“I won’t have the child brought in.” Nicole threw on her clothes as though they were chain mail.
“That’s all right,” said Dick. “Bring Lanier in. We’ll settle this bath-tub matter—fact or myth.”
Lanier, half clothed mentally and physically, gazed at the angered faces of the adults.
“Listen, Lanier,” Mary demanded, “how did you come to think you were bathed in water that had been used before?”
“Speak up,” Dick added.
“It was just dirty, that was all.”
“Couldn’t you hear the new water running, from your room, next door?”
Lanier admitted the possibility, but reiterated his point—the water was dirty. He was a little awed; he tried to see ahead:
“It couldn’t have been running, because—”
They pinned him down.
“Why not?”
He stood in his little kimono arousing the sympathy of his parents and further arousing Mary’s impatience—then he said:
“The water was dirty, it was full of soap-suds.”
“When you’re not sure what you’re saying—” Mary began, but Nicole interrupted.
“Stop it, Mary. If there were dirty suds in the water it was logical to think it was dirty. His father told him to come-”
“There couldn’t have been dirty suds in the water.”
Lanier looked reproachfully at his father, who had betrayed him. Nicole turned him about by the shoulders and sent him out of the room; Dick broke the tenseness with a laugh.
Then, as if the sound recalled the past, the old friendship, Mary guessed how far from them she had gone and said in a mollifying tone: “It’s always like that with children.”
Her uneasiness grew as she remembered the past. “You’d be silly to go—Hosain wanted to make this trip, anyhow. After all, you’re my guests and you just blundered into the thing.” But Dick, made more angry by this obliqueness and the use of the word blunder, turned away and began arranging his effects, saying:
“It’s too bad about the young women. I’d like to apologize to the one who came in here.”
“If you’d only listened on the piano seat!”
“But you’ve gotten so damned dull, Mary. I listened as long as I could.”
“Be quiet!” Nicole advised him.
“I return his compliment,” said Mary bitterly. “Good-bye, Nicole.” She went out.
After all that there was no question of her coming to see them off; the major-domo arranged the departure. Dick left formal notes for Hosain and the sisters. There was nothing to do except to go, but all of them, especially Lanier, felt bad about it.
“I insist,” insisted Lanier on the train, “that it was dirty bath water.”
“That’ll do,” his father said. “You better forget it—unless you want me to divorce you. Did you know there was a new law in France that you can divorce a child?”
Lanier roared with delight and the Divers were unified again—Dick wondered how many more times it could be done.
V
NICOLE WENT TO THE window and bent over the sill to take a look at the rising altercation on the terrace; the April sun shone pink on the saintly face of Augustine, the cook, and blue on the butcher’s knife she waved in her drunken hand. She had been with them since their return to Villa Diana in February.
Because of an obstruction of an awning she could see only Dick’s head and his hand holding one of his heavy canes with a bronze knob on it. The knife and the cane, menacing each other, were like tripod and short sword in a gladiatorial combat. Dick’s words reached her first:
“—care how much kitchen wine you drink, but when I find you digging into a bottle of Chablis Mouton—”
“You talk about drinking!” Augustine cried, flourishing her sabre. “You drink—all the time!”
Nicole called over the awning: “What’s the matter, Dick?” and he answered in English:
“The old girl has been polishing off the vintage wines. I’m firing her—at least I’m trying to.”
“Heavens! Well, don’t let her reach you with that knife.”
Augustine shook her knife up at Nicole. Her old mouth was made of two small intersecting cherries.
“I would like to say, Madame, if you knew that your husband drinks over at his Bastide comparatively as a day-labourer —”
“Shut up and get out!” interrupted Nicole. “We’ll get the gendarmes.”
“You’ll get the gendarmes! With my brother in the corps! You—a disgusting American?”
In English Dick called up to Nicole:
“Get the children away from the house till I settle this.”
“—disgusting Americans who come here and drink up our finest wines,” screamed Augustine with the voice of the commune.
Dick mastered a firmer tone.
“You must leave now! I’ll pay you what we owe you.”
“Very sure you’ll pay me! And let me tell you -” she came close and waved the knife so furiously that Dick raised his stick, whereupon she rushed into the kitchen and returned with the carving-knife reinforced by a hatchet.
The situation was not prepossessing. Augustine was a strong woman and could be disarmed only at the risk of serious results to herself—and severe legal complications which were the lot of one who molested a French citizen. Trying a bluff, Dick called up to Nicole:
“Phone the poste de police.” Then to Augustine, indicating her armament, “This means arrest for you.”
“Ha-ha!” she laughed demoniacally; nevertheless, she came no nearer. Nicole phoned the police, but was answered with what was almost an echo of Augustine’s laugh. She heard mumbles and passings of the word around—the connexion was suddenly broken.
Returning to the window, she called down to Dick—“Give her something extra!”
“If I could get to that phone!” As this seemed impracticable, Dick capitulated. For fifty francs, increased to a hundred as he succumbed to the idea of getting her out hastily, Augustine yielded her fortress, covering the retreat with stormy grenades of “Salaud!” She would leave only when her nephew could come for her baggage. Waiting cautiously in the neighbourhood of the kitchen, Dick heard a cork pop, but he yielded the point. There was no further trouble—when the nephew arrived, all apologetic, Augustine bade Dick a cheerful convivial good-bye and called up, “Au revoir, Madame! Bonne chance!” to Nicole’s window.
The Divers went to Nice and dined on a bouillabaisse, which is a stew of rock fish and small lobsters highly seasoned with saffron, and a bottle of cold Chablis. He expressed pity for Augustine.
“I’m not sorry a bit,” said Nicole.
“I’m sorry—and yet I wish I’d shoved her over the cliff.”
There was little they dared talk about in these days; seldom did they find the right word when it counted, it arrived always a moment too late when one could not reach the other any more. To-night Augustine’s outburst had shaken them from their separate reveries; with the burn and chill of the spiced broth and the parching wine they talked.
“We can’t go on like this?” Nicole suggested. “Or can we?—what do you think?” Startled that for the moment Dick did not deny it, she continued, “Some of the tune I think it’s my fault—I’ve ruined you.”
“So I’m ruined, am I?” he inquired pleasantly.
“I didn’t mean that. But you used to want to create things—now you seem to want to smash them up.”
She trembled at criticizing him in these broad terms, but lis enlarging silence frightened her even more. She guessed that something was developing behind the silence, behind he hard, blue eyes, the almost unnatural interest in the children. Uncharacteristic bursts of temper surprised her—he would suddenly unroll a long scroll of contempt for some person, race, class, way of life, way of thinking. It was as though an incalculable story was telling itself inside him, about which she could only guess in the moments when it broke through the surface.
“After all, what do you get out of this?” she demanded.
“Knowing you’re stronger every day. Knowing that your illness follows the law of diminishing returns.”
His voice came to her from far off, as though he were speaking of something remote and academic; her alarm made her exclaim, “Dick!” and she thrust her hand forward to his across the table. A reflex pulled Dick’s hand back and he added: “There’s the whole situation to think of, isn’t there? There’s not just you.” He covered her hand with his and said in the old pleasant voice of a conspirator for pleasure, mischief, profit, and delight:
“See that boat out there?”
It was the motor yacht of T. F. Golding lying placid among the little swells of the Nicean bay, constantly bound upon a romantic voyage that was not dependent upon actual motion. “We’ll go out there now and ask the people on board what’s the matter with them. We’ll find out if they’re happy.”
“We hardly know him,” Nicole objected.
“He urged us. Besides, Baby knows him—she practically married him, doesn’t she—didn’t she?”
When they put out from the port in a hired launch it was already summer dusk and lights were breaking out in spasms along the rigging of the Margin. As they drew up alongside, Nicole’s doubts reasserted themselves.
“He’s having a party—”
“It’s only a radio,” he guessed.
They were hailed—a huge white-haired man in a white suit looked down at them, calling:
“Do I recognize the Divers?”
“Boat ahoy, Margin!”
Their boat moved under the companionway; as they mounted Golding doubled his huge frame to give Nicole a hand.
“Just in time for dinner.”
A small orchestra was playing astern: 286
“I’m yours for the asking, But till then you cant ask me to behave-”
And as Golding’s cyclonic arms blew them aft without touching them, Nicole was sorrier they had come, and more impatient at Dick. Having taken up an attitude of aloofness from the gay people here, at the time when Dick’s work and her health were incompatible with going about, they had a reputation as refusers. Riviera replacements during the ensuing years interpreted this as a vague unpopularity. Nevertheless, having
