Tender Is the Night (47 page)

She
watched Dick’s eyes following Rosemary’s track from raft to raft; but the sigh
that rocked out of her bosom was something left over from five years ago.

“Let’s
swim out and speak to Rosemary,” he suggested.

“You
go.”

“We’ll
both go.” She struggled a moment against his pronouncement, but eventually they
swam out together, tracing Rosemary by the school of little fish who followed
her, taking their dazzle from her, the shining spoon of a trout hook.

Nicole
stayed in the water while Dick hoisted himself up beside Rosemary, and the two
sat dripping and talking, exactly as if they had never loved or touched each
other. Rosemary was beautiful—her youth was a shock to Nicole, who rejoiced,
however, that the young girl was less slender by a hairline than herself.
Nicole swam around in little rings, listening to Rosemary who was acting
amusement, joy, and expectation—more confident than she had been five years
ago.

“I miss
Mother so, but she’s meeting me in
Paris
,
Monday.”

“Five
years ago you came here,” said Dick. “And what a funny little thing you were,
in one of those hotel peignoirs!”

“How you
remember things! You always did—and always the nice things.”

Nicole
saw the old game of flattery beginning again and she dove under water, coming
up again to hear:

“I’m
going to pretend
it’s
five years ago and I’m a girl of
eighteen again. You could always make me feel some you know, kind of, you know,
kind of happy way—you and Nicole. I feel as if you’re still on the beach there,
under one of those umbrellas—the nicest people I’d ever known, maybe ever
will.”

Swimming
away, Nicole saw that the cloud of Dick’s heart-sickness had lifted a little as
he began to play with Rosemary, bringing out his old expertness with people, a
tarnished object of art; she guessed that with a drink or so he would have done
his stunts on the swinging rings for her, fumbling through stunts he had once
done with ease. She noticed that this summer, for the first time, he avoided
high diving.

Later,
as she dodged her way from raft to raft, Dick overtook her.

“Some of
Rosemary’s friends have a speed boat, the one out there. Do you want to
aquaplane? I think it would be amusing.”

Remembering that once he could stand on his hands on a chair at the end
of a board, she indulged him as she might have indulged Lanier.
Last summer on the
Zugersee
they had played at that pleasant water game, and
Dick had lifted a two-hundred-pound man from the board onto his shoulders and
stood up. But women marry all their husbands’ talents and naturally,
afterwards, are not
so
impressed with them as they may
keep up the pretense of being. Nicole had not even pretended to be impressed,
though she had said “Yes” to him, and “Yes, I thought so too.”

She
knew, though, that he was somewhat tired, that it was only the closeness of
Rosemary’s exciting youth that prompted the impending effort—she had seen him
draw the same inspiration from the new bodies of her children and she wondered
coldly if he would make a spectacle of himself. The Divers were older than the
others in the boat—the young people were polite, deferential, but Nicole felt
an undercurrent of “Who are these Numbers anyhow?” and she missed Dick’s easy
talent of taking control of situations and making them all right—he had
concentrated on what he was going to try to do.

The
motor throttled down two hundred yards from shore and one of the young men dove
flat over the edge. He swam at the aimless twisting board, steadied it, climbed
slowly to his knees on it— then got on his feet as the boat accelerated.
Leaning back he swung his light vehicle ponderously from side to side in slow,
breathless arcs that rode the trailing side-swell at the end of each swing. In
the direct wake of the boat he let go his rope, balanced for a moment, then
back-flipped into the water, disappearing like a statue of glory, and
reappearing as an insignificant head while the boat made the circle back to
him.

Nicole
refused her turn; then Rosemary rode the board neatly and conservatively, with
facetious cheers from her admirers. Three of them scrambled egotistically for
the honor of pulling her into the boat, managing, among them, to bruise her
knee and hip against the side.

“Now you.
Doctor,” said the Mexican at the wheel.

Dick and
the last young man dove over the side and swam to the board. Dick was going to
try his lifting trick and Nicole began to watch with smiling scorn.
This physical showing-off for Rosemary irritated her most of all.

When the
men had ridden long enough to find their balance, Dick knelt, and putting the
back of his neck in the other man’s crotch, found the rope through his legs, and
slowly began to rise.

The
people in the boat, watching closely, saw that he was having difficulties. He
was on one knee; the trick was to straighten all the way up in the same motion
with which he left his kneeling position. He rested for a moment,
then
his face contracted as he put his heart into the
strain, and lifted.

The
board was narrow, the man, though weighing less than a hundred and fifty, was
awkward with his weight and grabbed clumsily at Dick’s head. When, with a last
wrenching effort of his back, Dick stood upright, the board slid sidewise and
the pair toppled into the sea.

In the
boat Rosemary exclaimed: “Wonderful! They almost had it.”

But as
they came back to the swimmers Nicole watched for a sight of Dick’s face. It
was full of annoyance as she expected, because he had done the thing with ease
only two years ago.

The
second time he was more careful. He
rose
a little
testing the balance of his burden, settled down again on his knee; then,
grunting “Alley
oop
!” began to rise—but before he could
really straighten out, his legs suddenly buckled and he shoved the board away
with his feet to avoid being struck as they fell off.

This
time when the Baby Gar came back it was apparent to all the passengers that he
was angry.

“Do you
mind if I try that once more?” he called, treading water. “We almost had it
then.”

“Sure.
Go ahead.”

To
Nicole he looked white-around-the-gills, and she cautioned him:

“Don’t
you think that’s enough for now?”

He
didn’t answer. The first partner had had plenty and was hauled over the
side,
the Mexican driving the motor boat obligingly took his
place.

He was
heavier than the first man. As the boat gathered motion, Dick rested for a
moment, belly-down on the board. Then he got beneath the man and took the rope,
and his muscles flexed as he tried to rise.

He could
not rise. Nicole saw him shift his position and strain upward again but at the
instant when the weight of his partner was full upon his shoulders he became
immovable. He tried again— lifting an inch, two inches—Nicole felt the sweat
glands of her forehead open as she strained with him—then he was simply holding
his ground, then he collapsed back down on his knees with a smack, and they
went over, Dick’s head barely missing a kick of the board.

“Hurry
back!” Nicole called to the driver; even as she spoke she saw him slide under
water and she gave a little cry; but he came up again and turned on his back,
and “Château” swam near to help. It seemed forever till the boat reached them
but when they came alongside at last and Nicole saw Dick floating exhausted and
expressionless, alone with the water and the sky, her panic changed suddenly to
contempt.

“We’ll
help you up, Doctor. . . . Get his foot . . . all right . . . now altogether. .
. .”

Dick sat
panting and looking at nothing.

“I knew
you shouldn’t have tried it,” Nicole could not help saying.

“He’d
tired himself the first two times,” said the Mexican.

“It was
a foolish thing,” Nicole insisted. Rosemary tactfully said nothing.

After a
minute Dick got his breath, panting, “I couldn’t have lifted a paper doll that
time.”

An
explosive little laugh relieved the tension caused by his failure. They were
all attentive to Dick as he disembarked at the dock. But Nicole was
annoyed—everything he did annoyed her now.

She sat
with Rosemary under an umbrella while Dick went to the buffet for a drink—he
returned presently with some sherry for them.

“The
first drink I ever had was with you,” Rosemary said, and with a spurt of
enthusiasm she added, “Oh, I’m so glad to see you and KNOW you’re all right. I
was worried—” Her sentence broke as she changed direction “that maybe you
wouldn’t be.”

“Did you
hear I’d gone into a process of deterioration?”

“Oh, no.
I simply—just heard you’d changed. And I’m glad to see with my own eyes it
isn’t true.”

“It is
true,” Dick answered, sitting down with them. “The change came a long way
back—but at first it didn’t show. The manner remains intact for some time after
the morale cracks.”

“Do you
practise
on the
Riviera
?”
Rosemary demanded hastily.

“It’d be
a good ground to find likely specimens.” He nodded here and there at the people
milling about in the golden sand.
“Great candidates.
Notice our old friend, Mrs. Abrams, playing duchess to Mary North’s queen?
Don’t get jealous about it—think of Mrs. Abram’s long climb up the back stairs
of the Ritz on her hands and knees and all the carpet dust she had to inhale.”

Rosemary
interrupted him. “But is that really Mary North?” She was regarding a woman
sauntering in their direction followed by a small group who behaved as if they
were accustomed to being looked at. When they were ten feet away, Mary’s glance
flickered fractionally over the Divers, one of those unfortunate glances that
indicate to the glanced-upon that they have been observed but are to be
overlooked, the sort of glance that neither the Divers nor Rosemary Hoyt had
ever permitted themselves to throw at any one in their lives. Dick was amused
when Mary perceived Rosemary, changed her plans and came over. She spoke to
Nicole with pleasant heartiness, nodded unsmilingly to Dick as if he were
somewhat contagious—whereupon he bowed in ironic respect—as she greeted
Rosemary.

“I heard
you were here.
For how long?”

“Until
to
-morrow,” Rosemary answered.

She,
too, saw how Mary had walked through the Divers to talk to her, and a sense of
obligation kept her unenthusiastic. No, she could not dine to-night.

Mary
turned to Nicole, her manner indicating affection blended with pity.

“How are
the children?” she asked.

They
came up at the moment, and Nicole gave ear to a request that she overrule the
governess on a swimming point.

“No,”
Dick answered for her. “What Mademoiselle says must go.”

Agreeing
that one must support delegated authority, Nicole refused their request,
whereupon Mary—who in the manner of an Anita
Loos’
heroine
had dealings only with
Faits
Accomplis
,
who indeed could not have house-broken a French poodle puppy—regarded Dick as
though he were guilty of a most flagrant bullying. Dick, chafed by the tiresome
performance, inquired with mock solicitude:

“How are
your children—and their aunts?”

Mary did
not answer; she left them, first draping a sympathetic hand over Lanier’s
reluctant head. After she had gone Dick said: “When I think of the time I spent
working over her.”

“I like
her,” said Nicole.

Dick’s
bitterness had surprised Rosemary, who had thought of him as all-forgiving,
all-comprehending. Suddenly she recalled what it was she had heard about him.
In conversation with some State Department people on the boat,—Europeanized
Americans who had reached a position where they could scarcely have been said
to belong to any nation at all, at least not to any great power though perhaps
to a Balkan-like state composed of similar citizens—the name of the
ubiquitously renowned Baby Warren had occurred and it was remarked that Baby’s
younger sister had thrown herself away on a dissipated doctor. “He’s not
received anywhere
any more
,” the woman said.

The
phrase disturbed Rosemary, though she could not place the Divers as living in
any relation to society where such a fact, if fact it was, could have any
meaning, yet the hint of a hostile and organized public opinion rang in her
ears. “He’s not received anywhere
any more
.” She
pictured Dick climbing the steps of a mansion, presenting cards and being told
by a butler: “We’re not receiving you any more”; then proceeding down an avenue
only to be told the same thing by the countless other butlers of countless
Ambassadors, Ministers,
Chargés
d’Affaires
.
. . .