As they passed through the principal salon they saw ahead of them figures that seemed to dance in the half-light of the circular stern. This was an illusion made by the enchantent of the music, the unfamiliar lighting, and the surrounding presence of water. Actually, save for some busy stewards, the guests loafed on a wide divan that followed the curve of the deck. There were a white, a red, a blurred dress and the laundered chests of several men, of whom one, detaching and identifying himself, brought from Nicole a rare little cry of delight.
“Tommy!”
Brushing aside the Gallicism of his formal dip at her hand, Nicole pressed her face against his. They sat, or rather lay down together, on the Antoninian bench. His handsome face was so dark as to have lost the pleasantness of deep tan, without attaining the blue beauty of Negroes—it was just worn leather. The foreignness of his depigmentation by unknown suns, his nourishment by strange soils, his tongue awkward with the curl of many dialects, his reactions attuned to odd alarms—these things fascinated and rested Nicole; in the moment of meeting she lay on his bosom, spiritually, going out and out… Then self-preservation reasserted itself and, retiring to her own world, she spoke lightly.
“You look just like all the adventurers in the movies—but why do you have to stay away so long?”
Tommy Barban looked at her, uncomprehending but alert; the pupils of his eyes flashed.
“Five years,” she continued, in throaty mimicry of nothing. “Much too long. Couldn’t you only slaughter a certain number of creatures and then come back, and breathe our air for a while?”
In her cherished presence Tommy Europeanized himself quickly.
“Mais pour nous autres heros,” he said. “Il faut du temps, Nicole. Nous ne pouvons pas faire de petits exercices d’heroisme—il faut faire les grandes compositions.”
“Talk English to me, Tommy.”
“Parlez francais avec moi, Nicole.”
“But the meanings are different. In French you can be heroic and gallant with dignity, and you know it. But in English you can’t be heroic and gallant without being a little absurd, and you know that, too. That gives me an advantage.”
“But after all—” He chuckled suddenly. “Even in English I’m brave, heroic, and all that.”
She pretended to be groggy with wonderment, but he was not abashed.
“I only know what I see in the cinema,” he said.
“Is it all like the movies?”
“The movies aren’t so bad. Now this Ronald Colman -have you seen his pictures about the Bataillon d’Afrique? They’re not bad at all.”
“Very well, whenever I go to the movies I’ll know you’re going through just that sort of thing at that moment.”
As she spoke Nicole was aware of a small, pale, pretty young woman with lovely metallic hair, almost green in the deck lights, who had been sitting on the other side of Tommy and might have been part either of their conversation or of the one next to them. She had obviously had a monopoly of Tommy, for now she abandoned hope of his attention with what was once called ill grace, and petulantly crossed the crescent of the deck.
“After all, I am a hero,” Tommy said calmly, only half joking. “I have ferocious courage, usually, something like a lion, something like a drunken man.”
Nicole waited until the echo of his boast had died away in his mind—she knew he had probably never made such a statement before. Then she looked among the strangers and found, as usual, the fierce neurotics pretending calm, liking the country only in horror of the city, of the sound of their own voices which had set the tone and pitch. She asked:
“Who is the woman in white?”
“The one who was beside me? Lady Caroline Sibley-Biers.” They listened for a moment to her voice across the way:
“The man’s a scoundrel, but he’s a cat of the stripe. We sat up all night playing two-handed chemin-de-fer, and he owes me a mille Swiss.”
Tommy laughed and said: “She is now the wickedest woman in London—whenever I come back to Europe there is a new crop of the wickedest women from London. She’s the very latest—though I believe there is now one other who’s considered almost as wicked.”
Nicole glanced again at the woman across the deck. She was fragile, tubercular—it was incredible that such narrow shoulders, such puny arms could bear aloft the pennon of decadcnce, last ensign of the fading empire. Her resemblance was rather to one of John Held’s flat-chested flappers than to the hierarchy of tall languid blondes who had posed for painters and novelists since before the war.
Golding approached, fighting down the resonance of his huge bulk, which transmitted his will as through a gargantuan amplifier, and Nicole, still reluctant, yielded to his reiterated points: that the Margin was starting for Cannes immediately after dinner; that they could always pack in some caviare and champagne, even though they had dined; that in any case Dick was now on the phone, telling their chauffeur in Nice to drive their car back to Cannes and leave it in front of the Cafe des Allies, where the Divers could retrieve it.
They moved into the dining salon and Dick was placed next to Lady Caroline. Nicole saw that his usually ruddy face was drained of blood; he talked in a dogmatic voice, of which only snatches reached Nicole:
“… It’s all right for you English, you’re doing a dance of death… Sepoys in the ruined fort, I mean Sepoys at the gate and gaiety in the fort and all that. The green hat, the crushed hat, no future.”
Lady Caroline answered him in short sentences spotted with the terminal “What?” the double-edged “Quite!” the depressing “Cheerio!” that always had a connotation of imminent peril, but Dick appeared oblivious to the warning signals. Suddenly he made a particularly vehement pronouncement, the purport of which eluded Nicole, but she saw the young woman turn dark and sinewy, and heard her answer sharply:
“After all, a chep’s a chep and a chum’s a chum.”
Again he had offended someone—couldn’t he hold his tongue a little longer ? How long ? To death then.
At the piano, a fair-haired young Scotsman from the orchestra (entitled by its drum “The Ragtime College Jazzes of Edinboro”) had begun singing in a Danny Deever monotone, accompanying himself with low chords on the piano. He pronounced his words with great precision, as though they impressed him almost intolerably:
“There was a young lady from hell,
Who jumped at the sound of a bell,
Because she was bad—bad—bad,
She jumped at the sound of a bell,
From hell (BOOMBOOM)
From hell (TOOTTOOT)
There was a young lady from hell—”
“What is all this?” whispered Tommy to Nicole.
The girl on the other side of him supplied the answer:
“Caroline Sibley-Biers wrote the words. He wrote the music.”
“Quel enfantillage!” Tommy murmured as the next verse began, hinting at the jumpy lady’s further predilections. “On dirait qu’il recite Racine!”
On the surface, at least, Lady Caroline was paying no attention to the performance of her work. Glancing at her again, Nicole found herself impressed, neither with the character nor the personality, but with the sheer strength derived from an attitude; Nicole thought that she was formidable, and she was confirmed in this point of view as the party rose from table. Dick remained in his seat wearing an odd expression; then he crashed into words with a harsh ineptness.
“I don’t like innuendo in these deafening English whispers.”
Already half-way out of the room Lady Caroline turned and walked back to him; she spoke in a low clipped voice purposely audible to the whole company.
“You came to me asking for it—disparaging my country-men, disparaging my friend, Mary Minghetti. I simply said you were observed associating with a questionable crowd in Lausanne. Is that a deafening whisper? Or does it simply deafen you?”
“It’s still all not loud enough,” said Dick, a little too late. “So I am actually a notorious—”
Golding crushed out the phrase with his voice, saying:
“What! What!” and moved his guests on out, with the threat of his powerful body. Turning the corner of the door, Nicole saw that Dick was still sitting at the table. She was furious at the woman for her preposterous statement, equally furious at Dick for having brought them there, for having become fuddled, for having untipped the capped barbs of his irony, for having come off humiliated. She was a little more annoyed because she knew that her taking possession of Tommy Barban on their arrival had first irritated the Englishwoman.
A moment later she saw Dick standing in the gangway, apparently in complete control of himself as he talked with Golding; then for half an hour she did not see him anywhere about the deck and she broke out of an intricate Malay game, played with string and coffee beans, and said to Tommy:
“I’ve got to find Dick.”
Since dinner the yacht had been in motion westward. The fine night streamed away on either side, the Diesel engines pounded softly, there was a spring wind that blew Nicole’s hair abruptly when she reached the bow, and she had a sharp lessening of anxiety when she saw Dick standing in the angle by the flagstaff. His voice was serene as he recognized her.
“It’s a nice night.”
“I was worried.”
“Oh. you were worried?”
“Oh, don’t talk that way. It would give me so much pleasure to think of a little something I could do for you, Dick.”
He turned away from her, toward the veil of starlight over Africa.
“I believe that’s true, Nicole. And sometimes I believe that the littler it was, the more pleasure it
