Nicole refused her turn; then Rosemary rode the board neatly and conservatively, with facetious cheers from her admirers. Three of them scrambled egotistically for the honour of pulling her into the boat, managing, among them, to bruise her knee and hip against the side.
“Now you, Doctor,” said the Mexican at the wheel.
Dick and the last young man dived over the side and swam to the board. Dick was going to try his lifting trick and Nicole began to watch with smiling scorn. This physical showing-off for Rosemary irritated her most of all.
When the men had ridden long enough to find their balance, Dick knelt, and putting the back of his neck in the other man’s crotch, found the rope through his legs, and slowly began to rise.
The people in the boat, watching closely, saw that he was having difficulties. He was on one knee: the trick was to straighten all the way up in the same motion with which he left his kneeling position. He rested for a moment, then his face contracted as he put his heart into the strain, and lifted.
The board was narrow, the man, though weighing less than a hundred and fifty, was awkward with his weight and grabbed clumsily at Dick’s head. When, with a last wrenching effort of his back, Dick stood upright, the board slid sidewise and the pair toppled into the sea.
In the boat Rosemary exclaimed: “Wonderful! They almost had it.”
But as they came back to the swimmers Nicole watched for a sight of Dick’s face. It was full of annoyance as she expected, because he had done the thing with ease only two years ago.
The second time he was more careful. He rose a little, testing the balance of his burden, settled down again on his knee; then, grunting “Alley oop!” began to rise—but before he could really straighten out, his legs suddenly buckled and he shoved the board away with his feet to avoid being struck as they fell off.
This time when the Baby Car came back it was apparent to all the passengers that he was angry.
“Do you mind if I try that once more?” he called, treading water. “We almost had it then.”
“Sure. Go ahead.”
To Nicole he looked white-around-the-gills, and she cautioned him:
“Don’t you think that’s enough for now?”
He didn’t answer. The first partner had had plenty and was hauled over the side, the Mexican driving the motor-boat obligingly took his place.
He was heavier than the first man. As the boat gathered motion, Dick rested for a moment, belly-down on the board. Then he got beneath the man and took the rope, and his muscles flexed as he tried to rise.
He could not rise. Nicole saw him shift his position and strain upward again, but at the instant when the weight of his partner was full upon his shoulders he became immovable. He tried again—lifting an inch, two inches—Nicole felt the sweat glands of her forehead open as she strained with him—then he was simply holding his ground, then he collapsed back down on his knees with a smack, and they went over, Dick’s head barely missing a kick of the board.
“Hurry back!” Nicole called to the driver; even as she spoke she saw him slide under water and she gave a little cry; but he came up again and turned on his back, and the Mexican swam near to help. It seemed for ever till the boat reached them, but when they came alongside at last and Nicole saw Dick floating exhausted and expressionless, alone with the water and the sky, her panic changed suddenly to contempt.
“We’ll help you up, Doctor… Get his foot … all right … now altogether….”
Dick sat panting and looking at nothing.
“I knew you shouldn’t have tried it,” Nicole could not help saying.
“He’d tired himself the first two times,” said the Mexican.
“It was a foolish thing,” Nicole insisted. Rosemary tactfully said nothing.
After a minute Dick got his breath, panting, “I couldn’t have lifted a paper doll that time.”
An explosive little laugh relieved the tension caused by his failure. They were all attentive to Dick as he disembarked at the dock. But Nicole was annoyed—everything he did annoyed her now.
She sat with Rosemary under an umbrella while Dick went to the buffet for a drink. He returned presently with some sherry for them.
“The first drink I ever had was with you,” Rosemary said, and with a spurt of enthusiasm she added, “Oh, I’m so glad to see you and know you’re all right. I was worried—” Her sentence broke as she changed direction—“that maybe you wouldn’t be.”
“Did you hear I’d gone into a process of deterioration?”
“Oh, no. I simply—just heard you’d changed. And I’m glad to see with my own eyes it isn’t true.”
“It is true,” Dick answered, sitting down with them. “The change came a long way back—but at first it didn’t show. The manner remains intact for some time after the morale cracks.”
“Do you practise on the Riviera?” Rosemary demanded hastily.
“It’d be a good ground to find likely specimens.” He nodded here and there at the people milling about in the golden sand. “Great candidates. Notice our old friend, Mrs Abrams, playing duchess to Mary North’s queen? Don’t get jealous about it—think of Mrs Abrams’s long climb up the back stairs of the Ritz on her hands and knees and all the carpet dust she had to inhale.”
Rosemary interrupted him. “But is that really Mary North?” She was regarding a woman sauntering in their direction, followed by a small group who behaved as if they were accustomed to being looked at. When they were ten feet away, Mary’s glance flickered fractionally over the Divers, one of those unfortunate glances that indicate to the glanced-upon that they have been observed but are to be overlooked, the sort of glance that neither the Divers nor Rosemary Hoyt had ever permitted themselves to throw at anyone in their lives. Dick was amused when Mary perceived Rosemary, changed her plans, and came over. She spoke to Nicole with pleasant heartiness, nodded unsmilingly to Dick as if he were somewhat contagious—whereupon he bowed in ironic respect—as she greeted Rosemary.
“I heard you were here. For how long?”
“Until to-morrow,” Rosemary answered.
She, too, saw how Mary had walked through the Divers to talk to her, and a sense of obligation kept her unenthusiastic. No, she could not dine to-night.
Mary turned to Nicole, her manner indicating affect on blended with pity.
“How are the children?” she asked.
They came up at the moment, and Nicole gave ear to a request that she overrule the governess on a swimming point.
“No,” Dick answered for her. “What Mademoiselle says must go.”
Agreeing that one must support delegated authority, Nicole refused their request, whereupon Mary—who in the manner of an Anita Loos heroine had dealings only with Faits Accomplis, who indeed could not have house-broken a French poodle puppy — regarded Dick as though he were guilty of a most flagrant bullying. Dick, chafed by the tiresome performance, inquired with mock solicitude:
“How are your children—and their aunts?”
Mary did not answer; she left them, first draping a sympathetic hand over Lanier’s reluctant head. After she had gone Dick said: “When I think of the time I spent working over her.”
“I like her,” said Nicole.
Dick’s bitterness had surprised Rosemary, who had thought of him as all-forgiving, all-comprehending. Suddenly she recalled what it was she had heard about him. In conversation with some State Department people on the boat—Europeanized Americans who had reached a position where they could scarcely have been said to belong to any nation at all, at least not to any great power, though perhaps to a Balkan-like state composed of similar citizens -the name of the ubiquitously renowned Baby Warren had occurred and it was remarked that Baby’s younger sister had thrown herself away on a dissipated doctor. “He’s not received anywhere any more,” the woman said.
The phrase disturbed Rosemary. She could not place the Divers as living in any relation to society where such a fact, if fact it was, could have any meaning, yet the hint of a hostile and organized public opinion rang in her ears. “He’s not received anywhere any more.” She pictured Dick climbing the steps of a mansion, presenting cards, and being told by a butler: “We’re not receiving you any more”; then proceeding down an avenue only to be told the same thing by the countless other butlers of countless Ambassadors, Ministers, Charges d’Affaires…
Nicole wondered how she could get away. She guessed that Dick, stung into alertness, would grow charming and would make Rosemary respond to him. Sure enough, in a moment his voice managed to qualify everything unpleasant he had said:
“Mary’s all right—she’s done very well. But it’s hard to go on liking people who don’t like you.”
Rosemary, falling into line, swayed toward Dick and crooned:
“Oh, you’re so nice. I can’t imagine anybody not forgiving you anything, no matter what you did to them.” Then feeling that her exuberance had transgressed on Nicole’s rights, she
