Tender Is the Night (4 page)

She
looked in turn at the three men, temporarily expropriating them. All three were
personable in different ways; all were of a special gentleness that she felt
was part of their lives, past and future, not circumstanced by events, not at
all like the company manners of actors, and she detected also a far-reaching
delicacy that was different from the rough and ready good fellowship of
directors, who represented the intellectuals in her life. Actors and
directors—those were the only men she had ever known, those and the
heterogeneous, indistinguishable mass of college boys, interested only in love
at first sight, whom she had met at the Yale prom last fall.

These
three were different.
Barban
was less civilized, more
skeptical and scoffing, his manners were formal, even perfunctory. Abe North
had, under his shyness, a desperate humor that amused but puzzled her. Her
serious nature distrusted its ability to make a supreme impression on him.

But Dick
Diver—he was all complete there. Silently she admired him. His complexion was
reddish and weather-burned, so was his short hair—a light growth of it rolled
down his arms and hands. His eyes were of a bright, hard blue. His nose was
somewhat pointed and there was never any doubt at whom he was looking or
talking—and this is a flattering attention, for who looks at us?— glances fall
upon us, curious or disinterested, nothing more. His voice, with some faint
Irish melody running through it, wooed the world, yet she felt the layer of
hardness in him, of self-control and of self-discipline, her own virtues. Oh,
she chose him, and Nicole, lifting her head saw her choose him, heard the
little sigh at the fact that he was already possessed.

Toward
noon
the
McKiscos
,
Mrs. Abrams, Mr.
Dumphry
, and Signor Campion came on
the beach. They had brought a new umbrella that they set up with side glances
toward the Divers, and crept under with satisfied expressions—all save Mr.
McKisco
, who remained derisively without. In his raking
Dick had passed near them and now he returned to the umbrellas.

“The two
young men are reading the Book of Etiquette together,” he said in a low voice.

“Planning
to mix
wit
de quality,” said Abe.

Mary
North, the
very
tanned young woman whom Rosemary had
encountered the first day on the raft, came in from swimming and said with a
smile that was a rakish gleam:

“So Mr. and Mrs.
Neverquiver
have arrived.”

“They’re
this man’s friends,” Nicole reminded her, indicating Abe. “Why doesn’t he go
and speak to them? Don’t you think they’re attractive?”

“I think
they’re very attractive,” Abe agreed. “I just don’t think they’re attractive,
that’s all.”

“Well, I
HAVE felt there were too many people on the beach this summer,” Nicole
admitted.
“OUR beach that Dick made out of a pebble pile.”
She considered, and then lowering her voice out of the range of the trio of
nannies who sat back under another umbrella. “Still, they’re preferable to
those British last summer who kept shouting about: ‘Isn’t the sea blue? Isn’t
the sky white? Isn’t little Nellie’s nose red?’”

Rosemary
thought she would not like to have Nicole for an enemy.

“But you
didn’t see the fight,” Nicole continued. “The day before you came, the married
man, the one with the name that sounds like a substitute for gasoline or
butter—”

“
McKisco
?”

“Yes—well
they were having words and she tossed some sand in his face. So naturally he
sat on top of her and rubbed her face in the sand. We were—electrified. I
wanted Dick to interfere.”

“I
think,” said Dick Diver, staring down abstractedly at the straw mat, “that I’ll
go over and invite them to dinner.”

“No, you
won’t,” Nicole told him quickly.

“I think
it would be a very good thing. They’re here—let’s adjust ourselves.”

“We’re
very well adjusted,” she insisted, laughing. “I’m not going to have MY nose
rubbed in the sand. I’m a mean, hard woman,” she explained to Rosemary, and
then raising her voice, “Children, put on your bathing suits!”

Rosemary
felt that this swim would become the typical one of her life, the one that
would always pop up in her memory at the mention of swimming. Simultaneously
the whole party moved toward the water, super-ready from the long, forced
inaction, passing from the heat to the cool with the
gourmandise
of a tingling curry eaten with chilled white wine. The Divers’ day was spaced
like the day of the older civilizations to yield the utmost from the materials
at hand, and to give all the transitions their full value, and she did not know
that there would be another transition presently from the utter absorption of
the swim to the garrulity of the
Provençal
lunch
hour. But again she had the sense that Dick was taking care of her, and she
delighted in responding to the eventual movement as if it had been an order.

Nicole
handed her husband the curious garment on which she had been working. He went
into the dressing tent and inspired a commotion by appearing in a moment clad
in transparent black lace drawers. Close inspection revealed that actually they
were lined with flesh- colored cloth.

“Well,
if that isn’t a
pansys
trick!” exclaimed Mr.
McKisco
contemptuously—then turning quickly to Mr.
Dumphry
and Mr. Campion, he added, “Oh, I beg your pardon.”

Rosemary
bubbled with delight at the trunks. Her naïveté responded whole-heartedly to
the expensive simplicity of the Divers, unaware of its complexity and its lack
of innocence, unaware that it was all a selection of quality rather than
quantity from the run of the world’s bazaar; and that the simplicity of behavior
also, the nursery-like peace and good will, the emphasis on the simpler
virtues, was part of a desperate bargain with the gods and had been attained
through struggles she could not have guessed at. At that moment the Divers
represented externally the exact furthermost evolution of a class, so that most
people seemed awkward beside them—in reality a qualitative change had already
set in that was not at all apparent to Rosemary.

She
stood with them as they took sherry and ate crackers. Dick Diver looked at her
with cold blue eyes; his kind, strong mouth said thoughtfully and deliberately:

“You’re
the only girl I’ve seen for a long time that actually did look like something
blooming.”

In her
mother’s lap afterward Rosemary cried and cried.

“I love
him, Mother. I’m desperately in love with him—I never knew I could feel that
way about anybody. And he’s married and I like her too—it’s just hopeless. Oh,
I love him so!”

“I’m
curious to meet him.”

“She
invited us to dinner Friday.”

“If
you’re in love it ought to make you happy. You ought to laugh.”

Rosemary
looked up and gave a beautiful little shiver of her face and laughed. Her
mother always had a great influence on her.

V

Rosemary
went to
Monte Carlo
nearly as sulkily as it was possible for her to be. She rode up the rugged hill
to La
Turbie
, to an old
Gaumont
lot in process of reconstruction, and as she stood by the grilled entrance
waiting for an answer to the message on her card, she might have been looking
into
Hollywood
.
The bizarre
débris
of some recent picture, a decayed
street scene in
India
,
a great cardboard whale, a monstrous tree bearing cherries large as
basketballs, bloomed there by exotic dispensation, autochthonous as the pale
amaranth, mimosa, cork oak or dwarfed pine. There were a quick-lunch shack and
two barnlike stages and everywhere about the lot, groups of waiting, hopeful,
painted faces.

After
ten minutes a young man with hair the color of canary feathers hurried down to
the gate.

“Come
in, Miss Hoyt. Mr. Brady’s on the set, but he’s very anxious to see you. I’m
sorry you were kept waiting, but you know some of these French dames are worse
about pushing themselves in—”

The
studio manager opened a small door in the blank wall of stage building and with
sudden glad familiarity Rosemary followed him into half darkness. Here and
there figures spotted the twilight, turning up ashen faces to her like souls in
purgatory watching the passage of a mortal through. There were whispers and
soft voices and, apparently from afar, the gentle tremolo of a small organ.
Turning the corner made by some flats, they came upon the white crackling glow
of a stage, where a French actor—his shirt front, collar, and cuffs tinted a
brilliant pink—and an American actress stood motionless face to face. They
stared at each other with dogged eyes, as though they had been in the same
position for hours; and still for a long time nothing happened, no one moved. A
bank of lights went off with a savage hiss, went on again; the plaintive tap of
a hammer begged admission to nowhere in the distance; a blue face appeared
among the blinding lights above, called something unintelligible into the upper
blackness. Then the silence was broken by a voice in front of Rosemary.

“Baby,
you don’t take off the stockings, you can spoil ten more pairs. That dress is
fifteen pounds.”

Stepping
backward the speaker ran against Rosemary, whereupon the studio manager said,
“Hey, Earl—Miss Hoyt.”

They
were meeting for the first time. Brady was quick and strenuous. As he took her
hand she saw him look her over from head to foot, a gesture she recognized and
that made her feel at home, but gave her always a faint feeling of superiority
to whoever made it. If her person was property she could exercise whatever
advantage was inherent in its ownership.

“I thought
you’d be along any day now,” Brady said, in a voice that was just a little too
compelling for private life, and that trailed with it a faintly defiant cockney
accent. “Have a good trip?”

“Yes,
but we’re glad to be going home.”

“No-o-o!”
he protested. “Stay awhile—I want to talk to you. Let me tell you that was some
picture of yours—that ‘Daddy’s Girl.’ I saw it in
Paris
. I wired the coast right away to see if
you were signed.”

“I just
had—I’m sorry.”

“God, what a picture!”

Not
wanting to smile in silly agreement Rosemary frowned.

“Nobody
wants to be thought of forever for just one picture,” she said.

“Sure—that’s
right. What’re your plans?”

“Mother
thought I needed a rest. When I get back we’ll probably either sign up with
First National or keep on with Famous.”

“
Who’s
we?”

“My mother.
She decides business matters. I couldn’t do without her.”

Again he
looked her over completely, and, as he did, something in Rosemary went out to
him. It
was not liking
, not at all the spontaneous
admiration she had felt for the man on the beach this morning. It was a click.
He desired her and, so far as her virginal emotions went, she contemplated
a surrender
with equanimity. Yet she knew she would forget
him half an hour after she left him—like an actor kissed in a picture.

“Where
are you staying?” Brady asked. “Oh, yes, at
Gausse’s
.
Well, my plans are made for this year, too, but that letter I wrote you still
stands
. Rather make a picture with you than any girl since
Connie
Talmadge
was a kid.”

“I feel
the same way. Why don’t you come back to
Hollywood
?”

“I can’t
stand the damn place. I’m fine here. Wait till after this shot and I’ll show
you around.”

Walking
onto the set he began to talk to the French actor in a low, quiet voice.

Five
minutes passed—Brady talked on, while from time to time the Frenchman shifted
his feet and nodded. Abruptly, Brady broke off, calling something to the lights
that startled them into a humming glare.
Los
Angeles
was loud about Rosemary now.
Unappalled
she moved once more through the city of thin
partitions, wanting to be back there. But she did not want to see Brady in the
mood she sensed he would be in after he had finished and she left the lot with
a spell still upon her. The Mediterranean world was less silent now that she
knew the studio was there. She liked the people on the streets and bought
herself a pair of espadrilles on the way to the train.

Her
mother was pleased that she had done so accurately what she was told to do, but
she still wanted to launch her out and away. Mrs. Speers was fresh in
appearance but she was tired; death beds make people tired indeed and she had
watched beside a couple.

VI

Feeling
good from the rosy wine at lunch, Nicole Diver folded her arms high enough for
the artificial camellia on her shoulder to touch her cheek, and went out into
her lovely grassless garden. The garden was bounded on one side by the house,
from which it flowed and into which it ran, on two sides by the old village,
and on the last by the cliff falling by ledges to the sea.