Tender is the Night / Ночь нежна

Chapter 1

On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera[1] stands a large, rose-colored hotel. Palms cool its façade, and before it stretches a short beach. Lately it has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people.

The hotel and its beach were one. Before eight a man came down to the beach in a blue bathrobe and swam a minute in the sea. When he had gone, beach and bay were quiet for an hour. In another hour the horns of motors began to blow down from the winding road along the low hills, which separate the shore from true Provençal France[2].

A mile from the sea is a railroad stop, where one June morning in 1925 a train brought a woman and her daughter down to Gausse’s Hotel[3]. The mother’s face was rather pretty; her expression was quiet in a pleasant way. However, one’s eye moved on quickly to her daughter, who had magic in her cheeks lit to a lovely flame. Her fine forehead went gently up to where her hair burst into lovelocks and waves of ash blonde and gold. Her eyes were bright, big, clear, and shining. She was almost eighteen, her body was nearly complete, but the dew was still on her[4].

As sea and sky appeared below them in a thin line the mother said:

“Something tells me we’re not going to like this place.”

“I want to go home anyhow,” the girl answered.

They both spoke cheerfully but were obviously without direction and bored by the fact. They wanted high excitement.

“We’ll stay three days and then go home. I’ll call right away for steamer tickets.”

At the hotel the girl made the reservation in French. When they were installed on the ground floor she walked through the French windows and out onto the stone veranda that ran the length of the hotel. When she walked she carried herself like a ballet-dancer. Out there the hot sun was too bright to see. Fifty yards away the Mediterranean melted in the sunshine.

Indeed, of all the region only the beach was alive with activity. Three British nannies sat knitting sweaters and socks; closer to the sea a dozen persons stayed under umbrellas, while their dozen children chased fish through the shallows or lay naked out in the sun.

As Rosemary came onto the beach a boy of twelve ran past her and dashed into the sea. Feeling the looks of strange faces, she took off her bathrobe and followed. She swam face down for a few yards and finding it shallow stood on her feet and went forward. When it was about breast high, she glanced back toward shore: a bald man in a monocle and a pair of tights was regarding her attentively. As Rosemary returned the gaze the man put the monocle aside and poured himself a glass of something from a bottle in his hand.

Rosemary laid her face on the water and swam out to the raft. Reaching it, she was out of breath, but a tanned woman with very white teeth looked down at her, and Rosemary, suddenly conscious of the whiteness of her own body, turned on her back and drifted toward shore. The hairy man holding the bottle spoke to her as she came out.

“I say – they have sharks out behind the raft.” He spoke English with a slow Oxford drawl. “Yesterday they ate two British sailors from the flotte at Golfe Juan[5].”

“Heavens![6]” exclaimed Rosemary.

Rosemary looked for a place to sit. Obviously each family possessed the strip of sand immediately in front of its umbrella; besides there was much visiting and talking back and forth – the atmosphere of a community. Farther up, sat a group with flesh as white as her own. They lay under small hand-parasols instead of beach umbrellas. Between the dark people and the light, Rosemary found room and spread out her peignoir on the sand.

Lying so, she first heard their voices. Presently her ear distinguished individual voices and she became aware that some one had kidnapped a waiter from a café in Cannes[7]

last night in order to saw him in two. The sponsor of the story was a white-haired woman in full evening dress, obviously of the previous evening. Rosemary, forming a vague antipathy to her and her companions, turned away.

Nearest her, on the other side, a young woman lay under a roof of umbrellas. Her bathing suit was pulled off her shoulders and her back. On the neck she was wearing pearls. Her face was hard and lovely and pitiful. Her eyes met Rosemary’s but did not see her. Beyond her was a fine man in a jockey cap and red-striped tights; then the woman Rosemary had seen on the raft; then a man with a long face and a golden, leonine head, with blue tights and no hat, talking very seriously to a Latin young man[8] in black tights. She thought they were mostly Americans, but something made them unlike the Americans she had known.

The man of the monocle and bottle spoke suddenly out of the sky above Rosemary.

“You are a ripping swimmer[9]. Jolly good. My name is Campion. Here is a lady who says she saw you in Sorrento last week and knows who you are and would so like to meet you.”

Glancing around with annoyance Rosemary saw the untanned people were waiting. Reluctantly she got up and went over to them.

“Mrs. Abrams – Mrs. McKisco – Mr. McKisco – Mr. Dumphry —

“We know who you are,” spoke up the woman in evening dress. “You’re Rosemary Hoyt and I recognized you in Sorrento and asked the hotel clerk and we all think you’re perfectly marvellous and we want to know why you’re not back in America making another marvellous moving picture.”

“We wanted to warn you about getting burned the first day,” she continued cheerily, “because YOUR skin is important, but there seems to be so darn much formality on this beach that we didn’t know whether you’d mind[10].”

Chapter 2

“We thought maybe you were in the plot[11],” said Mrs. McKisco, a pretty young woman. “We don’t know who’s in the plot and who isn’t. One man, my husband had been particularly nice to, turned out to be a chief character.”

“The plot?” inquired Rosemary, half understanding. “Is there a plot?”

“My dear, we don’t KNOW,” said Mrs. Abrams, with a chuckle. “We’re not in it. We’re the gallery.”

Mr. McKisco, a skinny, freckled man of thirty, did not find the topic of the “plot” amusing. He had been staring at the sea – now he turned to Rosemary and asked:

“Been here long?”

“Only a day.”

“Oh.”

Evidently feeling that the subject had been changed, he looked in turn at the others.

“Going to stay all summer?” asked Mrs. McKisco, innocently. “If you do you can watch the plot develop.”

“For God’s sake, Violet, drop the subject!” exploded her husband. “Get a new joke, for God’s sake!”

Mrs. McKisco bent toward Mrs. Abrams and said:

“He’s nervous.”

“I’m not nervous,” disagreed McKisco. “It just happens I’m not nervous at all.”

He got up to go in the water, followed by his wife, and seizing the opportunity[12] Rosemary followed.

Mr. McKisco drew a long breath, flung himself into the shallows and began swimming in the Mediterranean— soon he was short of breath, looked around with an expression of surprise that he could still see the shore.

“I haven’t learned to breathe yet. I never quite understood how they breathed.” He looked at Rosemary.

“I think you breathe out under water,” she explained. “And every fourth beat you lift your head over for air.”

“The breathing’s the hardest part for me. Shall we go to the raft?”

The man with the leonine head lay stretched out upon the raft, which moved back and forth with the motion of the water. As Mrs. McKisco reached for it, the man pulled her on board.

“I was afraid it hit you.” His voice was slow and shy; he had one of the saddest faces Rosemary had ever seen, the high cheekbones of an Indian, and enormous deep-set dark golden eyes. In a minute he had pushed off into the water and his long body lay motionless toward shore.

Rosemary and Mrs. McKisco watched him. He abruptly bent double, his thin thighs rose above the surface, and he disappeared totally.

“He’s a good swimmer,” Rosemary said.

Mrs. McKisco’s answer came with surprising violence.

“Well, he’s a rotten musician.” She turned to her husband, who after two unsuccessful attempts had managed to climb on the raft. “I was just saying that Abe North may be a good swimmer but he’s a rotten musician.”

“Yes,” agreed McKisco, grudgingly. Obviously he had created his wife’s world of opinions.

The woman of the pearls had joined her two children in the water, and now Abe North came up under one of them like a volcanic island, raising him on his shoulders. The child yelled with fear and delight and the woman watched with a lovely peace, without a smile.

“Is that his wife?” Rosemary asked.

“No, that’s Mrs. Diver. They’re not at the hotel.” After a moment she turned to Rosemary.

“Have you been abroad before?”

“Yes – I went to school in Paris.”

“Oh! Well, then you probably know that if you want to enjoy yourself here the thing is to get to know some real French families. They just stick around with each other in little groups. Of course, we had letters of introduction and met all the best French artists and writers in Paris. That made it very nice.”

“I should think so.”

“My husband is finishing his first novel, you see.”

Rosemary said: “Oh, he is?” She was not thinking anything special, except wondering whether her mother had got to sleep in this heat.

She swam back to the shore, where she threw her peignoir over her already sore shoulders and lay down again in the sun. The man with the jockey cap was now going from umbrella to umbrella carrying a bottle and little glasses in his hands; presently he and his friends grew livelier and closer together under one big umbrella – she understood that some one was leaving and that this was a last drink on the beach. Excitement was generating under that umbrella – and it seemed to Rosemary that it all came from the man in the jockey cap.

Campion walked near her, stood a few feet away and Rosemary closed her eyes, pretending to be asleep; then she fell really asleep.

She awoke to find the beach deserted save for the man in the jockey cap, who was folding a last umbrella. As Rosemary lay blinking, he walked nearer and said:

“I was going to wake you before I left. It’s not good to get too burned right away.”

“Thank you.” Rosemary looked down at her crimson legs.

“Heavens!”

She laughed cheerfully, inviting him to talk, but Dick Diver was already carrying a tent and a beach umbrella up to a waiting car, so she went into the water. He came back, collected his things and glanced up and down the beach to see if he had left anything.

“Do you know what time it is?” Rosemary asked.

“It’s about half-past one.”

He looked at her and for a moment she lived in the bright blue worlds of his eyes. Then he shouldered his last piece of junk and went up to his car, and Rosemary came out of the water, shook out her peignoir and walked up to the hotel.

Chapter 3

It was almost two when they went into the dining-room. Two waiters, piling plates and talking loud Italian, fell silent when they came in and brought them the table d’hôte luncheon[13].

“I fell in love on the beach,” said Rosemary.

“Who with?”

“First with a whole lot of people who looked nice. Then with one man.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“Just a little. Very handsome. With reddish hair.” She was eating, ravenously. “He’s married though – it’s usually the way.”

Her mother was her best friend. She was twice satisfactorily married and twice widowed, her cheerful stoicism had each time deepened. One of her husbands had been a cavalry ofifcer and one an army doctor, and they both left something to her that she tried to present intact to Rosemary.

“Then you like it here?” she asked.

“It might be fun if we knew those people. There were some other people, but they weren’t nice. They recognized me – no matter where we go everybody’s seen ‘Daddy’s Girl.’”

Mrs. Speers waited for Rosemary’s egotism to pass; then she said in a matter-of-fact way: “That reminds me[14], when are you going to see Earl Brady?”

“I thought we might go this afternoon – if you’re rested.”

“You go – I’m not going.”

“We’ll wait till to-morrow then.”

“I want you to go alone. It’s only a short way – it isn’t as if you didn’t speak French[15].”

“Mother – aren’t there some things I don’t have to do?”

“Oh, well then go later – but some day before we leave.”

“All right, Mother.”

After lunch they were both taken by the sudden weakness that comes over American travellers in quiet foreign places: they felt that life was not continuing here.

“Let’s only stay three days, Mother,” Rosemary said when they were back in their rooms.

“How about the man you fell in love with on the beach?”

“I don’t love anybody but you, Mother, darling.”

Rosemary stopped in the lobby and spoke to the concierge about trains. She took the bus and rode to the station. The first-class compartment was stifling. Unlike American trains, this train was part of the country through which it passed. Its breath stirred the dust from the palm leaves. Rosemary was sure she could lean from the window and pull flowers with her hand.

A dozen cabbies slept in their taxis outside the Cannes station. As she came out of a drug store with a bottle of cocoanut oil, a woman, whom she recognized as Mrs. Diver, crossed her path with arms full of sofa cushions, and went to a car parked down the street. A long black dog barked at her, a dozing chauffeur woke with a start. She sat in the car, her lovely face set, her eyes watchful, looking straight ahead toward nothing. Her dress was bright red and her brown legs were bare. She had thick, dark, gold hair.

With half an hour to wait for her train Rosemary sat down in the Café des Alliés[16]. She had bought Le Temps[17] and The Saturday Evening Post[18] for her mother, and as she drank her citronade she opened the latter at the memoirs of a Russian princess and now began to feel that French life was empty and stale. She was glad to go back to Gausse’s Hotel.

Her shoulders were too burned to swim with the next day, so she and her mother hired a car and drove along the Riviera, the delta of many rivers. The chauffeur, a Russian Czar of the period of Ivan the Terrible, was a self-appointed guide, and the beautiful names – Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo[19] – began whispering of old kings come here to dine or die, of Russian princes spending the weeks here in the lost caviar days. Most of all, there was the scent of the Russians along the coast – their closed book shops and grocery stores. Ten years ago, when the season ended in April, the doors of the Orthodox Church were locked, and the sweet champagnes they favored were put away until their return. “We’ll be back next season,” they said, but they were never coming back any more.

It was pleasant to drive back to the hotel in the late afternoon, above a mysteriously colored sea. It was pleasant to pass people eating outside their doors, and to hear the loud mechanical pianos behind the vines of country cabarets. When they turned down to Gausse’s Hotel through the darkening trunks of trees, the moon already hung over the ruins of the aqueducts …

Somewhere in the hills behind the hotel there was a dance, and Rosemary listened to the music, realizing that there was gaiety somewhere about, and she thought of the nice people on the beach. She thought she might meet them in the morning, but they obviously formed a self-sufcif ient little group, and once their umbrellas, bamboo rugs, dogs, and children were set out in place, the part of the beach was literally closed up. She decided in any case not to spend her last two mornings with the other ones.

Chapter 4

The matter was solved for her. The McKiscos were not yet there and she had scarcely spread her peignoir when two men left the group and came down toward her.

“Good morning,” said Dick Diver. “Look – sunburn or no sunburn, why did you stay away yesterday? We worried about you.”

She sat up and her happy little laugh welcomed him.

“We wondered,” Dick Diver said, “if you wouldn’t come over this morning. We take food and drink, so it’s an invitation.”

He seemed kind and charming – his voice promised that he would take care of her, and that a little later he would open up whole new worlds for her full of magnificent possibilities. He managed the introduction so that her name wasn’t mentioned and then let her know that everyone knew who she was but were respecting her private life.

Nicole Diver was looking through a recipe book for chicken Maryland. She was about twenty-four, Rosemary guessed – her face could have been described in terms of conventional prettiness.

“Are you here for a long time?” Nicole asked. Her voice was low.

Suddenly Rosemary let the possibility enter her mind that they might stay another week.

“Not very long,” she answered vaguely. “We’ve been abroad a long time – we landed in Sicily[20] in March and we’ve been slowly working our way north. I got pneumonia making a picture last January and I’ve been recovering.”

“Mercy! How did that happen?”

“Well, it was from swimming,” Rosemary was rather reluctant at answering personal questions. “One day I happened to have the grippe and didn’t know it, and they were taking a scene where I dove into a canal in Venice. It was a very expensive set, so I had to dive and dive and dive all morning. Mother had a doctor right there, but it was no use – I got pneumonia.” She changed the subject before they could speak. “Do you like it here – this place?”

“They have to like it,” said Abe North slowly. “They invented it.” He turned his noble head slowly so that his eyes rested with tenderness and affection on the two Divers.

“Oh, did you?”

“This is only the second season that the hotel’s been open in summer,” Nicole explained. “We persuaded Gausse to keep on a cook and a garçon – it paid its way[21] and this year it’s doing even better.”

“But you’re not in the hotel.”

“We built a house, up at Tarmes[22].”

“The theory is,” said Dick, arranging an umbrella to protect Rosemary’s shoulder, “that all the northern places were picked out by Russians and English who don’t mind the cold, while half of us Americans come from tropical climates – that’s why we’re beginning to come here.”

The young man of Latin aspect had been turning the pages of The New York Herald[23].

“Well, what nationality are these people?” he asked, suddenly, and read with a slight French intonation, “ ‘Registered at the Hotel Palace at Vevey[24] are Mr. Pandely Vlasco, Mme. Bonneasse’– I don’t exaggerate —‘Corinna Medonca, Yolanda Yosfuglu and Geneveva de Momus!’ She attracts me most – Geneveva de Momus. Almost worth running up to Vevey to take a look at Geneveva de Momus[25].”

He stood up suddenly, stretching himself. He was a few years younger than Diver or North. He was tall and his body was hard but too thin save for the force gathered in his shoulders and upper arms. At first glance he seemed handsome – but there was a faint disgust always in his face which ruined the shine of his brown eyes.

“We found some fine ones in the news of Americans last week,” said Nicole. “Mrs. Evelyn Oyster and – what were the others?”

“There was Mr. S. Flesh,” said Diver, getting up also.

“Oh, yes – S. Flesh – doesn’t he give you the creeps[26]?”

It was quiet alone with Nicole – Rosemary found it even quieter than with her mother. Abe North and Barban, the Latin-looking young man who happened to be French, were talking about Morocco. Having copied her recipe, Nicole picked up a piece of sewing. Rosemary examined their possessions – four large parasols that made a canopy of shade, a portable bath house for dressing, a rubber horse, new things that Rosemary had never seen. She had thought that they were rich people.

She looked in turn at the men. All three were personable in different ways; all were of a special gentleness that she felt was part of their lives, not at all like the company manners of actors, and she noticed also a far-reaching delicacy that was different from the rough and ready[27] good fellowship of directors, who represented the intellectuals in her life. Actors and directors – those were the only men she had ever known, those and the mass of college boys, interested only in love at first sight, whom she had met at the Yale prom[28] last fall.

These three were different. Barban was less civilized, more skeptical and sarcastic, his manners were formal. Abe North had, under his shyness, a desperate humor that amused but puzzled her.

But Dick Diver – he was all complete there. Silently she admired him. His complexion was reddish, so was his short hair. His eyes were of a bright, hard blue. His nose was somewhat pointed and there was never any doubt at whom he was looking or talking. His voice, with some faint Irish melody[29], was soft, yet she felt the layer of hardness in him, of self-control and of self-discipline, her own virtues. Oh, she chose him, and Nicole, lifting her head saw her choose him, heard the little sigh at the fact that he was already possessed.

Toward noon the McKiscos, Mrs. Abrams, Mr. Dumphry, and Signor Campion came on the beach. They had brought a new umbrella that they set up with side glances toward the Divers, and crept under with satisfied expressions.

Mary North, the very tanned young woman whom Rosemary had encountered the first day on the raft, came in from swimming and said with a smile:

“So they have arrived.”

“They’re this man’s friends,” Nicole reminded her, indicating Abe. “Why doesn’t he go and speak to them? Don’t you think they’re attractive?”

“I think they’re very attractive,” Abe agreed. “I just don’t think they’re attractive, that’s all.”

“Well, I HAVE felt there were too many people on the beach this summer,” Nicole admitted. “OUR beach that Dick made out of a pebble pile.” She considered, and then lowering her voice, “Still, they’re preferable to those British last summer who kept shouting about: ‘Isn’t the sea blue? Isn’t the sky white? Isn’t little Nellie’s nose red?’”

Rosemary thought she would not like to have Nicole for an enemy.

“But you didn’t see the fight,” Nicole continued. “The day before you came, the married man, the one with the name that sounds like a substitute for gasoline or butter —”

“McKisco?”

“Yes – well they were having words[30] and she tossed some sand in his face. So naturally he sat on top of her and rubbed her face in the sand. We were shocked. I wanted Dick to interfere.”

“I think,” said Dick Diver, staring down abstractedly at the straw mat, “that I’ll go over and invite them to dinner.”

“No, you won’t,” Nicole told him quickly.

“I think it would be a very good thing. They’re here – let’s adjust ourselves[31].”

“I’m not going to have MY nose rubbed in the sand,” she insisted, laughing. “I’m a mean, hard woman,” she explained to Rosemary, and then raising her voice, “Children, put on your bathing suits!”

Nicole handed her husband the curious garment on which she had been working. He went into the dressing tent and caused a commotion by appearing in a moment wearing transparent black lace drawers. Close inspection showed that actually they were lined with flesh-colored cloth.

“Well, if that isn’t a pansy’s trick[32]!” exclaimed Mr. McKisco contemptuously – then turning quickly to Mr. Dumphry and Mr. Campion, he added, “Oh, I beg your pardon.”

Rosemary was delighted with the trunks. She admired the expensive simplicity of the Divers. She stood with them as they took sherry and ate crackers. Dick Diver looked at her with cold blue eyes; his kind, strong mouth said thoughtfully and deliberately:

“You’re the only girl I’ve seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming.”

In her mother’s lap afterward Rosemary cried and cried.

“I love him, Mother. I’m desperately in love with him – I never knew I could feel that way about anybody. And he’s married and I like her too – it’s just hopeless. Oh, I love him so!”

“I’m curious to meet him.”

“She invited us to dinner Friday.”

“If you’re in love it should make you happy. You should laugh.”