… We travelled a lot that year—from Woolloomooloo Bay to Biskra. On the edge of the Sahara we ran into a plague of locusts and the chauffeur explained kindly that they were bumble-bees. The sky was low at night, full of the presence of a strange and watchful God. Oh, the poor little naked Ouled Nail; the night was noisy with drums from Senegal and flutes and whining camels, and the natives pattering about in shoes made of old automobile tyres.
But I was gone again by that time—trains and beaches they were all one. That was why he took me travelling, but after my second child, my little girl Topsy, was born everything got dark again.
… If I could get word to my husband who has seen fit to desert me here, to leave me in the hands of incompetents. You tell me my baby is black—that’s farcical, that’s very cheap. We went to Africa merely to see Timgad, since my principal interest in life is archaeology. I am tired of knowing nothing and being reminded of it all the time.
… When I get well I want to be a fine person like you, Dick—I would study medicine except it’s too late. We must spend my money and have a house—I’m tired of apartments and waiting for you. You’re bored with Zurich and you can’t find time for writing here and you say that it’s a confession of weakness for a scientist not to write. And I’ll look over the whole field of knowledge and pick out something and really know about it, so I’ll have it to hang on to if I go to pieces again. You’ll help me, Dick, so I won’t feel so guilty. We’ll live near a warm beach where we can be brown and young together.
… This is going to be Dick’s work house. Oh, the idea came to us both at the same moment. We had passed Tarmes a dozen times and we rode up here and found the houses empty, except two stables. When we bought we acted through a Frenchman, but the navy sent spies up here in no rime when they found that Americans had bought part of a hill village. They looked for cannons all through the building material, and finally Baby had to twitch wires for us at the Affaires Etrangeres in Paris.
No one comes to the Riviera in summer, so we expect to have a few guests and to work. There are some French people here—Mistinguett last week, surprised to find the hotel open, and Picasso and the man who wrote Pas sur la Bouche.
… Dick, why did you register Mr and Mrs Diver instead of Doctor and Mrs Diver? I just wondered—it just floated through my mind.—You’ve taught me that work is everything and I believe you. You used to say a man knows things and when he stops knowing things he’s like anybody else, and the thing is to get power before he stops knowing things. If you want to turn things topsy-turvy, all right, but must your Nicole follow you walking on her hands, darling?
… Tommy says I am silent. Since I was well the first time I talked a lot to Dick late at night, both of us sitting up in bed and lighting cigarettes, then diving down afterward out of the blue dawn and into the pillows, to keep the light from our eyes. Sometimes I sing, and play with the animals, and I have a few friends too—Mary, for instance. When Mary and I talk neither of us listens to the other. Talk is men. When I talk I say to myself that I am probably Dick. Already I have even been my son, remembering how wise and slow he is. Sometimes I am Doctor Dohmler and one time I may even be an aspect of you, Tommy Barban. Tommy is in love with me, I think, but gently, reassuringly. Enough, though, so that he and Dick have begun to disapprove of each other. All in all, everything has never gone better. I am among friends who like me. I am here on this tranquil beach near my home above the Mediterranean with my husband and two children and our dear friends. Everything is all right—if I can finish translating this damn recipe for chicken a la Maryland into French. My toes feel warm in the sand.” Yes, I’ll look. More new people—oh, that girl—yes. Who lid you say she looked like?… No, I haven’t, we don’t get much chance to see the new American pictures over here. Rosemary who? Well, we’re getting very fashionable for Inly—seems very peculiar to me.“
XI
DOCTOR RICHARD DIVER AND Mrs Elsie Speers sat in the Cafe des Allies in August, under cool and dusty trees. The sparkle of the mica was dulled by the baked ground, and a few gusts of mistral from down the coast seeped through the Esterel and rocked the fishing boats in the harbour, pointing the masts here and there at a featureless sky.
“I had a letter this morning,” said Mrs Speers. “What a terrible time you all must have had with those Negroes! But Rosemary said you were perfectly wonderful to her.”
“Rosemary ought to have a service stripe. It was pretty harrowing—the only person it didn’t disturb was Abe North. He flew off to Havre—he probably doesn’t know about it yet.”
“I’m sorry Mrs Diver was upset,” she said carefully.
Rosemary had written:
“Nicole seemed Out of her Mind. I didn’t want to come South with them because I felt Dick had enough on his hands.”
“She’s all right now.” He spoke almost impatiently, you’re leaving to-morrow. “When will you sail?”
“Right away.”
“My God, it’s awful to have you go.”
“We’re glad we came here. We’ve had a good time, thanks to you. You’re the first man Rosemary ever cared for.”
Another gust of wind strained around the porphyry hills of la Napoule. There was a hint in the air that the earth was hurrying on toward other weather; the lush midsummer moment outside of time was already over.
“Rosemary’s had crushes, but sooner or later she always turned the man over to me”—Mrs Speers laughed—“for dissection.”
“So I was spared.”
“There was nothing I could have done. She was in love with you before I ever saw you. I told her to go ahead.”
He saw that no provision had been made for him, or for Nicole, in Mrs Speers’ plans—and he saw that her amorality sprang from the conditions of her own withdrawal. It was her right, the pension on which her own emotions had retired. Women are necessarily capable of almost anything in their struggle for survival and can scarcely be convicted of such man-made crimes as “cruelty”. So long as the shuffle of love and pain went on within proper walls Mrs Speers could view it with as much detachment and humour as a eunuch. She had not even allowed for the possibility of Rosemary’s being damaged—or was she certain that she couldn’t be?
“If what you say is true I don’t think it did her any harm.” He was keeping up to the end the pretence that he could still think objectively about Rosemary. “She’s over it already. Still—so many of the important times in life begin by seeming incidental.”
“This wasn’t incidental,” Mrs Speers insisted. “You were the first man—you’re an ideal to her. In every letter she says that.”
“She’s so polite.”
“You and Rosemary are the politest people I’ve ever known, but she means this.”
“My politeness is a trick of the heart.”
This was partly true. From his father Dick had learned the somewhat conscious good manners of the young Southerner coming north after the Civil War. Often he used them and just as often he despised them because they were not a protest against how unpleasant selfishness was, but against how unpleasant it looked.
“I’m in love with Rosemary,” he told her suddenly. “It’s a kind of self-indulgence saying that to you.”
It seemed very strange and official to him, as if the very tables and chairs in the Cafe des Allies would remember it forever. Already he felt her absence from these skies: on the beach he could only remember the sun-torn flesh of her shoulder; at Tarmes he crushed out her footprints as he crossed the garden; and now the orchestra launching into the “Nice Carnival Song”, an echo of last year’s vanished gaieties, started the little dance that went on all about her. In a hundred hours she had come to possess all the world’s dark magic; the blinding belladonna, the caffeine converting physical into nervous energy, the mandragora that imposes harmony.
With an effort he once more accepted the fiction that he shared Mrs Speers’ detachment.
“You and Rosemary aren’t really alike,” he said. “The wisdom she got from you is all moulded up into her persona, into the mask she faces the world with. She doesn’t think; her real depths are Irish and romantic and illogical.”
Mrs Speers knew too that Rosemary, for all her delicate surface, was a young mustang, perceptibly by Captain Doctor Hoyt, U.S.A. Cross-sectioned, Rosemary would have displayed an enormous heart, liver, and soul, all crammed close together under the lovely shell.
Saying good-by, Dick was aware of Elsie Speers’ full charm, aware that she meant rather more to him than merely a last unwillingly relinquished fragment of Rosemary. He could possibly have made up Rosemary; he could
