III

One morning a week later, stopping at the desk for his mail, Dick became aware of some extra commotion outside: Patient Von Cohn Morris was going away. His parents, Australians, were putting his baggage vehemently into a large limousine, and beside them stood Doctor Ladislau protesting with ineffectual attitudes against the violent gesturings of Morris, senior. The young man was regarding his embarkation with aloof cynicism as Doctor Diver approached.

“Isn’t this a little sudden, Mr. Morris?”

Mr. Morris started as he saw Dick—his florid face and the large checks on his suit seemed to turn off and on like electric lights. He approached Dick as though to strike him.

“High time we left, we and those who have come with us,” he began, and paused for breath. “It is high time, Doctor Diver. High time.”

“Will you come in my office?” Dick suggested.

“Not I! I’ll talk to you, but I’m washing my hands of you and your place.”

He shook his finger at Dick. “I was just telling this doctor here. We’ve wasted our time and our money.”

Doctor Ladislau stirred in a feeble negative, signalling up a vague Slavic evasiveness. Dick had never liked Ladislau. He managed to walk the excited Australian along the path in the direction of his office, trying to persuade him to enter; but the man shook his head.

“It’s you, Doctor Diver, YOU, the very man. I went to Doctor Ladislau because you were not to be found, Doctor Diver, and because Doctor Gregorovius is not expected until the nightfall, and I would not wait. No, sir! I would not wait a minute after my son told me the truth.”

He came up menacingly to Dick, who kept his hands loose enough to drop him if it seemed necessary. “My son is here for alcoholism, and he told us he smelt liquor on your breath. Yes, sir!” He made a quick, apparently unsuccessful sniff. “Not once, but twice Von Cohn says he has smelt liquor on your breath. I and my lady have never touched a drop of it in our lives. We hand Von Cohn to you to be cured, and within a month he twice smells liquor on your breath! What kind of cure is that there?”

Dick hesitated; Mr. Morris was quite capable of making a scene on the clinic drive.

“After all, Mr. Morris, some people are not going to give up what they regard as food because of your son—”

“But you’re a doctor, man!” cried Morris furiously. “When the workmen drink their beer that’s bad ‘cess to them—but you’re here supposing to cure—”

“This has gone too far. Your son came to us because of kleptomania.”

“What was behind it?” The man was almost shrieking. “Drink—black drink. Do you know what color black is? It’s black! My own uncle was hung by the neck because of it, you hear? My son comes to a sanitarium, and a doctor reeks of it!”

“I must ask you to leave.”

“You ASK me! We ARE leaving!”

“If you could be a little temperate we could tell you the results of the treatment to date. Naturally, since you feel as you do, we would not want your son as a patient—”

“You dare to use the word temperate to me?”

Dick called to Doctor Ladislau and as he approached, said: “Will you represent us in saying good-by to the patient and to his family?”

He bowed slightly to Morris and went into his office, and stood rigid for a moment just inside the door. He watched until they drove away, the gross parents, the bland, degenerate offspring: it was easy to prophesy the family’s swing around Europe, bullying their betters with hard ignorance and hard money. But what absorbed Dick after the disappearance of the caravan was the question as to what extent he had provoked this. He drank claret with each meal, took a nightcap, generally in the form of hot rum, and sometimes he tippled with gin in the afternoons—gin was the most difficult to detect on the breath. He was averaging a half- pint of alcohol a day, too much for his system to burn up.

Dismissing a tendency to justify himself, he sat down at his desk and wrote out, like a prescription, a régime that would cut his liquor in half. Doctors, chauffeurs, and Protestant clergymen could never smell of liquor, as could painters, brokers, cavalry leaders; Dick blamed himself only for indiscretion. But the matter was by no means clarified half an hour later when Franz, revivified by an Alpine fortnight, rolled up the drive, so eager to resume work that he was plunged in it before he reached his office. Dick met him there.

“How was Mount Everest?”

“We could very well have done Mount Everest the rate we were doing. We thought of it. How goes it all? How is my Kaethe, how is your Nicole?”

“All goes smooth domestically. But my God, Franz, we had a rotten scene this morning.”

“How? What was it?”

Dick walked around the room while Franz got in touch with his villa by telephone. After the family exchange was over, Dick said: “The Morris boy was taken away—there was a row.”

Franz’s buoyant face fell.

“I knew he’d left. I met Ladislau on the veranda.”

“What did Ladislau say?”

“Just that young Morris had gone—that you’d tell me about it. What about it?”

“The usual incoherent reasons.”

“He was a devil, that boy.”

“He was a case for anesthesia,” Dick agreed. “Anyhow, the father had beaten Ladislau into a colonial subject by the time I came along. What about Ladislau? Do we keep him? I say no—he’s not much of a man, he can’t seem to cope with anything.” Dick hesitated on the verge of the truth, swung away to give himself space within which to recapitulate. Franz perched on the edge of a desk, still in his linen duster and travelling gloves. Dick said:

“One of the remarks the boy made to his father was that your distinguished collaborator was a drunkard. The man is a fanatic, and the descendant seems to have caught traces of vin-du-pays on me.”

Franz sat down, musing on his lower lip. “You can tell me at length,” he said finally.

“Why not now?” Dick suggested. “You must know I’m the last man to abuse liquor.” His eyes and Franz’s glinted on each other, pair on pair. “Ladislau let the man get so worked up that I was on the defensive. It might have happened in front of patients, and you can imagine how hard it could be to defend yourself in a situation like that!”

Franz took off his gloves and coat. He went to the door and told the secretary, “Don’t disturb us.” Coming back into the room he flung himself at the long table and fooled with his mail, reasoning as little as is characteristic of people in such postures, rather summoning up a suitable mask for what he had to say.

“Dick, I know well that you are a temperate, well-balanced man, even though we do not entirely agree on the subject of alcohol. But a time has come—Dick, I must say frankly that I have been aware several times that you have had a drink when it was not the moment to have one. There is some reason. Why not try another leave of abstinence?”

“Absence,” Dick corrected him automatically. “It’s no solution for me to go away.”

They were both chafed, Franz at having his return marred and blurred.

“Sometimes you don’t use your common sense, Dick.”

“I never understood what common sense meant applied to complicated problems—unless it means that a general practitioner can perform a better operation than a specialist.”

He was seized by an overwhelming disgust for the situation. To explain, to patch—these were not natural functions at their age— better to continue with the cracked echo of an old truth in the ears.

“This is no go,” he said suddenly.

“Well, that’s occurred to me,” Franz admitted. “Your heart isn’t in this project any more, Dick.”

“I know. I want to leave—we could strike some arrangement about taking Nicole’s money out gradually.”

“I have thought about that too, Dick—I have seen this coming. I am able to arrange other backing, and it will be possible to take all your money out by the end of the year.”

Dick had not intended to come to a decision so quickly, nor was he prepared for Franz’s so ready acquiescence in the break, yet he was relieved. Not without desperation he had long felt the ethics of his profession dissolving into a lifeless mass.

IV

The Divers would return to the Riviera, which was home. The Villa Diana had been rented again for the summer, so they divided the intervening time between German spas and French cathedral towns where they were always happy for a few days. Dick wrote a little with no particular method; it was one of those parts of life that is an awaiting; not upon Nicole’s health, which seemed to thrive on travel, nor upon work, but simply an awaiting. The factor that gave purposefulness to the period was the children.

Dick’s interest in them increased with their ages, now eleven and nine. He managed to reach them over the heads of employees on the principle that both the forcing of children and the fear of forcing them were inadequate substitutes for the long, careful watchfulness, the checking and balancing and reckoning of accounts, to the end that there should be no slip below a certain level of duty. He came to know them much better than Nicole did, and in expansive moods over the wines of several countries he talked and played with them at length. They had that wistful charm, almost sadness, peculiar to children who have learned early not to cry or laugh with abandon; they were apparently moved to no extremes of emotion, but content with a simple regimentation and the simple pleasures allowed them. They lived on the even tenor found advisable in the experience of old families of the Western world, brought up rather than brought out. Dick thought, for example, that nothing was more conducive to the development of observation than compulsory silence.

Lanier was an unpredictable boy with an inhuman curiosity. “Well, how many Pomeranians would it take to lick a lion, father?” was typical of the questions with which he harassed Dick. Topsy was easier. She was nine and very fair and exquisitely made like Nicole, and in the past Dick had worried about that. Lately she had become as robust as any American child. He was satisfied with them both, but conveyed the fact to them only in a tacit way. They were not let off breaches of good conduct—“Either one learns politeness at home,” Dick said, “or the world teaches it to you with a whip and you may get hurt in the process. What do I care whether Topsy ‘adores’ me or not? I’m not bringing her up to be my wife.”

Another element that distinguished this summer and autumn for the Divers was a plenitude of money. Due to the sale of their interest in the clinic, and to developments in America, there was now so much that the mere spending of it, the care of goods, was an absorption in itself. The style in which they travelled seemed fabulous.

Regard them, for example, as the train slows up at Boyen where they are to spend a fortnight visiting. The shifting from the wagon-lit has begun at the Italian frontier. The governess’s maid and Madame Diver’s maid have come up from second class to help with the baggage and the dogs. Mlle. Bellois will superintend the hand- luggage, leaving the Sealyhams to one maid and the pair of Pekinese to the other. It is not necessarily poverty of spirit that makes a woman surround herself with life—it can be a superabundance of interest, and, except during her flashes of illness, Nicole was capable of being curator of it all. For example with the great quantity of heavy baggage—presently from the van would be unloaded four wardrobe trunks, a shoe trunk, three hat trunks, and two hat boxes, a chest of servants’ trunks, a portable filing-cabinet, a medicine case, a spirit lamp container, a picnic set, four tennis rackets in presses and cases, a phonograph, a typewriter. Distributed among the spaces reserved for family and entourage were two dozen supplementary grips, satchels and packages, each one numbered, down to the tag on the cane case. Thus all of it could be checked up in two minutes on any station platform, some for storage, some for accompaniment from the “light trip list” or the “heavy trip list,” constantly revised, and carried on metal-edged plaques in Nicole’s purse. She had devised the system as a child when travelling with her failing mother. It was equivalent to the system of a regimental supply officer who must think of the bellies and equipment of three thousand men.

The Divers flocked from the train into the early gathered twilight of the valley. The village people watched the debarkation with an awe akin to that which followed the Italian pilgrimages of Lord Byron a century before. Their hostess was the Contessa di Minghetti, lately Mary North. The journey that had begun in a room over the shop of a paperhanger in Newark had ended in an extraordinary marriage.

“Conte di Minghetti” was merely a papal title—the wealth of Mary’s husband flowed from his being ruler-owner of manganese deposits in southwestern Asia. He was not quite light enough to travel in a pullman south of Mason-Dixon; he was of the Kyble-Berber-Sabaean- Hindu strain that belts across north Africa and Asia, more sympathetic to the European than the mongrel faces of the ports.

When these princely households, one of the East, one of the West, faced each other on the station platform, the splendor of the Divers seemed pioneer simplicity by comparison. Their hosts were accompanied by an Italian major-domo carrying a staff, by a quartet of turbaned retainers on motorcycles, and by two half-veiled females who stood respectfully a little behind Mary and salaamed at Nicole, making her jump with the gesture.

To Mary as well as to the Divers the greeting was faintly comic; Mary gave an apologetic, belittling giggle; yet her voice, as she introduced her husband by his Asiatic title, flew proud and high.

In their rooms as they dressed for dinner, Dick and Nicole grimaced at each other in an awed way: such rich as want to be thought democratic pretend in private to be swept off their feet by swank.

“Little Mary North knows what she wants,” Dick muttered through his shaving cream. “Abe educated her, and now she’s married to a Buddha. If Europe ever goes Bolshevik she’ll turn up as the bride of Stalin.”

Nicole looked around from her dressing-case. “Watch your tongue, Dick, will you?” But she laughed. “They’re very swell. The warships all fire at them or salute them or something. Mary rides in the royal bus in London.”

“All right,” he agreed. As he heard Nicole at the door asking for pins, he called, “I wonder if I could have some whiskey; I feel the mountain air!”

“She’ll see to it,” presently Nicole called through the bathroom door. “It was one of those women who were at the station. She has her veil off.”

“What did Mary tell you about life?” he asked.

“She didn’t say so much—she was interested in high life—she asked me a lot of questions about my genealogy and all that sort of thing, as if I knew anything about it. But it seems the bridegroom has two very tan children by another marriage—one of them ill with some Asiatic thing they can’t diagnose. I’ve got to warn the children. Sounds very peculiar to me. Mary will see how we’d feel about it.” She stood worrying a minute.

“She’ll understand,” Dick reassured her. “Probably the child’s in bed.”

At dinner Dick talked to Hosain, who had been at an English public school. Hosain wanted to know about stocks and about Hollywood and Dick, whipping up his imagination with champagne, told him preposterous tales.

“Billions?”Hosain demanded.

“Trillions,” Dick assured him.

“I didn’t truly realize—”

“Well, perhaps millions,” Dick conceded. “Every hotel guest is assigned a harem—or what amounts to a harem.”

“Other than the actors and directors?”

“Every hotel guest—even travelling salesmen. Why, they tried to send me up a dozen candidates, but Nicole wouldn’t stand for it.”

Nicole reproved him when they were in their room alone. “Why so many highballs? Why did you use your word spic in front of him?”

“Excuse me, I meant smoke. The tongue slipped.”

“Dick, this isn’t faintly like you.”

“Excuse me again. I’m not much like myself any more.”

That night Dick opened a bathroom window, giving on a narrow and tubular court of the château, gray as rats but echoing at the moment to plaintive and peculiar music, sad as a flute. Two men were chanting in an Eastern language or dialect full of k’s and l’s—he leaned out but he could not see them; there was obviously a religious significance in the sounds, and tired and emotionless he let them pray for him too, but what for, save that he should not lose himself in his increasing melancholy, he did not know.

Next day, over a thinly wooded hillside they shot scrawny birds, distant poor relations to the partridge. It was done in a vague imitation of the English manner, with a corps of inexperienced beaters whom Dick managed to miss by firing only directly overhead.

On their return Lanier was waiting in their suite.

“Father, you said tell you immediately if we were near the sick boy.”

Nicole whirled about, immediately on guard.

“—so, Mother,” Lanier continued, turning to her, “the boy takes a bath every evening and to-night he took his bath just before mine and I had to take mine in his water, and it was dirty.”

“What? Now what?”

“I saw them take Tony out of it, and then they called me into it and the water was dirty.”

“But—did you take it?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Heavens!” she exclaimed to Dick.

He demanded: “Why didn’t Lucienne draw your bath?”

“Lucienne can’t. It’s a funny heater—it reached out of itself and burned her arm last night and she’s afraid of it, so one of those two women—”

“You go in this bathroom and take a bath now.”

“Don’t say I told you,” said Lanier from the doorway.

Dick went in and sprinkled the tub with sulphur; closing the door he said to Nicole:

“Either we speak to Mary or we’d better get out.”

She agreed and he continued: “People think their children are constitutionally cleaner than other people’s, and their diseases are less contagious.”

Dick came in and helped himself from the decanter, chewing a biscuit savagely in the rhythm of the pouring water in the bathroom.

“Tell Lucienne that she’s got to learn about the heater—” he suggested. At that moment the Asiatic woman came in person to the door.

“El Contessa—”

Dick beckoned her inside and closed the door.

“Is the little sick boy better?” he inquired pleasantly.

“Better, yes, but he still has the eruptions frequently.”

“That’s too bad—I’m very sorry. But you see our children mustn’t be bathed in his water. That’s out of the question—I’m sure your mistress would be furious if she had known you had done a thing like that.”

“I?” She seemed thunderstruck. “Why, I merely saw your maid had difficulty with the heater—I told her about it and started the water.”

“But with a sick person you must empty the bathwater entirely out, and clean the tub.”

“I?”

Chokingly the woman drew a long breath, uttered a convulsed sob and rushed from the room.

“She mustn’t get up on western civilization at our expense,” he said grimly.

At dinner that night he decided that it must inevitably be a truncated visit: about his own country Hosain seemed to have observed only that there were many mountains and some goats and herders of goats. He was a reserved young man—to draw him out would have required the sincere effort that Dick now reserved for his family. Soon after dinner Hosain left Mary and the Divers to themselves, but the old unity was split—between them lay the restless social fields that Mary was about to conquer. Dick was relieved when, at nine-thirty, Mary received and read a note and got up.

“You’ll have to excuse me. My husband is leaving on a short trip— and I must be with him.”

Next morning, hard on the heels of the servant bringing coffee, Mary entered their room. She was dressed and they were not dressed, and she had the air of having been up for some time. Her face was toughened with quiet jerky fury.

“What is this story about Lanier having been bathed in a dirty bath?”

Dick began to protest, but she cut through:

“What is this story that you commanded my husband’s sister to clean Lanier’s tub?”

She remained on her feet staring at them, as they sat impotent as idols in their beds, weighted by their trays. Together they exclaimed: “His SISTER!”

“That you ordered one of his sisters to clean out a tub!”

“We didn’t—” their voices rang together saying the same thing, “— I spoke to the native servant—”

“You spoke to Hosain’s sister.”

Dick could only say: “I supposed they were two maids.”

“You were told they were Himadoun.”

“What?” Dick got out of bed and into a robe.

“I explained it to you at the piano night before last. Don’t tell me you were too merry to understand.”

“Was that what you said? I didn’t hear the beginning. I didn’t connect the—we didn’t make any connection, Mary. Well, all we can do is see her and apologize.”

“See her and apologize! I explained to you that when the oldest member of the family—when the oldest one marries, well, the two oldest sisters consecrate themselves to being Himadoun, to being his wife’s ladies-in-waiting.”

“Was that why Hosain left the house last night?”

Mary hesitated; then nodded.

“He had to—they all left. His honor makes it necessary.”

Now both the Divers were up and dressing; Mary went on:

“And what’s all that about the bathwater. As if a thing like that could happen in this house! We’ll ask Lanier about it.”

Dick sat on the bedside indicating in a private gesture to Nicole that she should take over. Meanwhile Mary went to the door and spoke to an attendant in Italian.

“Wait a minute,” Nicole said. “I won’t have that.”

“You accused us,” answered Mary, in a tone she had never used to Nicole before. “Now I have a right to see.”

“I won’t have the child brought in.” Nicole threw on her clothes as though they were chain mail.

“That’s all right,” said Dick. “Bring Lanier in. We’ll settle this bathtub matter—fact or myth.”

Lanier, half clothed mentally and physically, gazed at the angered faces of the adults.

“Listen, Lanier,” Mary demanded, “how did you come to think you were bathed in water that had been used before?”

“Speak up,” Dick added.

“It was just dirty, that was all.”

“Couldn’t you hear the new water running, from your room, next door?”

Lanier admitted the possibility but reiterated his point—the water was dirty. He was a little awed; he tried to see ahead:

“It couldn’t have been running, because—”

They pinned him down.

“Why not?”

He stood in his little kimono arousing the sympathy of his parents and further arousing Mary’s impatience—then he said:

“The water was dirty, it was full of soap-suds.”

“When you’re not sure what you’re saying—” Mary began, but Nicole interrupted.

“Stop it, Mary. If there were dirty suds in the water it was logical to think it was dirty. His father told him to come—”

“There couldn’t have been dirty suds in the water.”

Lanier looked reproachfully at his father, who had betrayed him. Nicole turned him about by the shoulders and sent him out of the room; Dick broke the tensity with a laugh.

Then, as if the sound recalled the past, the old friendship, Mary guessed how far away from them she had gone and said in a mollifying tone: “It’s always like that with children.”

Her uneasiness grew as she remembered the past. “You’d be silly to go—Hosain wanted to make this trip anyhow. After all, you’re my guests and you just blundered into the thing.” But Dick, made more angry by this obliqueness and the use of the word blunder, turned away and began arranging his effects, saying:

“It’s too bad about the young women. I’d like to apologize to the one who came in here.”

“If you’d only listened on the piano seat!”

“But you’ve gotten so damned dull, Mary. I listened as long as I could.”

“Be quiet!” Nicole advised him.

“I return his compliment,” said Mary bitterly. “Good-by, Nicole.” She went out.

After all that there was no question of her coming to see them off; the major-domo arranged the departure. Dick left formal notes for Hosain and the sisters. There was nothing to do except to go, but all of them, especially Lanier, felt bad about it.

“I insist,” insisted Lanier on the train, “that it was dirty bathwater.”

“That’ll do,” his father said. “You better forget it—unless you want me to divorce you. Did you know there was a new law in France that you can divorce a child?”

Lanier roared with delight and the Divers were unified again—Dick wondered how many more times it could be done.

V

Nicole went to the window and bent over the sill to take a look at the rising altercation on the terrace; the April sun shone pink on the saintly face of Augustine, the cook, and blue on the butcher’s knife she waved in her drunken hand. She had been with them since their return to Villa Diana in February.

Because of an obstruction of an awning she could see only Dick’s head and his hand holding one of his heavy canes with a bronze knob on it. The knife and the cane, menacing each other, were like tripos and short sword in a gladiatorial combat. Dick’s words reached her first:

“—care how much kitchen wine you drink but when I find you digging into a bottle of Chablis Moutonne—”

“You talk about drinking!” Augustine cried, flourishing her sabre. “You drink—all the time!”

Nicole called over the awning: “What’s the matter, Dick?” and he answered in English:

“The old girl has been polishing off the vintage wines. I’m firing her—at least I’m trying to.”

“Heavens! Well, don’t let her reach you with that knife.”

Augustine shook her knife up at Nicole. Her old mouth was made of two small intersecting cherries.

“I would like to say, Madame, if you knew that your husband drinks over at his Bastide comparatively as a day-laborer—”

“Shut up and get out!” interrupted Nicole. “We’ll get the gendarmes.”

“YOU’LL get the gendarmes! With my brother in the corps! You—a disgusting American?”

In English Dick called up to Nicole:

“Get the children away from the house till I settle this.”

“—disgusting Americans who come here and drink up our finest wines,” screamed Augustine with the voice of the commune.

Dick mastered a firmer tone.

“You must leave now! I’ll pay you what we owe you.”

“Very sure you’ll pay me! And let me tell you—” she came close and waved the knife so furiously that Dick raised his stick, whereupon she rushed into the kitchen and returned with the carving knife reinforced by a hatchet.

The situation was not prepossessing—Augustine was a strong woman and could be disarmed only at the risk of serious results to herself—and severe legal complications which were the lot of one who molested a French citizen. Trying a bluff Dick called up to Nicole:

“Phone the poste de police.” Then to Augustine, indicating her armament, “This means arrest for you.”

“Ha-HA!” she laughed demoniacally; nevertheless she came no nearer. Nicole phoned the police but was answered with what was almost an echo of Augustine’s laugh. She heard mumbles and passings of the word around—the connection was suddenly broken.

Returning to the window she called down to Dick: “Give her something extra!”

“If I could get to that phone!” As this seemed impracticable, Dick capitulated. For fifty francs, increased to a hundred as he succumbed to the idea of getting her out hastily, Augustine yielded her fortress, covering the retreat with stormy grenades of “Salaud!” She would leave only when her nephew could come for her baggage. Waiting cautiously in the neighborhood of the kitchen Dick heard a cork pop, but he yielded the point. There was no further trouble—when the nephew arrived, all apologetic, Augustine bade Dick a cheerful, convivial good-by and called up “All revoir, Madame! Bonne chance!” to Nicole’s window.

The Divers went to Nice and dined on a bouillabaisse, which is a stew of rock fish and small lobsters, highly seasoned with saffron, and a bottle of cold Chablis. He expressed pity for Augustine.

“I’m not sorry a bit,” said Nicole.

“I’m sorry—and yet I wish I’d shoved her over the cliff.”

There was little they dared talk about in these days; seldom did they find the right word when it counted, it arrived always a moment too late when one could not reach the other any more. To- night Augustine’s outburst had shaken them from their separate reveries; with the burn and chill of the spiced broth and the parching wine they talked.

“We can’t go on like this,” Nicole suggested. “Or can we?—what do you think?” Startled that for the moment Dick did not deny it, she continued, “Some of the time I think it’s my fault—I’ve ruined you.”

“So I’m ruined, am I?” he inquired pleasantly.

“I didn’t mean that. But you used to want to create things—now you seem to want to smash them up.”

She trembled at criticizing him in these broad terms—but his enlarging silence frightened her even more. She guessed that something was developing behind the silence, behind the hard, blue eyes, the almost unnatural interest in the children. Uncharacteristic bursts of temper surprised her—he would suddenly unroll a long scroll of contempt for some person, race, class, way of life, way of thinking. It was as though an incalculable story was telling itself inside him, about which she could only guess at in the moments when it broke through the surface.

“After all, what do you get out of this?” she demanded.

“Knowing you’re stronger every day. Knowing that your illness follows the law of diminishing returns.”

His voice came to her from far off, as though he were speaking of something remote and academic; her alarm made her exclaim, “Dick!” and she thrust her hand forward to his across the table. A reflex pulled Dick’s hand back and he added: “There’s the whole situation to think of, isn’t there? There’s not just you.” He covered her hand with his and said in the old pleasant voice of a conspirator for pleasure, mischief, profit, and delight:

“See that boat out there?”

It was the motor yacht of T. F. Golding lying placid among the little swells of the NiceanBay, constantly bound upon a romantic voyage that was not dependent upon actual motion. “We’ll go out there now and ask the people on board what’s the matter with them. We’ll find out if they’re happy.”

“We hardly know him,” Nicole objected.

“He urged us. Besides, Baby knows him—she practically married him, doesn’t she—didn’t she?”

When they put out from the port in a hired launch it was already summer dusk and lights were breaking out in spasms along the rigging of the Margin. As they drew up alongside, Nicole’s doubts reasserted themselves.

“He’s having a party—”

“It’s only a radio,” he guessed.

They were hailed—a huge white-haired man in a white suit looked down at them, calling:

“Do I recognize the Divers?”

“Boat ahoy, Margin!”

Their boat moved under the companionway; as they mounted Golding doubled his huge frame to give Nicole a hand.

“Just in time for dinner.”

A small orchestra was playing astern.

“I’m yours for the asking—but till then you can’t ask me to behave—”

And as Golding’s cyclonic arms blew them aft without touching them, Nicole was sorrier they had come, and more impatient at Dick. Having taken up an attitude of aloofness from the gay people here, at the time when Dick’s work and her health were incompatible with going about, they had a reputation as refusers. Riviera replacements during the ensuing years interpreted this as a vague unpopularity. Nevertheless, having taken such a stand, Nicole felt it should not be cheaply compromised for a momentary self- indulgence.

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 enchantment 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, 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 héros,” he said, “il nous faut du temps, Nicole. Nous ne pouvons pas faire de petits exercises d’héroisme—il faut faire les grandes compositions.”

“Talk English to me, Tommy.”

“Parlez français 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 Corps d’Afrique du Nord? 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, US-ually, 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 Sibly-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 decadence, 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 Café des Alliées where the Divers could retrieve it.

They moved into the dining salon and Dick was placed next to Lady Sibly-Biers. 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 some one—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 Sibly-Biers wrote the words. He wrote the music.”

“Quelle enfanterie!” Tommy murmured as the next verse began, hinting at the jumpy lady’s further predilections. “On dirait qu’il récite 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 countrymen, 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 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 here, 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 lesion of anxiety at seeing 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 would give you.”

“Don’t talk like that—don’t say such things.”

His face, wan in the light that the white spray caught and tossed back to the brilliant sky had none of the lines of annoyance she had expected. It was even detached; his eyes focussed upon her gradually as upon a chessman to be moved; in the same slow manner he caught her wrist and drew her near.

“You ruined me, did you?” he inquired blandly. “Then we’re both ruined. So—”

Cold with terror she put her other wrist into his grip. All right, she would go with him—again she felt the beauty of the night vividly in one moment of complete response and abnegation—all right, then—

—but now she was unexpectedly free and Dick turned his back sighing. “Tch! tch!”

Tears streamed down Nicole’s face—in a moment she heard some one approaching; it was Tommy.

“You found him! Nicole thought maybe you jumped overboard, Dick,” he said, “because that little English poule slanged you.”

“It’d be a good setting to jump overboard,” said Dick mildly.

“Wouldn’t it?” agreed Nicole hastily. “Let’s borrow life- preservers and jump over. I think we should do something spectacular. I feel that all our lives have been too restrained.”

Tommy sniffed from one to the other trying to breathe in the situation with the night. “We’ll go ask the Lady Beer-and-Ale what to do—she should know the latest things. And we should memorize her song ‘There was a young lady from l’enfer.’ I shall translate it, and make a fortune from its success at the Casino.”

“Are you rich, Tommy?” Dick asked him, as they retraced the length of the boat.

“Not as things go now. I got tired of the brokerage business and went away. But I have good stocks in the hands of friends who are holding it for me. All goes well.”

“Dick’s getting rich,” Nicole said. In reaction her voice had begun to tremble.

On the after deck Golding had fanned three pairs of dancers into action with his colossal paws. Nicole and Tommy joined them and Tommy remarked: “Dick seems to be drinking.”

“Only moderately,” she said loyally.

“There are those who can drink and those who can’t. Obviously Dick can’t. You ought to tell him not to.”

“I!” she exclaimed in amazement. “I tell Dick what he should do or shouldn’t do!”

But in a reticent way Dick was still vague and sleepy when they reached the pier at Cannes. Golding buoyed him down into the launch of the Margin whereupon Lady Caroline shifted her place conspicuously. On the dock he bowed good-by with exaggerated formality, and for a moment he seemed about to speed her with a salty epigram, but the bone of Tommy’s arm went into the soft part of his and they walked to the attendant car.

“I’ll drive you home,” Tommy suggested.

“Don’t bother—we can get a cab.”

“I’d like to, if you can put me up.”

On the back seat of the car Dick remained quiescent until the yellow monolith of Golfe Juan was passed, and then the constant carnival at Juan les Pins where the night was musical and strident in many languages. When the car turned up the hill toward Tarmes, he sat up suddenly, prompted by the tilt of the vehicle and delivered a peroration:

“A charming representative of the—” he stumbled momentarily, “—a firm of—bring me Brains addled a l’Anglaise.” Then he went into an appeased sleep, belching now and then contentedly into the soft warm darkness.

VI

Next morning Dick came early into Nicole’s room. “I waited till I heard you up. Needless to say I feel badly about the evening—but how about no postmortems?”

“I’m agreed,” she answered coolly, carrying her face to the mirror.

“Tommy drove us home? Or did I dream it?”

“You know he did.”

“Seems probable,” he admitted, “since I just heard him coughing. I think I’ll call on him.”

She was glad when he left her, for almost the first time in her life—his awful faculty of being right seemed to have deserted him at last.

Tommy was stirring in his bed, waking for café au lait.

“Feel all right?” Dick asked.

When Tommy complained of a sore throat he seized at a professional attitude.

“Better have a gargle or something.”

“You have one?”

“Oddly enough I haven’t—probably Nicole has.”

“Don’t disturb her.”

“She’s up.”

“How is she?”

Dick turned around slowly. “Did you expect her to be dead because I was tight?” His tone was pleasant. “Nicole is now made of—of Georgia pine, which is the hardest wood known, except lignum vitæ from New Zealand—”

Nicole, going downstairs, heard the end of the conversation. She knew, as she had always known, that Tommy loved her; she knew he had come to dislike Dick, and that Dick had realized it before he did, and would react in some positive way to the man’s lonely passion. This thought was succeeded by a moment of sheerly feminine satisfaction. She leaned over her children’s breakfast table and told off instructions to the governess, while upstairs two men were concerned about her.

Later in the garden she was happy; she did not want anything to happen, but only for the situation to remain in suspension as the two men tossed her from one mind to another; she had not existed for a long time, even as a ball.

“Nice, Rabbits, isn’t it—Or is it? Hey, Rabbit—hey you! Is it nice?—hey? Or does it sound very peculiar to you?”

The rabbit, after an experience of practically nothing else and cabbage leaves, agreed after a few tentative shiftings of the nose.

Nicole went on through her garden routine. She left the flowers she cut in designated spots to be brought to the house later by the gardener. Reaching the sea wall she fell into a communicative mood and no one to communicate with; so she stopped and deliberated. She was somewhat shocked at the idea of being interested in another man—but other women have lovers—why not me? In the fine spring morning the inhibitions of the male world disappeared and she reasoned as gaily as a flower, while the wind blew her hair until her head moved with it. Other women have had lovers—the same forces that last night had made her yield to Dick up to the point of death, now kept her head nodding to the wind, content and happy with the logic of, Why shouldn’t I?

She sat upon the low wall and looked down upon the sea. But from another sea, the wide swell of fantasy, she had fished out something tangible to lay beside the rest of her loot. If she need not, in her spirit, be forever one with Dick as he had appeared last night, she must be something in addition, not just an image on his mind, condemned to endless parades around the circumference of a medal.

Nicole had chosen this part of the wall on which to sit, because the cliff shaded to a slanting meadow with a cultivated vegetable garden. Through a cluster of boughs she saw two men carrying rakes and spades and talking in a counterpoint of Niçoise and Provençal. Attracted by their words and gestures she caught the sense:

“I laid her down here.”

“I took her behind the vines there.”

“She doesn’t care—neither does he. It was that sacred dog. Well, I laid her down here—”

“You got the rake?”

“You got it yourself, you clown.”

“Well, I don’t care where you laid her down. Until that night I never even felt a woman’s breast against my chest since I married— twelve years ago. And now you tell me—”

“But listen about the dog—”

Nicole watched them through the boughs; it seemed all right what they were saying—one thing was good for one person, another for another. Yet it was a man’s world she had overheard; going back to the house she became doubtful again.

Dick and Tommy were on the terrace. She walked through them and into the house, brought out a sketch pad and began a head of Tommy.

“Hands never idle—distaff flying,” Dick said lightly. How could he talk so trivially with the blood still drained down from his cheeks so that the auburn lather of beard showed red as his eyes? She turned to Tommy saying:

“I can always do something. I used to have a nice active little Polynesian ape and juggle him around for hours till people began to make the most dismal rough jokes—”

She kept her eyes resolutely away from Dick. Presently he excused himself and went inside—she saw him pour himself two glasses of water, and she hardened further.

“Nicole—” Tommy began but interrupted himself to clear the harshness from his throat.

“I’m going to get you some special camphor rub,” she suggested. “It’s American—Dick believes in it. I’ll be just a minute.”

“I must go really.”

Dick came out and sat down. “Believes in what?” When she returned with the jar neither of the men had moved, though she gathered they had had some sort of excited conversation about nothing.

The chauffeur was at the door, with a bag containing Tommy’s clothes of the night before. The sight of Tommy in clothes borrowed from Dick moved her sadly, falsely, as though Tommy were not able to afford such clothes.

“When you get to the hotel rub this into your throat and chest and then inhale it,” she said.

“Say, there,” Dick murmured as Tommy went down the steps, “don’t give Tommy the whole jar—it has to be ordered from Paris—it’s out of stock down here.”

Tommy came back within hearing and the three of them stood in the sunshine, Tommy squarely before the car so that it seemed by leaning forward he would tip it upon his back.

Nicole stepped down to the path.

“Now catch it,” she advised him. “It’s extremely rare.”

She heard Dick grow silent at her side; she took a step off from him and waved as the car drove off with Tommy and the special camphor rub. Then she turned to take her own medicine.

“There was no necessity for that gesture,” Dick said. “There are four of us here—and for years whenever there’s a cough—”

They looked at each other.

“We can always get another jar—” then she lost her nerve and presently followed him upstairs where he lay down on his own bed and said nothing.

“Do you want lunch to be brought up to you?” she asked.

He nodded and continued to lie quiescent, staring at the ceiling. Doubtfully she went to give the order. Upstairs again she looked into his room—the blue eyes, like searchlights, played on a dark sky. She stood a minute in the doorway, aware of the sin she had committed against him, half afraid to come in. . . . She put out her hand as if to rub his head, but he turned away like a suspicious animal. Nicole could stand the situation no longer; in a kitchen-maid’s panic she ran downstairs, afraid of what the stricken man above would feed on while she must still continue her dry suckling at his lean chest.

In a week Nicole forgot her flash about Tommy—she had not much memory for people and forgot them easily. But in the first hot blast of June she heard he was in Nice. He wrote a little note to them both—and she opened it under the parasol, together with other mail they had brought from the house. After reading it she tossed it over to Dick, and in exchange he threw a telegram into the lap of her beach pajamas:

Dears will be at Gausses to-morrow unfortunately without mother am counting on seeing you.

“I’ll be glad to see her,” said Nicole, grimly.