Tender is the night / Ночь нежна. Книга для чтения на английском языке

XV

“What is it you are giving up?” demanded Rosemary, facing Dick earnestly in the taxi.

“Nothing of importance.”

“Are you a scientist?”

“I’m a doctor of medicine.”

“Oh-h!” she smiled delightedly. “My father was a doctor too. Then why don’t you —” she stopped.

“There’s no mystery. I didn’t disgrace myself at the height of my career, and hide away on the Riviera. I’m just not practising. You can’t tell, I’ll probably practise again some day.”

Rosemary put up her face quietly to be kissed. He looked at her for a moment as if he didn’t understand. Then holding her in the hollow of his arm he rubbed his cheek against her cheek’s softness, and then looked down at her for another long moment.

“Such a lovely child,” he said gravely.

She smiled up at him; her hands playing conventionally with the lapels of his coat. “I’m in love with you and Nicole. Actually that’s my secret – I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are. Honestly – I love you and Nicole – I do.”

– So many times he had heard this – even the formula was the same.

Suddenly she came toward him, her youth vanishing as she passed inside the focus of his eyes and he had kissed her breathlessly as if she were any age at all. Then she lay back against his arm and sighed.

“I’ve decided to give you up,” she said.

Dick started – had he said anything to imply that she possessed any part of him?

“But that’s very mean,” he managed to say lightly, “just when I was getting interested.”

“I’ve loved you so —” As if it had been for years. She was weeping a little now. “I’ve loved you soo-o.”

Then he should have laughed, but he heard himself saying, “Not only are you beautiful but you are somehow on the grand scale. Everything you do, like pretending to be in love or pretending to be shy gets across.”

In the dark cave of the taxi, fragrant with the perfume Rosemary had bought with Nicole, she came close again, clinging to him. He kissed her without enjoying it. He knew that there was passion there, but there was no shadow of it in her eyes or on her mouth; there was a faint spray of champagne on her breath. She clung nearer desperately and once more he kissed her and was chilled by the innocence of her kiss, by the glance that at the moment of contact looked beyond him out into the darkness of the night, the darkness of the world. She did not know yet that splendor is something in the heart; at the moment when she realized that and melted into the passion of the universe he could take her without question or regret.

Her room in the hotel was diagonally across from theirs and nearer the elevator. When they reached the door she said suddenly:

“I know you don’t love me – I don’t expect it. But you said I should have told you about my birthday. Well, I did, and now for my birthday present I want you to come into my room a minute while I tell you something. Just one minute.” They went in and he closed the door, and Rosemary stood close to him, not touching him. The night had drawn the color from her face – she was pale as pale now, she was a white carnation left after a dance.

“When you smile —” He had recovered his paternal attitude, perhaps because of Nicole’s silent proximity, “I always think I’ll see a gap where you’ve lost some baby teeth.”

But he was too late – she came close up against him with a forlorn whisper.

“Take me.”

“Take you where?”

Astonishment froze him rigid.[131]

“Go on,” she whispered. “Oh, please go on, whatever they do. I don’t care if I don’t like it – I never expected to – I’ve always hated to think about it but now I don’t. I want you to.”

She was astonished at herself – she had never imagined she could talk like that. She was calling on things she had read, seen, dreamed through a decade of convent hours. Suddenly she knew too that it was one of her greatest roles and she flung herself into it more passionately.

“This is not as it should be,” Dick deliberated. “Isn’t it just the champagne? Let’s more or less forget it.”

“Oh, no, now. I want you to do it now, take me, show me, I’m absolutely yours and I want to be.”

“For one thing, have you thought how much it would hurt Nicole?”

“She won’t know – this won’t have anything to do with her.”

He continued kindly:

“Then there’s the fact that I love Nicole.”

“But you can love more than just one person, can’t you? Like I love Mother and I love you – more. I love you more now.”

“ – the fourth place you’re not in love with me but you might be afterwards, and that would begin your life with a terrible mess.”

“No, I promise I’ll never see you again. I’ll get mother and go to America right away.”

He dismissed this. He was remembering too vividly the youth and freshness of her lips. He took another tone.

“You’re just in that mood.”

“Oh, please, I don’t care even if I had a baby. I could go into Mexico like a girl at the studio. Oh, this is so different from anything I ever thought – I used to hate it when they kissed me seriously.” He saw she was still under the impression that it must happen. “Some of them had great big teeth, but you’re all different and beautiful. I want you to do it.”

“I believe you think people just kiss some way and you want me to kiss you.”

“Oh, don’t tease me – I’m not a baby. I know you’re not in love with me.” She was suddenly humble and quiet. “I didn’t expect that much. I know I must seem just nothing to you.”

“Nonsense. But you seem young to me.” His thoughts added[132], “ – there’d be so much to teach you.”

Rosemary waited, breathing eagerly till Dick said: “And lastly things aren’t arranged so that this could be as you want.”

Her face drooped with dismay and disappointment and Dick said automatically, “We’ll have to simply —” He stopped himself, followed her to the bed, sat down beside her while she wept. He was suddenly confused, not about the ethics of the matter, for the impossibility of it was sheerly indicated from all angles, but simply confused, and for a moment his usual grace, the tensile strength of his balance, was absent.

“I knew you wouldn”t,” she sobbed. “It was just a forlorn hope.”

He stood up.

“Good night, child. This is a damn shame. Let’s drop it out of the picture.[133]” He gave her two lines of hospital patter to go to sleep on. “So many people are going to love you and it might be nice to meet your first love all intact, emotionally too. That’s an old-fashioned idea, isn’t it?” She looked up at him as he took a step toward the door; she looked at him without the slightest idea as to what was in his head, she saw him take another step in slow motion, turn and look at her again, and she wanted for a moment to hold him and devour him, wanted his mouth, his ears, his coat collar, wanted to surround him and engulf him; she saw his hand fall on the doorknob. Then she gave up and sank back on the bed. When the door closed she got up and went to the mirror, where she began brushing her hair, sniffling a little. One hundred and fifty strokes Rosemary gave it, as usual, then a hundred and fifty more. She brushed it until her arm ached, then she changed arms and went on brushing…

XVI

She woke up cooled and shamed. The sight of her beauty in the mirror did not reassure her but only awakened the ache of yesterday and a letter, forwarded by her mother, from the boy who had taken her to the Yale prom last fall, which announced his presence in Paris was no help – all that seemed far away. She emerged from her room for the ordeal of meeting the Divers weighted with a double trouble. But it was hidden by a sheath as impermeable as Nicole’s when they met and went together to a series of fittings. It was consoling, though, when Nicole remarked, apropos of a distraught saleswoman: “Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do – they think other people’s opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval.” Yesterday in her expansiveness Rosemary would have resented that remark – to-day in her desire to minimize what had happened she welcomed it eagerly. She admired Nicole for her beauty and her wisdom, and also for the first time in her life she was jealous. Just before leaving Gausse’s hotel her mother had said in that casual tone, which Rosemary knew concealed her most significant opinions, that Nicole was a great beauty, with the frank implication that Rosemary was not. This did not bother Rosemary, who had only recently been allowed to learn that she was even personable; so that her prettiness never seemed exactly her own but rather an acquirement, like her French. Nevertheless, in the taxi she looked at Nicole, matching herself against her. There were all the potentialities for romantic love in that lovely body and in the delicate mouth, sometimes tight, sometimes expectantly half open to the world. Nicole had been a beauty as a young girl and she would be a beauty later when her skin stretched tight over her high cheek-bones – the essential structure was there. She had been white-Saxon-blonde but she was more beautiful now that her hair had darkened than when it had been like a cloud and more beautiful than she.

“We lived there,” Rosemary suddenly pointed to a building in the Rue des Saints-Péres.

“That’s strange. Because when I was twelve Mother and Baby and I once spent a winter there,” and she pointed to a hotel directly across the street. The two dingy fronts stared at them, gray echoes of girlhood.

“We’d just built our Lake Forest house and we were economizing,” Nicole continued. “At least Baby and I and the governess economized and Mother travelled.”

“We were economizing too,” said Rosemary, realizing that the word meant different things to them.

“Mother always spoke of it very carefully as a small hotel —” Nicole gave her quick magnetic little laugh, “– I mean instead of saying a “cheap” hotel. If any swanky friends asked us our address we’d never say, “We”re in a dingy little hole over in the apache quarter where we’re glad of running water,’ – we’d say “We”re in a small hotel.’ As if all the big ones were too noisy and vulgar for us. Of course the friends always saw through us and told everyone about it, but Mother always said it showed we knew our way around Europe. She did, of course: she was born a German citizen. But her mother was American, and she was brought up in Chicago, and she was more American than European.”

They were meeting the others in two minutes, and Rosemary reconstructed herself once more as they got out of the taxi in the Rue Guynemer, across from the Luxembourg Gardens[134]. They were lunching in the Norths’ already dismantled apartment high above the green mass of leaves. The day seemed different to Rosemary from the day before – When she saw him face to face their eyes met and brushed like birds’ wings. After that everything was all right, everything was wonderful, she knew that he was beginning to fall in love with her. She felt wildly happy, felt the warm sap of emotion being pumped through her body. A cool, clear confidence deepened and sang in her. She scarcely looked at Dick but she knew everything was all right.

After luncheon the Divers and the Norths and Rosemary went to the Franco-American Films, to be joined by Collis Clay, her young man from New Haven, to whom she had telephoned. He was a Georgian, with the peculiarly regular, even stencilled ideas of Southerners who are educated in the North. Last winter she had thought him attractive – once they held hands in an automobile going from New Haven to New York; now he no longer existed for her.

In the projection room she sat between Collis Clay and Dick while the mechanic mounted the reels of Daddy’s Girl and a French executive fluttered about her trying to talk American slang. “Yes, boy,” he said when there was trouble with the projector, “I have not any benenas.[135]” Then the lights went out, there was the sudden click and a flickering noise and she was alone with Dick at last. They looked at each other in the half darkness.

“Dear Rosemary,” he murmured. Their shoulders touched. Nicole stirred restlessly at the end of the row and Abe coughed convulsively and blew his nose; then they all settled down and the picture ran.

There she was – the school girl of a year ago, hair down her back and rippling out stiffly like the solid hair of a Tanagra figure[136]; there she was – so young and innocent – the product of her mother’s loving care; there she was – embodying all the immaturity of the race, cutting a new cardboard paper doll to pass before its empty harlot’s mind. She remembered how she had felt in that dress, especially fresh and new under the fresh young silk.

Daddy’s girl. Was it a ’itty-bitty bravekins[137] and did it suffer? Ooo-ooo-tweet, de tweetest thing, wasn’t she dest too tweet?[138] Before her tiny fist the forces of lust and corruption rolled away; nay, the very march of destiny stopped; inevitable became evitable, syllogism, dialectic, all rationality fell away. Women would forget the dirty dishes at home and weep, even within the picture one woman wept so long that she almost stole the film away from Rosemary. She wept all over a set that cost a fortune, in a Duncan Phyfe[139] dining-room, in an aviation port, and during a yacht-race that was only used in two flashes, in a subway and finally in a bathroom. But Rosemary triumphed. Her fineness of character, her courage and steadfastness intruded upon by the vulgarity of the world, and Rosemary showing what it took with a face that had not yet become masklike – yet it was actually so moving that the emotions of the whole row of people went out to her at intervals during the picture. There was a break once and the light went on and after the chatter of applause Dick said to her sincerely: “I’m simply astounded. You’re going to be one of the best actresses on the stage.”

Then back to Daddy’s Girl: happier days now, and a lovely shot of Rosemary and her parent united at the last in a father complex so apparent that Dick winced for all psychologists at the vicious sentimentality. The screen vanished, the lights went on, the moment had come.

“I’ve arranged one other thing,” announced Rosemary to the company at large, “I’ve arranged a test for Dick.”

“A what?”

“A screen test, they’ll take one now.”

There was an awful silence – then an irrepressible chortle from the Norths. Rosemary watched Dick comprehend what she meant, his face moving first in an Irish way; simultaneously she realized that she had made some mistake in the playing of her trump and still she did not suspect that the card was at fault.

“I don’t want a test,” said Dick firmly; then, seeing the situation as a whole, he continued lightly, “Rosemary, I’m disappointed. The pictures make a fine career for a woman – but my God, they can’t photograph me. I’m an old scientist all wrapped up in his private life.”

Nicole and Mary urged him ironically to seize the opportunity; they teased him, both faintly annoyed at not having been asked for a sitting. But Dick closed the subject with a somewhat tart discussion of actors: “The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing,” he said. “Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.”

In the taxi with Dick and Collis Clay – they were dropping Collis, and Dick was taking Rosemary to a tea from which Nicole and the Norths had resigned in order to do the things Abe had left undone till the last – in the taxi Rosemary reproached him.

“I thought if the test turned out to be good I could take it to California with me. And then maybe if they liked it you’d come out and be my leading man in a picture.”

He was overwhelmed. “It was a darn sweet thought, but I’d rather look at you. You were about the nicest sight I ever looked at.”

“That’s a great picture,” said Collis. “I’ve seen it four times. I know one boy at New Haven who’s seen it a dozen times – he went all the way to Hartford to see it one time. And when I brought Rosemary up to New Haven he was so shy he wouldn’t meet her. Can you beat that?[140] This little girl knocks them cold[141].”

Dick and Rosemary looked at each other, wanting to be alone, but Collis failed to understand.

“I’ll drop you where you’re going,” he suggested. “I’m staying at the Lutetia.”

“We’ll drop you,” said Dick.

“It’ll be easier for me to drop you. No trouble at all.”

“I think it will be better if we drop you.”

“But —” began Collis; he grasped the situation at last and began discussing with Rosemary when he would see her again.

Finally, he was gone, with the shadowy unimportance but the offensive bulk of the third party. The car stopped unexpectedly, unsatisfactorily, at the address Dick had given. He drew a long breath.

“Shall we go in?”

“I don’t care,” Rosemary said. “I’ll do anything you want.”

He considered.

“I almost have to go in – she wants to buy some pictures from a friend of mine who needs the money.”

Rosemary smoothed the brief expressive disarray of her hair.

“We’ll stay just five minutes,” he decided. “You’re not going to like these people.”

She assumed that they were dull and stereotyped people, or gross and drunken people, or tiresome, insistent people, or any of the sorts of people that the Divers avoided. She was entirely unprepared for the impression that the scene made on her.

XVII

It was a house hewn[142] from the frame of Cardinal de Retz’s[143] palace in the Rue Monsieur, but once inside the door there was nothing of the past, nor of any present that Rosemary knew. The outer shell, the masonry, seemed rather to enclose the future so that it was an electric-like shock, a definite nervous experience, perverted as a breakfast of oatmeal and hashish, to cross that threshold, if it could be so called, into the long hall of blue steel, silver-gilt, and the myriad facets of many oddly bevelled mirrors. The effect was unlike that of any part of the Decorative Arts Exhibition – for there were people in it, not in front of it. Rosemary had the detached false-and-exalted feeling of being on a set and she guessed that every one else present had that feeling too.

There were about thirty people, mostly women, and all fashioned by Louisa M. Alcott[144] or Madame de Ségur[145]; and they functioned on this set as cautiously, as precisely, as does a human hand picking up jagged broken glass. Neither individually nor as a crowd could they be said to dominate the environment, as one comes to dominate a work of art he may possess, no matter how esoteric, no one knew what this room meant because it was evolving into something else, becoming everything a room was not; to exist in it was as difficult as walking on a highly polished moving stairway, and no one could succeed at all save with the aforementioned qualities of a hand moving among broken glass – which qualities limited and defined the majority of those present.

These were of two sorts. There were the Americans and English who had been dissipating all spring and summer, so that now everything they did had a purely nervous inspiration. They were very quiet and lethargic: at certain hours and then they exploded into sudden quarrels and breakdowns and seductions. The other class, who might be called the exploiters, was formed by the sponges, who were sober, serious people by comparison, with a purpose in life and no time for fooling. These kept their balance best in that environment, and what tone there was, beyond the apartment’s novel organization of light values, came from them.

The Frankenstein[146] took down Dick and Rosemary at a gulp – it separated them immediately and Rosemary suddenly discovered herself to be an insincere little person, living all in the upper registers of her throat and wishing the director would come. There was however such a wild beating of wings in the room that she did not feel her position was more incongruous than any one else’s. In addition, her training told and after a series of semi-military turns, shifts, and marches she found herself presumably talking to a neat, slick girl with a lovely boy’s face, but actually absorbed by a conversation taking place on a sort of gun-metal ladder diagonally opposite her and four feet away.

There was a trio of young women sitting on the bench. They were all tall and slender with small heads groomed like manikins’ heads, and as they talked the heads waved gracefully about above their dark tailored suits, rather like long-stemmed flowers and rather like cobras’ hoods.

“Oh, they give a good show,” said one of them, in a deep rich voice. “Practically the best show in Paris – I’d be the last one to deny that. But after all —” She sighed. “Those phrases he uses over and over – ’Oldest inhabitant gnawed by rodents.’ You laugh once.”

“I prefer people whose lives have more corrugated surfaces,” said the second, “and I don’t like her.”

“I’ve never really been able to get very excited about them, or their entourage either. Why, for example, the entirely liquid Mr. North?”

“He’s out,” said the first girl. “But you must admit that the party in question can be one of the most charming human-beings you have ever met.”

It was the first hint Rosemary had had that they were talking about the Divers, and her body grew tense with indignation. But the girl talking to her, in the starched blue shirt with the bright blue eyes and the red cheeks and the very gray suit, a poster of a girl, had begun to play up. Desperately she kept sweeping things from between them, afraid that Rosemary couldn’t see her, sweeping them away until presently there was not so much as a veil of brittle humor hiding the girl, and with distaste Rosemary saw her plain.

“Couldn’t you have lunch, or maybe dinner, or lunch the day after?” begged the girl. Rosemary looked about for Dick, finding him with the hostess, to whom he had been talking since they came in. Their eyes met and he nodded slightly, and simultaneously the three cobra women noticed her; their long necks darted toward her and they fixed finely critical glances upon her. She looked back at them defiantly, acknowledging that she had heard what they said. Then she threw off her exigent vis-á-vis with a polite but clipped parting that she had just learned from Dick, and went over to join him. The hostess – she was another tall rich American girl, promenading insouciantly upon the national prosperity – was asking Dick innumerable questions about Gausse’s Hôtel, whither she evidently wanted to come, and battering persistently against his reluctance. Rosemary’s presence reminded her that she had been recalcitrant as a hostess and glancing about she said: “Have you met anyone amusing, have you met Mr. —” Her eyes groped for a male who might interest Rosemary, but Dick said they must go. They left immediately, moving over the brief threshold of the future to the sudden past of the stone façade without.

“Wasn’t it terrible?” he said.

“Terrible,” she echoed obediently.

“Rosemary?”

She murmured, “What?” in an awed voice.

“I feel terribly about this.”

She was shaken with audibly painful sobs. “Have you got a handkerchief?” she faltered. But there was little time to cry, and lovers now they fell ravenously on the quick seconds while outside the taxi windows the green and cream twilight faded, and the fire-red, gas-blue, ghost-green signs began to shine smokily through the tranquil rain. It was nearly six, the streets were in movement, the bistros gleamed, the Place de la Concorde[147] moved by in pink majesty as the cab turned north.

They looked at each other at last, murmuring names that were a spell. Softly the two names lingered on the air, died away more slowly than other words, other names, slower than music in the mind.

“I don’t know what came over me last night,” Rosemary said. “That glass of champagne? I’ve never done anything like that before.”

“You simply said you loved me.”

“I do love you – I can’t change that.” It was time for Rosemary to cry, so she cried a little in her handkerchief.

“I’m afraid I’m in love with you,” said Dick, “and that’s not the best thing that could happen.”

Again the names – then they lurched together as if the taxi had swung them. Her breasts crushed flat against him, her mouth was all new and warm, owned in common. They stopped thinking with an almost painful relief, stopped seeing; they only breathed and sought each other. They were both in the gray gentle world of a mild hangover of fatigue when the nerves relax in bunches like piano strings, and crackle suddenly like wicker chairs. Nerves so raw and tender must surely join other nerves, lips to lips, breast to breast…