Tender Is the Night (49 page)

“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, inevitable 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.”

“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.

“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 Cézannes 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!”

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 Mentone. 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.

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.