and devotion she had cultivated
an idealism
in Rosemary, which at present was directed
toward herself and saw the world through her eyes. So that while Rosemary was a
“simple” child she was protected by a double sheath of her mother’s armor and
her own—she had a mature distrust of the trivial, the facile and the vulgar.
However, with Rosemary’s sudden success in pictures Mrs. Speers felt that it
was time she were spiritually weaned; it would please rather than pain her if
this somewhat bouncing, breathless and exigent idealism would focus on
something except herself.