“That would be poetic justice if it should be you,” she said. She twisted away from him, walked to the mirror, and boxed her disarranged hair with her hands. Presently she drew a chair close to the bed and stroked his cheek.
“Tell me the truth about you,” he demanded.
“I always have.”
“In a way—but nothing hangs together.”
They both laughed, but he pursued.
“Are you actually a virgin?”
“No-o-o!” she sang. “I’ve slept with six hundred and forty men—if that’s the answer you want.”
“It’s none of my business.”
“Do you want me for a case in psychology?”
“Looking at you as a perfectly normal girl of twenty-two, living in the year nineteen twenty-nine, I guess you’ve taken a few shots at love.”
“It’s all been—abortive,” she said.
Dick couldn’t believe her. He could not decide whether she was deliberately building a barrier between them or whether this was intended to make an eventual surrender more significant.
“Let’s go walk in the Pincio,” he suggested.
He shook himself straight in his clothes and smoothed his hair. A moment had come and somehow passed. For three years Dick had been the ideal by which Rosemary measured other men and inevitably his stature had increased to heroic size. She did not want him to be like other men, yet here were the same exigent demands, as if he wanted to take some of herself away, carry it off in his pocket.
Walking on the greensward between cherubs and philosophers, fauns and falling water, she took his arm snugly, settling into it with a series of little readjustments, as if she wanted it to be right because it was going to be there for ever. She plucked a twig and broke it, but she found no spring in it. Suddenly seeing what she wanted in Dick’s face she took his gloved hand and kissed it. Then she cavorted childishly for him until he smiled and she laughed and they began having a good time.
“I can’t go out with you to-night, darling, because I promised some people a long time ago. But if you’ll get up early I’ll take you out to the set to-morrow.”
He dined alone at the hotel, went to bed early, and met Rosemary in the lobby at half-past six. Beside him in the car she glowed away fresh and new in the morning sunshine. They went out through the Porta San Sebastiano and along the Appian Way until they came to the huge set of the forum, larger than the forum itself. Rosemary turned him over to a man who led him about the great props: the arches and tiers of seats and the sanded arena. She was working on a stage which represented a guard-room for Christian prisoners, and presently they went there and watched Nicotera, one of many hopeful Valentinos, strut and pose before a dozen female “captives,” their eyes melancholy and startling with mascara.
Rosemary appeared in a knee-length tunic.
“Watch this,” she whispered to Dick. “I want your opinion. Everybody that’s seen the rushes says—”
“What are the rushes?”
“When they run off what they took the day before. They say it’s the first thing I’ve had sex appeal in.”
“I don’t notice it.”
“You wouldn’t! But I have.”
Nicotera in his leopard skin talked attentively to Rosemary while the electrician discussed something with the director, meanwhile leaning on him. Finally the director pushed his hand off roughly and wiped a sweating forehead, and Dick’s guide remarked ; “He’s on the hop again, and how!”
“Who?” asked Dick, but before the man could answer the director walked swiftly over to them.
“Who’s on the hop—you’re on the hop yourself.” He spoke vehemently to Dick, as if to a jury. “When he’s on the hop he always thinks everybody else is, and how!” He glared at the guide a moment longer, then he clapped his hands: “All right—everybody on the set.”
It was like visiting a great turbulent family. An actress approached Dick and talked to him for five minutes under the impression that he was an actor recently arrived from London. Discovering her mistake she scuttled away in panic. The majority of the company felt either sharply superior or sharply inferior to the world outside, but the former feeling prevailed. They were people of bravery and industry ; they were risen to a position of prominence in a nation that for a decade had wanted only to be entertained.
The session ended as the light grew misty—a fine light for painters, but, for the camera, not to be compared with the clear California air. Nicotera followed Rosemary to the car and whispered something to her—she looked at him without smiling as she said good-bye.
Dick and Rosemary had luncheon at the Castelli dei Cesari, a splendid restaurant in a high-terraced villa overlooking the ruined forum of an undetermined period of the decadence. Rosemary took a cocktail and a little wine, and Dick took enough so that his feeling of dissatisfaction left him. Afterward they drove back to the hotel, all flushed and happy, in a sort of exalted quiet. She wanted to be taken and she was, and what had begun with a childish infatuation on a beach was accomplished at last.
XXI
ROSEMARY HAD ANOTHER DINNER date, a birthday party for a member of the company. Dick ran into Collis Clay in the lobby, but he wanted to dine alone and pretended an engagement at the Excelsior. He drank a cocktail with Collis and his vague dissatisfaction crystallized as impatience—he no longer had an excuse for playing truant to the clinic. This was less an infatuation than a romantic memory. Nicole was his girl—too often he was sick at heart about her, yet she was his girl. Time with Rosemary was self-indulgence—time with Collis was nothing plus nothing.
In the doorway of the Excelsior he ran into Baby Warren. Her large beautiful eyes, looking precisely like marbles, stared at him with surprise and curiosity. “I thought you were in America, Dick! Is Nicole with you?”
“I came back by way of Naples.”
The black band on his arm reminded her to say: “I’m so sorry to hear of your trouble.”
Inevitably they dined together.
“Tell me about everything,” she demanded.
Dick gave her a version of the facts, and Baby frowned. She found it necessary to blame someone for the catastrophe in her sister’s life.
“Do you think Doctor Dohmler took the right course with her from the first?”
“There’s not much variety in treatment any more—of course you try to find the right personality to handle a particular case.”
“Dick, I don’t pretend to advise you or to know much about it, but don’t you think a change might be good for her—to get out of that atmosphere of sickness and live in the world like other people?”
“But you were keen for the clinic,” he reminded her. “You told me you’d never feel really safe about her —”
“That was when you were leading that hermit’s life on the Riviera, up on a hill way off from anybody. I didn’t mean to go back to that life. I meant, for instance, London. The English are the best-balanced race in the world.”
“They are not,” he disagreed.
“They are. I know them, you see. I meant it might be nice for you to take a house in London for the spring season—I know a dove of a house in Talbot Square you could get, furnished. I mean, living with sane, well-balanced English people.”
She would have gone on to tell him all the old propaganda stories of 1914 if he had not laughed and said:
“I’ve been reading a book by Michael Arlen and if that’s—”
She ruined Michael Arlen with a wave of her salad spoon.
“He only writes about degenerates. I mean the worthwhile English.”
As she thus dismissed her friends they were replaced in Dick’s mind only by a picture of the alien, unresponsive faces that peopled the small hotels of Europe.
“Of course it’s none of my business,” Baby repeated, as a preliminary to a further plunge, “but to leave her alone in an atmosphere like that —”
“I went to America because my father died.”
“I understand that, I told you how sorry I was.” She fiddled with the glass grapes on her necklace. “But there’s so much money now. Plenty for everything, and it ought to be used to get Nicole well.”
“For one thing I can’t see myself in London.”
“Why not? I should think you could work there as well as anywhere else.”
He sat back and looked at her. If she had ever suspected the rotted old truth, the real reason for Nicole’s illness, she had certainly determined to deny it to herself, shoving it back in a dusty closet like one of the paintings she bought by mistake.
They continued the conversation in the Ulpia, where Collis Clay came over to their table and sat down, and a gifted guitar player thrummed and rumbled “Suona Fanfara Mia” in the cellar piled with wine casks.
“It’s possible that I was the wrong person for Nicole,” Dick said. “Still, she would probably have married someone of my type, someone she thought she could rely on—indefinitely.”
“You think she’d be happier with somebody else?” Baby thought aloud suddenly. “Of course it could be arranged.”
Only as she saw Dick bend forward with helpless laughter did she realize the preposterousness of her remark.
“Oh, you understand,” she assured him. “Don’t think for a moment that we’re not grateful for all you’ve done. And we know you’ve had a hard time —”
“For God’s sake,” he protested. “If I didn’t love Nicole it might be different.”
“But you do love Nicole?” she demanded in alarm.
Collis was catching up with the conversation now and Dick switched it quickly: “Suppose
