It was almost two when they went into the dining-room. Two waiters, piling plates and talking loud Italian, fell silent when they came in and brought them the table d’hôte luncheon[13].
“I fell in love on the beach,” said Rosemary.
“Who with?”
“First with a whole lot of people who looked nice. Then with one man.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“Just a little. Very handsome. With reddish hair.” She was eating, ravenously. “He’s married though – it’s usually the way.”
Her mother was her best friend. She was twice satisfactorily married and twice widowed, her cheerful stoicism had each time deepened. One of her husbands had been a cavalry ofifcer and one an army doctor, and they both left something to her that she tried to present intact to Rosemary.
“Then you like it here?” she asked.
“It might be fun if we knew those people. There were some other people, but they weren’t nice. They recognized me – no matter where we go everybody’s seen ‘Daddy’s Girl.’”
Mrs. Speers waited for Rosemary’s egotism to pass; then she said in a matter-of-fact way: “That reminds me[14], when are you going to see Earl Brady?”
“I thought we might go this afternoon – if you’re rested.”
“You go – I’m not going.”
“We’ll wait till to-morrow then.”
“I want you to go alone. It’s only a short way – it isn’t as if you didn’t speak French[15].”
“Mother – aren’t there some things I don’t have to do?”
“Oh, well then go later – but some day before we leave.”
“All right, Mother.”
After lunch they were both taken by the sudden weakness that comes over American travellers in quiet foreign places: they felt that life was not continuing here.
“Let’s only stay three days, Mother,” Rosemary said when they were back in their rooms.
“How about the man you fell in love with on the beach?”
“I don’t love anybody but you, Mother, darling.”
Rosemary stopped in the lobby and spoke to the concierge about trains. She took the bus and rode to the station. The first-class compartment was stifling. Unlike American trains, this train was part of the country through which it passed. Its breath stirred the dust from the palm leaves. Rosemary was sure she could lean from the window and pull flowers with her hand.
A dozen cabbies slept in their taxis outside the Cannes station. As she came out of a drug store with a bottle of cocoanut oil, a woman, whom she recognized as Mrs. Diver, crossed her path with arms full of sofa cushions, and went to a car parked down the street. A long black dog barked at her, a dozing chauffeur woke with a start. She sat in the car, her lovely face set, her eyes watchful, looking straight ahead toward nothing. Her dress was bright red and her brown legs were bare. She had thick, dark, gold hair.
With half an hour to wait for her train Rosemary sat down in the Café des Alliés[16]. She had bought Le Temps[17] and The Saturday Evening Post[18] for her mother, and as she drank her citronade she opened the latter at the memoirs of a Russian princess and now began to feel that French life was empty and stale. She was glad to go back to Gausse’s Hotel.
Her shoulders were too burned to swim with the next day, so she and her mother hired a car and drove along the Riviera, the delta of many rivers. The chauffeur, a Russian Czar of the period of Ivan the Terrible, was a self-appointed guide, and the beautiful names – Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo[19] – began whispering of old kings come here to dine or die, of Russian princes spending the weeks here in the lost caviar days. Most of all, there was the scent of the Russians along the coast – their closed book shops and grocery stores. Ten years ago, when the season ended in April, the doors of the Orthodox Church were locked, and the sweet champagnes they favored were put away until their return. “We’ll be back next season,” they said, but they were never coming back any more.
It was pleasant to drive back to the hotel in the late afternoon, above a mysteriously colored sea. It was pleasant to pass people eating outside their doors, and to hear the loud mechanical pianos behind the vines of country cabarets. When they turned down to Gausse’s Hotel through the darkening trunks of trees, the moon already hung over the ruins of the aqueducts …
Somewhere in the hills behind the hotel there was a dance, and Rosemary listened to the music, realizing that there was gaiety somewhere about, and she thought of the nice people on the beach. She thought she might meet them in the morning, but they obviously formed a self-sufcif ient little group, and once their umbrellas, bamboo rugs, dogs, and children were set out in place, the part of the beach was literally closed up. She decided in any case not to spend her last two mornings with the other ones.
The matter was solved for her. The McKiscos were not yet there and she had scarcely spread her peignoir when two men left the group and came down toward her.
“Good morning,” said Dick Diver. “Look – sunburn or no sunburn, why did you stay away yesterday? We worried about you.”
She sat up and her happy little laugh welcomed him.
“We wondered,” Dick Diver said, “if you wouldn’t come over this morning. We take food and drink, so it’s an invitation.”
He seemed kind and charming – his voice promised that he would take care of her, and that a little later he would open up whole new worlds for her full of magnificent possibilities. He managed the introduction so that her name wasn’t mentioned and then let her know that everyone knew who she was but were respecting her private life.
Nicole Diver was looking through a recipe book for chicken Maryland. She was about twenty-four, Rosemary guessed – her face could have been described in terms of conventional prettiness.
“Are you here for a long time?” Nicole asked. Her voice was low.
Suddenly Rosemary let the possibility enter her mind that they might stay another week.
“Not very long,” she answered vaguely. “We’ve been abroad a long time – we landed in Sicily[20] in March and we’ve been slowly working our way north. I got pneumonia making a picture last January and I’ve been recovering.”
“Mercy! How did that happen?”
“Well, it was from swimming,” Rosemary was rather reluctant at answering personal questions. “One day I happened to have the grippe and didn’t know it, and they were taking a scene where I dove into a canal in Venice. It was a very expensive set, so I had to dive and dive and dive all morning. Mother had a doctor right there, but it was no use – I got pneumonia.” She changed the subject before they could speak. “Do you like it here – this place?”
“They have to like it,” said Abe North slowly. “They invented it.” He turned his noble head slowly so that his eyes rested with tenderness and affection on the two Divers.
“Oh, did you?”
“This is only the second season that the hotel’s been open in summer,” Nicole explained. “We persuaded Gausse to keep on a cook and a garçon – it paid its way[21] and this year it’s doing even better.”
“But you’re not in the hotel.”
“We built a house, up at Tarmes[22].”
“The theory is,” said Dick, arranging an umbrella to protect Rosemary’s shoulder, “that all the northern places were picked out by Russians and English who don’t mind the cold, while half of us Americans come from tropical climates – that’s why we’re beginning to come here.”
The young man of Latin aspect had been turning the pages of The New York Herald[23].
“Well, what nationality are these people?” he asked, suddenly, and read with a slight French intonation, “ ‘Registered at the Hotel Palace at Vevey[24] are Mr. Pandely Vlasco, Mme. Bonneasse’– I don’t exaggerate —‘Corinna Medonca, Yolanda Yosfuglu and Geneveva de Momus!’ She attracts me most – Geneveva de Momus. Almost worth running up to Vevey to take a look at Geneveva de Momus[25].”
He stood up suddenly, stretching himself. He was a few years younger than Diver or North. He was tall and his body was hard but too thin save for the force gathered in his shoulders and upper arms. At first glance he seemed handsome – but there was a faint disgust always in his face which ruined the shine of his brown eyes.
“We found some fine ones in the news of Americans last week,” said Nicole. “Mrs. Evelyn Oyster and – what were the others?”
“There was Mr. S. Flesh,” said Diver, getting up also.
“Oh, yes – S. Flesh – doesn’t he give you the creeps[26]?”
It was quiet alone with Nicole – Rosemary found it even quieter than with her mother. Abe North and Barban, the Latin-looking young man who happened to be French, were talking about Morocco. Having copied her recipe, Nicole picked up a piece of sewing. Rosemary examined their possessions – four large parasols that made a canopy of shade, a portable bath house for dressing, a rubber horse, new things that Rosemary had never seen. She had thought that they were rich people.
She looked in turn at the men. All three were personable in different ways; all were of a special gentleness that she felt was part of their lives, not at all like the company manners of actors, and she noticed also a far-reaching delicacy that was different from the rough and ready[27] 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 mass of college boys, interested only in love at first sight, whom she had met at the Yale prom[28] last fall.
These three were different. Barban was less civilized, more skeptical and sarcastic, his manners were formal. Abe North had, under his shyness, a desperate humor that amused but puzzled her.
But Dick Diver – he was all complete there. Silently she admired him. His complexion was reddish, so was his short hair. 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. His voice, with some faint Irish melody[29], was soft, 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.
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:
“So they 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, “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[30] 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 shocked. 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[31].”
“I’m not going to have MY nose rubbed in the sand,” she insisted, laughing. “I’m a mean, hard woman,” she explained to Rosemary, and then raising her voice, “Children, put on your bathing suits!”
Nicole handed her husband the curious garment on which she had been working. He went into the dressing tent and caused a commotion by appearing in a moment wearing transparent black lace drawers. Close inspection showed that actually they were lined with flesh-colored cloth.
“Well, if that isn’t a pansy’s trick[32]!” exclaimed Mr. McKisco contemptuously – then turning quickly to Mr. Dumphry and Mr. Campion, he added, “Oh, I beg your pardon.”
Rosemary was delighted with the trunks. She admired the expensive simplicity of the Divers. 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 should make you happy. You should laugh.”
Rosemary looked up and gave a laugh. Her mother always had a great influence on her.
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