Tender Is the Night
Page 18

“No use cracking at America,” said Abe rather sharply. And then, in a more conciliatory tone, “This has gone far enough, Tommy.” They parleyed briskly for a moment—then Barban nodded and bowed coldly to his late antagonist.
“No shake hand?” suggested the French doctor.
“They already know each other,” said Abe.
He turned to McKisco.
“Come on, let’s get out.”
As they strode off, McKisco, in exultation, gripped his arm.
“Wait a minute!” Abe said. “Tommy wants his pistol back. He might need it again.”
McKisco handed it over.
“To hell with him,” he said in a tough voice. “Tell him he can—”
“Shall I tell him you want another shot?”
“Well, I did it,” cried McKisco, as they went along. “And I did it pretty well, didn’t I? I wasn’t yellow.”
“You were pretty drunk,” said Abe bluntly.
“No, I wasn’t.”
“All right, then, you weren’t.”
“Why would it make any difference if I had a drink or so?”
As his confidence mounted he looked resentfully at Abe.
“What difference does that make?” he repeated.
“If you can’t see it, there’s no use going into it.”
“Don’t you know everybody was drunk all the time during the war?”
“Well, let’s forget it.”
But the episode was not quite over. There were urgent footsteps in the heather behind them and the doctor drew up alongside.
“Pardon, Messieurs,” he panted. “Voulez-vous regler mes honorairies? Naturellement c’est pour soins médicaux seulement. M. Barban n’a qu’un billet de mille et ne peut pas les régler et l’autre a laissé son porte-monnaie chez lui.”
“Trust a Frenchman to think of that,” said Abe, and then to the doctor. “Combien?”
“Let me pay this,” said McKisco.
“No, I’ve got it. We were all in about the same danger.”
Abe paid the doctor while McKisco suddenly turned into the bushes and was sick there. Then paler than before he strutted on with Abe toward the car through the now rosy morning.
Campion lay gasping on his back in the shrubbery, the only casualty of the duel, while Rosemary suddenly hysterical with laughter kept kicking at him with her espadrille. She did this persistently until she roused him—the only matter of importance to her now was that in a few hours she would see the person whom she still referred to in her mind as “the Divers” on the beach.
XII
They were at Voisins waiting for Nicole, six of them, Rosemary, the Norths, Dick Diver and two young French musicians. They were looking over the other patrons of the restaurant to see if they had repose—Dick said no American men had any repose, except himself, and they were seeking an example to confront him with. Things looked black for them—not a man had come into the restaurant for ten minutes without raising his hand to his face.
“We ought never to have given up waxed mustaches,” said Abe. “Nevertheless Dick isn’t the ONLY man with repose—”
“Oh, yes, I am.”
“—but he may be the only sober man with repose.”
A well-dressed American had come in with two women who swooped and fluttered unselfconsciously around a table. Suddenly, he perceived that he was being watched—whereupon his hand rose spasmodically and arranged a phantom bulge in his necktie. In another unseated party a man endlessly patted his shaven cheek with his palm, and his companion mechanically raised and lowered the stub of a cold cigar. The luckier ones fingered eyeglasses and facial hair, the unequipped stroked blank mouths, or even pulled desperately at the lobes of their ears.
A well-known general came in, and Abe, counting on the man’s first year at West Point—that year during which no cadet can resign and from which none ever recovers—made a bet with Dick of five dollars.
His hands hanging naturally at his sides, the general waited to be seated. Once his arms swung suddenly backward like a jumper’s and Dick said, “Ah!” supposing he had lost control, but the general recovered and they breathed again—the agony was nearly over, the garçon was pulling out his chair . . .
With a touch of fury the conqueror shot up his hand and scratched his gray immaculate head.
“You see,” said Dick smugly, “I’m the only one.”
Rosemary was quite sure of it and Dick, realizing that he never had a better audience, made the group into so bright a unit that Rosemary felt an impatient disregard for all who were not at their table. They had been two days in Paris but actually they were still under the beach umbrella. When, as at the ball of the Corps des Pages the night before, the surroundings seemed formidable to Rosemary, who had yet to attend a Mayfair party in Hollywood, Dick would bring the scene within range by greeting a few people, a sort of selection—the Divers seemed to have a large acquaintance, but it was always as if the person had not seen them for a long, long time, and was utterly bowled over, “Why, where do you KEEP yourselves?”—and then re-create the unity of his own party by destroying the outsiders softly but permanently with an ironic coup de grâce. Presently Rosemary seemed to have known those people herself in some deplorable past, and then got on to them, rejected them, discarded them.
Their own party was overwhelmingly American and sometimes scarcely American at all. It was themselves he gave back to them, blurred by the compromises of how many years.