Tender Is the Night (10 page)

It was
almost four. Nicole stood in a shop with a love bird on her shoulder, and had
one of her infrequent outbursts of speech.

“Well,
what if you hadn’t gone in that pool that day—I sometimes wonder about such
things. Just before the war we were in
Berlin
—I
was thirteen, it was just before Mother died. My sister was going to a court
ball and she had three of the royal princes on her dance card, all arranged by
a chamberlain and everything. Half an hour before she was going to start she
had a side ache and a high fever. The doctor said it was appendicitis and she
ought to be operated on. But Mother had her plans made, so Baby went to the
ball and danced till two with an ice pack strapped on under her evening dress.
She was operated on at
seven o’clock
next morning.”

It was
good to be hard, then; all nice people were hard on themselves. But it was
four o’clock
and Rosemary kept
thinking of Dick waiting for Nicole now at the hotel. She must go
there,
she must not make him wait for her. She kept
thinking, “Why don’t you go?” and then suddenly, “Or let me go if you don’t
want to.” But Nicole went to one more place to buy corsages for them both and
sent one to Mary North. Only then she seemed to remember and with sudden
abstraction she
signalled
for a taxi.

“Good-by,”
said Nicole. “We had fun, didn’t we?”

“Loads
of fun,” said Rosemary. It was more difficult than she thought and her whole
self protested as Nicole drove away.

XIII

Dick
turned the corner of the traverse and continued along the trench walking on the
duckboard. He came to a periscope, looked through it a moment; then he got up
on the step and peered over the parapet. In front of him beneath a dingy sky
was Beaumont Hamel; to his left the tragic hill of
Thiepval
.
Dick stared at them through his field glasses, his throat straining with
sadness.

He went
on along the trench, and found the others waiting for him in the next traverse.
He was full of excitement and he wanted to communicate it to them, to make them
understand about this, though actually Abe North had seen battle service and he
had not.

“This
land here cost twenty lives a foot that summer,” he said to Rosemary. She
looked out obediently at the rather bare green plain with its low trees of six
years’ growth. If Dick had added that they were now being shelled she would
have believed him that afternoon. Her love had reached a point where now at
last she was beginning to be unhappy, to be desperate. She didn’t know what to
do—she wanted to talk to her mother.

“There
are lots of people dead since and we’ll all be dead soon,” said Abe
consolingly.

Rosemary
waited tensely for Dick to continue.

“See
that little stream—we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a
month to walk to it—a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and
pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few
inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will
ever do that again in this generation.”

“Why,
they’ve only just quit over in
Turkey
,”
said Abe. “And in
Morocco
—”

“That’s
different. This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long
time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight
the first
Marne
again but not this. This took
religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation
that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on
this front. You had to have
a whole
-
souled
sentimental equipment going back further than you
could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown
Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in
Valence
and beer gardens in
Unter
den Linden and weddings at the
mairie
,
and going to the
Derby
,
and your grandfather’s whiskers.”

“General
Grant invented this kind of battle at
Petersburg
in sixty- five.”

“No, he
didn’t—he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by
Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons
bowling and
marraines
in
Marseilles
and girls seduced in the back
lanes of
Wurtemburg
and
Westphalia
.
Why, this was a love battle—there was a century of middle-class love spent
here. This was the last love battle.”

“You
want to hand over this battle to D. H. Lawrence,” said Abe.

“
All my
beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with
a great gust of high explosive love,” Dick mourned persistently. “Isn’t that
true, Rosemary?”

“I don’t
know,” she answered with a grave face. “You know everything.”

They
dropped behind the others. Suddenly a shower of earth gobs and pebbles came
down on them and Abe yelled from the next traverse:

“The war
spirit’s getting into me again. I have a hundred years of
Ohio
love behind me and I’m going to bomb
out this trench.” His head popped up over the embankment. “You’re dead—don’t
you know the rules? That was a grenade.”

Rosemary
laughed and Dick picked up a retaliatory handful of stones and then put them
down.

“I couldn’t
kid here,” he said rather apologetically. “The silver cord is cut and the
golden bowl is broken and all that, but an old romantic like me can’t do
anything about it.”

“I’m
romantic too.”

They
came out of the neat restored trench, and faced a memorial to the
Newfoundland
dead.
Reading the inscription Rosemary burst into sudden tears. Like most women she
liked to be told how she should feel, and she liked Dick’s telling her which
things were ludicrous and which things were sad. But most of all she wanted him
to know how she loved him, now that the fact was upsetting everything, now that
she was walking over the battlefield in a thrilling dream.

After
that they got in their car and started back toward
Amiens
. A thin warm rain was falling on the
new scrubby woods and underbrush and they passed great funeral pyres of sorted
duds, shells, bombs, grenades, and equipment, helmets, bayonets, gun stocks and
rotten leather, abandoned six years in the ground. And suddenly around a bend
the white caps of a great sea of graves. Dick asked the chauffeur to stop.

“There’s
that girl—and she still has her wreath.”

They
watched as he got out and went over to the girl, who stood uncertainly by the
gate with a wreath in her hand. Her taxi waited. She was a red-haired girl from
Tennessee
whom they had met on the train this morning, come from
Knoxville
to lay a memorial on her brother’s
grave. There were tears of vexation on her face.

“The War
Department must have given me the wrong number,” she whimpered. “It had another
name on it. I been
lookin
’ for it since
two o’clock
, and there’s so many
graves.”

“Then if
I were you I’d just lay it on any grave without looking at the name,” Dick
advised her.

“You
reckon that’s what I ought to do?”

“I think
that’s what he’d have wanted you to do.”

It was
growing dark and the rain was coming down harder.

She left
the wreath on the first grave inside the gate, and accepted Dick’s suggestion
that she dismiss her taxi-cab and ride back to
Amiens
with them.

Rosemary
shed tears again when she heard of the mishap—altogether it had been a watery
day, but she felt that she had learned something, though exactly what it was
she did not know. Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as
happy—one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between
past and future pleasure but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.

Amiens
was an echoing purple town, still
sad with the war, as some railroad stations were:—the
Gare
du Nord and
Waterloo
station in
London
.
In the daytime one is deflated by such towns, with their little trolley cars of
twenty years ago crossing the great gray cobble-stoned squares in front of the
cathedral, and the very weather seems to have a quality of the past, faded
weather like that of old photographs. But after dark all that is most
satisfactory in French life swims back into the picture—the sprightly tarts,
the men arguing with a hundred
Voilàs
in the cafés,
the couples drifting, head to head, toward the satisfactory inexpensiveness of
nowhere. Waiting for the train they sat in a big arcade, tall enough to release
the smoke and chatter and music upward and obligingly the orchestra launched
into “Yes, We Have No Bananas,”—they clapped, because the leader looked so
pleased with himself. The
Tennessee
girl forgot her sorrow and enjoyed
herself,
even began
flirtations of tropical eye-
rollings
and
pawings
, with Dick and Abe. They teased her gently.

Then,
leaving infinitesimal sections of
Wurtemburgers
,
Prussian Guards, Chasseurs
Alpins
,
Manchester
mill hands and old
Etonians
to pursue their eternal dissolution under the warm
rain, they took the train for
Paris
.
They ate sandwiches of
mortadel
sausage and
bel
paese
cheese made up in the
station restaurant, and drank
Beaujolais
.
Nicole was abstracted, biting her lip restlessly and reading over the
guide-books to the battle-field that Dick had brought along—indeed, he had made
a quick study of the whole affair, simplifying it always until it bore a faint
resemblance to one of his own parties.

XIV

When
they reached Paris Nicole was too tired to go on to the grand illumination at
the Decorative Art Exposition as they had planned. They left her at the Hotel
Roi
George, and as she disappeared between the intersecting
planes made by lobby lights of the glass doors, Rosemary’s oppression lifted.
Nicole was a force—not necessarily well disposed or predictable like her
mother—an incalculable force. Rosemary was somewhat afraid of her.

At
eleven she sat with Dick and the
Norths
at a
houseboat café just opened on the
Seine
. The river
shimmered with lights from the bridges and cradled many cold moons. On Sundays
sometimes when Rosemary and her mother had lived in
Paris
they had taken the little steamer up to
Suresnes
and talked about plans for the future. They
had little money but Mrs. Speers was so sure of Rosemary’s beauty and had
implanted in her so much ambition, that she was willing to gamble the money on
“advantages”; Rosemary in turn was to repay her mother when she got her start.
. . .

Since
reaching Paris Abe North had had a thin vinous fur over him; his eyes were
bloodshot from sun and wine. Rosemary realized for the first time that he was
always stopping in places to get a drink, and she wondered how Mary North liked
it. Mary was quiet, so quiet save for her frequent laughter that Rosemary had
learned little about her. She liked the straight dark hair brushed back until
it met some sort of natural cascade that took care of it— from time to time it
eased with a jaunty slant over the corner of her temple, until it was almost in
her eye when she tossed her head and caused it to fall sleek into place once
more.

“We’ll
turn in early to-night, Abe, after this drink.” Mary’s voice was light but it
held a little flicker of anxiety. “You don’t want to be poured on the boat.”

“It’s pretty
late now,” Dick said. “We’d all better go.”

The
noble dignity of Abe’s face took on
a certain
stubbornness, and he remarked with determination:

“Oh, no.”
He paused gravely.
“Oh, no, not yet.
We’ll have
another bottle of champagne.”

“No more
for me,” said Dick.

“It’s
Rosemary I’m thinking of. She’s a natural alcoholic—keeps a bottle of gin in
the bathroom and all that—her mother told me.”

He
emptied what was left of the first bottle into Rosemary’s glass. She had made
herself quite sick the first day in
Paris
with quarts of lemonade; after that she had taken nothing with them but now she
raised the champagne and drank at it.