He started as the knife on his plate gave a little sympathetic clink.
“Mon Dieu!” Once again he attempted a logical treatment of the situation, but he was obviously disturbed and he kept a watchful eye on the plate. “It is because I haven’t flown in ten days,” he decided. “You see, I am used to currents of air, to adjustments very sudden, and when it does not come I imagine it—”
It was a warm night, but there was extra dew on his young forehead, and then Tudy’s voice, very clear and piercing, cut through the tranquil air.
“Stop it, Tom. Stop it!”
He looked at her with an amazement as great as Riccard’s. In fear of a contagious mirth he had been avoiding her eyes, but he saw suddenly that there was no mirth in her face at all—only an engrossed compassion.
His world tilted like the plate for a moment, righted itself; he explained to Riccard the mechanics of the joke, and then as a sort of atonement, presented him with the apparatus. Riccard, trying to get back at someone, tried immediately to put it into action, inveigling the proprietor of the restaurant to sit down on it, but for the time Tom only remembered the expression on Tudy’s face when she had cried out. What did it mean when she could be so sorry for another man? Perhaps it was a general tenderness, perhaps her maternal instinct was so strong that he would be glad later when she felt that way about their children. Oh, she was good, but there was something in him unreconciled to the poignancy, the spontaneity of that cry—and on the way home in the cab he asked her:
“Are you by any chance interested in this French boy? If you are, it’s all right with me. We’ve been apart for a long time and if you’ve changed—”
She took his face between her hands and looked into his eyes.
“How can you say that to me?”
“Well, I thought that maybe gratitude was influencing you—”
“Gratitude has nothing to do with it. You’re the best man I ever knew.”
“The point is, do I happen to be attractive to you?”
“Of course you are—other men seem unimportant when you’re around. That’s why I don’t like to see them. Oh, Tom, I wish your mother would hurry so we can get married and leave here—”
As he caught her into his arms, she gave a sob that went through him like a knife. But as the minutes passed and she half lay in his arms in the shadow of the cab’s awning, he loved her so much and felt so close to her that he couldn’t believe anything could really have gone wrong.
Tudy took her examinations. “Not that they matter, because of course I’m not going on. But that’s what you sent me for. I’m now ‘finished.’ Darling, do I look finished?”
He regarded her appraisingly.
“You’ve probably learned enough French to get you in trouble,” he said. “You’re a little sweeter, perhaps, but not much—there wasn’t very much room for improvement.”
“Oh, but French wasn’t all I learned. How about Siamese? I sat next to the cutest little Siamese all during one lecture course, and he tried so desperately to make up to me. I learned to say, ‘No, I will not climb out the window of the pension tonight’ in Siamese. Do you want to hear me say it?”
It was a bright morning—he had called for her at eight to walk to the University. Arm in arm they strolled.
“What are you going to do while I’m being examined?” she asked.
“I’m going to get the car—”
“Our car—I’m wild to see it.”
“It’s a funny little thing, but it’ll take us all over Italy—”
“Then what will you do the rest of the time, after you get the car?”
“Why, I’ll try it out and then I’ll probably stop in front of the cafe about noon and have a bock, and maybe run into Riccard or one of your French friends—”
“What do you talk about with Riccard?” she asked.
“Oh, we do tricks. We don’t talk—not exactly, at least it doesn’t seem like talk.”
She hesitated. “I don’t see why you like to talk to Riccard,” she said at last.
“He’s a very nice type, very impetuous and fiery—”
“I know,” she said suddenly. “He once told me he’d resign his commission if I’d fly to China with him and fight in the war.”
When she said this, they had come to a halt engulfed by a crowd of students pouring into the buildings. She joined them as if she had said nothing at all:
“Goodbye, darling. I’ll be on this corner at one o’clock.”
He walked thoughtfully down to the garage. She had told him a great deal. He wasn’t asking her to fly to China; he was asking her to go for a quiet honeymoon in Sicily. He promised her security, not adventure.
“Well, it’s absurd to be jealous of this man,” he thought. “I’m just getting a little old before my time.”
So in the week of waiting for his mother, he organized picnics and swimming parties and trips to Arles and Nimes, inviting Tudy’s friends from the University, and they danced and sang and were very gay in little restaurant gardens and bistros all over that part of Provence—and behaved in such a harmless, lazy, wasteful summer manner that Tom, who wanted only to be alone with Tudy, almost managed to convince himself that he was having a good time…
…until the night on the steps of Tudy’s pension when he broke the silence and told her he wasn’t.
“Perhaps you’d better think it over,” he said.
“Think what over, Tom?”
“Whether you love me enough to marry me.”
Alarmed she cried: “Why, Tom, of course I do.”
“I’m not so sure. I like to see you have a good time, but I’m not the sort of man who could ever play—well, call it ‘background.’ ”
“But you’re not background. I’m trying to please you, Tom; I thought you wanted to see a lot of young people and be very Provencal and dance the Carmagnol’ and all that.”
“But it seems to be Riccard who’s dancing it with you. You didn’t actually have to kiss him tonight.”
“You were there—you saw. There was nothing secret about it. It was in front of a lot of people.”
“I didn’t like it.”
“Oh, I’m sorry if it hurt you, Tom. It was all playing. Sometimes with a man it’s difficult to avoid those things. You feel like a fool if you do. It was just Provence, just the lovely night—and I’ll never see him again after three or four days.”
He shook his head slowly.
“No, I’ve changed ideas. I don’t think we’ll see him any more at all.”
“What?” Was it alarm or relief in her voice? “Oh, then all right, Tom—that’s all right. You know best.”
“Is that agreed then?”
“You’re absolutely right,” she repeated after a minute. “But I think we could see him once more, just before he goes.”
“I’ll see him tomorrow,” he said almost gruffly. “You’re not a child and neither is he. It isn’t as if you were a debutante tapering off some heartsick swain.”
“Then why can’t you and I go away until he leaves.”
“That’s running away—that’d be a fine way to start a marriage.”
“Well, do what you want,” she said, and he saw by the starlight that her face was strained. “You know that more than anything in the world I want to marry you, Tom.”
Next day on the Rue de Provence he encountered Riccard; by mutual instinct they turned to a table of the nearest cafe.
“I must talk to you,” said Riccard.
“I wanted to talk to you,” Tom said, but he waited.
Riccard tapped his breast pocket.
“I have a letter here from Tudy delivered by hand this morning.”
“Yes?”
“You must understand that I am fond of you too, Tom—that I am very sad about the whole thing.”
“Well, what?” Tom demanded impatiently. “If Tudy wrote that she was in love with you—”
Riccard tapped his pocket again.
“She did not say that. I could show you this letter—”
“I don’t want to see it.”
Their tempers were rising.
“You’re upsetting Tudy,” Tom said. “Your business is to keep out.”
Riccard’s answer was humble but his eyes were proud.
“I have no money,” he said.
And, of all things, Tom was sorry for him.
“A girl must make her choice,” he said kindly. “You’re in the way now.”
“I understand that, too. I shall perhaps shorten my leave. I shall borrow a friend’s plane and fly down, and if I crash so much the better.”
“That’s nonsense.”
They shook hands and Tom duplicated the other’s formal little bow, succinct as a salute…
He picked up Tudy at her pension an hour later. She was lovely in an inky blue muslin dress above which her hair shone like a silver angel. As they drove away from the house he said:
“I feel like a brute. But you can’t have two men, can you—like a young girl at a dance?”
“Oh, I know it—don’t talk about it, darling. He did it all. I haven’t done anything I couldn’t tell you about.”
Riccard had said much the same thing. What bothered Tom was the image on the heart.
They drove southward past cliffs that might have had Roman lookouts posted on them, or that might have concealed barbarians waiting to drop boulders upon the Roman legions if they defiled through some pass.
Tom kept thinking: “Between Riccard and me which is the Roman, and which is the barbarian?”
…Over the crest of a cliff a singing dot came into sight—a dark bee, a hawk—an airplane. They looked up idly, then they were suddenly thinking the same thing, wondering if it were Riccard on his way back to the
