Tender Is the Night (45 page)

“You
look just like all the adventurers in the movies—but why do you have to stay
away so long?”

Tommy
Barban
looked at her, uncomprehending but alert; the pupils
of his eyes flashed.

“Five
years,” she continued, in throaty mimicry of nothing.
“MUCH
too long.
Couldn’t you only slaughter a certain number of creatures and
then come back, and breathe our air for a while?”

In her
cherished presence Tommy Europeanized himself quickly.

“
Mais
pour nous
héros
,” he said, “
il
nous
faut
du temps, Nicole.
Nous ne
pouvons
pas faire de
petits
exercises
d’héroisme—
il
faut
faire les
grandes
compositions.”

“Talk
English to me, Tommy.”

“
Parlez
français
avec
moi
, Nicole.”

“But the
meanings are different—in French you can be heroic and gallant with dignity,
and you know it. But in English you can’t be heroic and gallant without being a
little absurd, and you know that too. That gives me an advantage.”

“But
after all—” He chuckled suddenly. “Even in English I’m brave, heroic and all
that.”

She
pretended to be groggy with wonderment but he was not abashed.

“I only
know what I see in the cinema,” he said.

“Is it
all like the movies?”

“The
movies aren’t so bad—now this Ronald Colman—have you seen his pictures about
the Corps
d’Afrique
du Nord? They’re not bad at all.”

“Very
well, whenever I go to the movies I’ll know you’re going through just that sort
of thing at that moment.”

As she
spoke, Nicole was aware of a small, pale, pretty young woman with lovely
metallic hair, almost green in the deck lights,
who
had been sitting on the other side of Tommy and might have been part either of
their conversation or of the one next to them. She had obviously had a monopoly
of Tommy, for now she abandoned hope of his attention with what was once called
ill grace, and petulantly crossed the crescent of the deck.

“After
all, I am a hero,” Tommy said calmly, only half joking. “I have ferocious
courage, US-
ually
, something like a lion, something
like a drunken man.”

Nicole
waited until the echo of his boast had died away in his mind—she knew he had
probably never made such a statement before. Then she looked among the
strangers, and found as usual, the fierce neurotics, pretending calm, liking
the country only in horror of the city, of the sound of their own voices which
had set the tone and pitch. . . . She asked:

“Who is
the woman in white?”

“The one who was beside me?
Lady Caroline
Sibly
-Biers.”—They
listened for a moment to her voice across the way:

“The
man’s a scoundrel, but he’s a cat of the stripe. We sat up all night playing
two-handed
chemin
-de-
fer
,
and he owes me a mille Swiss.”

Tommy
laughed and said: “She is now the wickedest woman in
London
— whenever I come back to
Europe
there is a new crop of the wickedest women from
London
. She’s the very
latest—though I believe there is now one other who’s considered almost as
wicked.”

Nicole
glanced again at the woman across the deck—she was fragile, tubercular—it was
incredible that such narrow shoulders, such puny arms could bear aloft the
pennon of decadence, last ensign of the fading empire. Her resemblance was
rather to one of John Held’s flat-
chested
flappers
than to the hierarchy of tall languid blondes who had posed for painters and
novelists since before the war.

Golding
approached, fighting down the resonance of his huge bulk, which transmitted his
will as through a gargantuan amplifier, and Nicole, still reluctant, yielded to
his reiterated points: that the Margin was starting for Cannes immediately
after dinner; that they could always pack in some
caviare
and champagne, even though they had dined; that in any case Dick was now on the
phone, telling their chauffeur in Nice to drive their car back to Cannes and leave
it in front of the Café des
Alliées
where the Divers
could retrieve it.

They
moved into the dining salon and Dick was placed next to Lady
Sibly
-Biers. Nicole saw that his usually ruddy face was
drained of blood; he talked in a dogmatic voice, of which only snatches reached
Nicole:

“. . .
It’s all right for you
English,
you’re doing a dance
of death. . . .
Sepoys
in the ruined fort, I mean
Sepoys
at the gate and gaiety in the fort and all that.
The green hat, the crushed hat, no future.”

Lady
Caroline answered him in short sentences spotted with the terminal “What?” the
double-edged “Quite!” the depressing “Cheerio!” that always had a connotation
of imminent peril, but Dick appeared oblivious to the warning signals. Suddenly
he made a particularly vehement pronouncement, the purport of which eluded
Nicole, but she saw the young woman turn dark and sinewy, and heard her answer
sharply:

“After
all a
chep’s
a
chep
and a
chum’s a chum.”

Again he
had offended some one—couldn’t he hold his tongue a little longer? How long?
To death then.

At the
piano, a fair-haired young Scotsman from the orchestra (entitled by its drum
“The Ragtime College Jazzes of
Edinboro
”) had begun
singing in a Danny
Deever
monotone, accompanying
himself with low chords on the piano. He pronounced his words with great
precision, as though they impressed him almost intolerably.

“There was a young lady from hell,
Who jumped at the sound of a bell,
Because she was bad—bad—bad,
She jumped at the sound of a bell,
From hell (BOOMBOOM)
From hell (TOOTTOOT)
There was a young lady from hell—”

“What is
all this?” whispered Tommy to Nicole.

The girl
on the other side of him supplied the answer:

“Caroline
Sibly
-Biers wrote the words. He wrote the music.”

“
Quelle
enfanterie
!”
Tommy murmured as the next verse
began, hinting at the jumpy lady’s further predilections.
“On
dirait
qu’il
récite
Racine
!”

On the
surface at least, Lady Caroline was paying no attention to the performance of
her work. Glancing at her again Nicole found herself impressed, neither with
the character nor the personality, but with the sheer strength derived from an
attitude; Nicole thought that she was formidable, and she was confirmed in this
point of view as the party rose from table. Dick remained in his seat wearing
an odd expression; then he crashed into words with a harsh ineptness.

“I don’t
like innuendo in these deafening English whispers.”

Already
half-way out of the room Lady Caroline turned and walked back to him; she spoke
in a low clipped voice purposely audible to the whole company.

“You
came to me asking for it—disparaging my countrymen, disparaging my friend, Mary
Minghetti
. I simply said you were observed
associating with a questionable crowd in
Lausanne
.
Is that a deafening whisper? Or does it simply deafen YOU?”

“It’s
still not loud enough,” said Dick, a little too late. “So I am actually a
notorious—”

Golding
crushed out the phrase with his voice saying:

“What!
What!” and moved his guests on out, with the threat of his powerful body.
Turning the corner of the door Nicole saw that Dick was still sitting at the
table. She was furious at the woman for her preposterous statement, equally
furious at Dick for having brought them here, for having become fuddled, for
having
untipped
the capped barbs of his irony, for
having come off humiliated—she was a little more annoyed because she knew that
her taking possession of Tommy
Barban
on their
arrival had first irritated the Englishwoman.

A moment
later she saw Dick standing in the gangway, apparently in complete control of
himself as he talked with Golding; then for half an hour she did not see him
anywhere about the deck and she broke out of an intricate Malay game, played
with string and coffee beans, and said to Tommy:

“I’ve
got to find Dick.”

Since
dinner the yacht had been in motion westward. The fine night streamed away on
either side, the Diesel engines pounded softly, there was a spring wind that
blew Nicole’s hair abruptly when she reached the bow, and she had a sharp
lesion of anxiety at seeing Dick standing in the angle by the flagstaff. His
voice was serene as he recognized her.

“It’s a
nice night.”

“I was
worried.”

“Oh, you
were worried?”

“Oh,
don’t talk that way. It would give me so much pleasure to think of a little
something I could do for you, Dick.”

He
turned away from her, toward the veil of starlight over
Africa
.

“I
believe that’s true, Nicole. And sometimes I believe that the littler it was,
the more pleasure it would give you.”

“Don’t
talk like that—don’t say such things.”

His
face, wan in the light that the white spray caught and tossed back to the
brilliant sky had none of the lines of annoyance she had expected. It was even
detached; his eyes
focussed
upon her gradually as
upon a chessman to be moved; in the same slow manner he caught her wrist and
drew her near.

“You
ruined me, did you?” he inquired blandly. “Then we’re both ruined. So—”

Cold
with terror she put her other wrist into his grip. All right, she would go with
him—again she felt the beauty of the night vividly in one moment of complete
response and abnegation—all right, then—

—but now
she was unexpectedly free and Dick turned his back sighing.
“
Tch
!
tch
!”

Tears
streamed down Nicole’s face—in a moment she heard
some one
approaching; it was Tommy.

“You
found him! Nicole thought maybe you jumped overboard, Dick,” he said, “because
that little English
poule
slanged you.”

“It’d be
a good setting to jump overboard,” said Dick mildly.

“Wouldn’t
it?” agreed Nicole hastily. “Let’s borrow life- preservers and jump over. I
think we should do something spectacular. I feel that all our lives have been
too restrained.”

Tommy
sniffed from one to the other trying to breathe in the situation with the
night. “We’ll go ask the Lady Beer-and-Ale what to do—she should know the
latest things. And we should memorize her song ‘There was a young lady from
l’enfer
.’ I shall translate it, and make a fortune from its
success at the Casino.”

“Are you
rich, Tommy?” Dick asked him, as they retraced the length of the boat.

“Not as
things go now. I got tired of the brokerage business and went away. But I have
good stocks in the hands of friends who are holding it for me. All goes well.”

“Dick’s
getting rich,” Nicole said. In reaction her voice had begun to tremble.

On the
after deck Golding had fanned three pairs of dancers into action with his
colossal paws. Nicole and Tommy joined them and Tommy remarked: “Dick seems to
be drinking.”

“Only
moderately,” she said loyally.

“There
are those who can drink and those who can’t. Obviously Dick can’t. You ought to
tell him not to.”

“I!” she
exclaimed in amazement. “
I
tell Dick what he should do or shouldn’t
do!”

But in a
reticent way Dick was still vague and sleepy when they reached the pier at
Cannes
. Golding buoyed
him down into the launch of the Margin whereupon Lady Caroline shifted her
place conspicuously. On the dock he bowed good-by with exaggerated formality,
and for a moment he seemed about to speed her with a salty epigram, but the
bone of Tommy’s arm went into the soft part of his and they walked to the
attendant car.

“I’ll
drive you home,” Tommy suggested.

“Don’t
bother—we can get a cab.”

“I’d
like to, if you can put me up.”

On the
back seat of the car Dick remained quiescent until the yellow monolith of
Golfe
Juan was passed, and then the constant carnival at
Juan les Pins where the night was musical and strident in many languages. When
the car turned up the hill toward
Tarmes
, he sat up
suddenly, prompted by the tilt of the vehicle and delivered a peroration: