LITMIR.BIZ

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as though people were wondering why she was here in the lull between the gaiety of last winter and next winter, while up north the true world thundered by.

* * *

      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, low black dog barked at her, a dozing chauffeur woke with a start. She sat in the car, her lovely face set, controlled, her eyes brave and watchful, looking straight ahead toward nothing. Her dress was bright red and her brown legs were bare. She had thick, dark, gold hair like a chow’s.

      With half an hour to wait for her train Rosemary sat down in the Café des Alliés on the Croisette, where the trees made a green twilight over the tables and an orchestra wooed an imaginary public of cosmopolites with the Nice Carnival Song and last year’s American tune. She had bought Le Temps[29] and The Saturday Evening Post[30] for her mother, and as she drank her citronade[31] she opened the latter at the memoirs of a Russian princess, finding the dim conventions of the nineties realer and nearer than the headlines of the French paper. It was the same feeling that had oppressed her at the hotel – accustomed to seeing the starkest grotesqueries of a continent heavily underlined as comedy or tragedy, untrained to the task of separating out the essential for herself, she now began to feel that French life was empty and stale. This feeling was surcharged by listening to the sad tunes of the orchestra, reminiscent of the melancholy music played for acrobats in vaudeville. 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 – after much haggling, for Rosemary had formed her valuations of money in France – and drove along the Riviera, the delta of many rivers. The chauffeur, a Russian Czar of the period of Ivan the Terrible[32], was a self-appointed guide, and the resplendent names – Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo – began to glow through their torpid camouflage, whispering of old kings come here to dine or die, of rajahs tossing Buddha’s eyes to English ballerinas, of Russian princes turning the weeks into Baltic twilights in the lost caviare 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 this was premature, for they were never coming back any more[33].

      It was pleasant to drive back to the hotel in the late afternoon, above a sea as mysteriously colored as the agates and cornelians of childhood, green as green milk[34], blue as laundry water, wine dark. It was pleasant to pass people eating outside their doors, and to hear the fierce mechanical pianos behind the vines of country estaminets[35]. When they turned off the Corniche d’Or and down to Gausse’s Hotel through the darkening banks of trees, set one behind another in many greens, the moon already hovered over the ruins of the aqueducts…

      Somewhere in the hills behind the hotel there was a dance, and Rosemary listened to the music through the ghostly moonshine of her mosquito net, realizing that there was gaiety too 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-sufficient little group, and once their umbrellas, bamboo rugs, dogs, and children were set out in place the part of the plage was literally fenced in. She resolved in any case not to spend her last two mornings with the other ones.

      IV

      The matter was solved for her. The McKiscos were not yet there and she had scarcely spread her peignoir when two men – the man with the jockey cap and the tall blonde man, given to sawing waiters in two – left the group and came down toward her.

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

      She sat up and her happy little laugh welcomed their intrusion.

      “We wondered,” Dick Diver said, “if you wouldn’t come over this morning. We go in, we take food and drink, so it’s a substantial 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, unroll an endless succession of magnificent possibilities. He managed the introduction so that her name wasn’t mentioned and then let her know easily that everyone knew who she was but were respecting the completeness of her private life – a courtesy that Rosemary had not met with save from professional people since her success.

      Nicole Diver, her brown back hanging from her pearls, was looking through a recipe book for chicken Maryland[36]. She was about twenty-four, Rosemary guessed – her face could have been described in terms of conventional prettiness, but the effect was that it had been made first on the heroic scale with strong structure and marking, as if the features and vividness of brow and coloring, everything we associate with temperament and character had been molded with a Rodinesque[37] intention, and then chiseled away in the direction of prettiness to a point where a single slip would have irreparably diminished its force and quality. With the mouth the sculptor had taken desperate chances – it was the cupid’s bow of a magazine cover, yet it shared the distinction of the rest.

      “Are you here for a long time?” Nicole asked.

      Her voice was low, almost harsh.

      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 in March and we’ve been slowly working our way north. I got pneumonia making a picture last January and I’ve been recuperating.”

      “Mercy![38] How did that happen?”

      “Well, it was from swimming,” Rosemary was rather reluctant at embarking upon personal revelations. “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 determinedly 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 and a chasseur[39] – it paid its way and this year it’s doing even better.”

      “But you’re not in the hotel.”

      “We built a house, up at Tarmes.”

      “The theory is,” said Dick, arranging an umbrella to clip a square of sunlight off Rosemary’s shoulder, “that all the northern places, like Deauville[40], 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[41].

      “Well, what nationality are these people?” he demanded, suddenly, and read with a slight French intonation, “ ’Registered at the Hotel Palace at Vevey are Mr. Pandely Vlasco, Mme. Bonneasse’ – I don’t

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