F. Scott Fitzgerald - Tender is the Night [148]
When Nicole started out on the beach she saw Dick, not dressed for swimming, sitting on a rock above. She shrank back in the shadow of her dressing-tent. In a minute Baby joined her, saying:
“Dick’s still there.”
“I saw him.”
“I think he might have the delicacy to go.”
“This is his place—in a way, he discovered it. Old Gausse always says he owes everything to Dick.”
Baby looked calmly at her sister.
“We should have let him confine himself to his bicycle excursions,” she remarked. “When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they put up.”
“Dick was a good husband to me for six years,” Nicole said. “All that time I never suffered a minute’s pain because of him, and he always did his best never to let anything hurt me.”
Baby’s lower jaw projected slightly as she said:
“That’s what he was educated for.”
The sisters sat in silence; Nicole wondering in a tired way about things; Baby considering whether or not to marry the latest candidate for her hand and money, an authenticated Hapsburg. She was not quite THINKING about it. Her affairs had long shared such a sameness, that, as she dried out, they were more important for their conversational value than for themselves. Her emotions had their truest existence in the telling of them.
“Is he gone?” Nicole asked after a while. “I think his train leaves at noon.”
Baby looked.
“No. He’s moved up higher on the terrace and he’s talking to some women. Anyhow there are so many people now that he doesn’t HAVE to see us.”
He had seen them though, as they left their pavilion, and he followed them with his eyes until they disappeared again. He sat with Mary Minghetti, drinking anisette.
“You were like you used to be the night you helped us,” she was saying, “except at the end, when you were horrid about Caroline. Why aren’t you nice like that always? You can be.”
It seemed fantastic to Dick to be in a position where Mary North could tell him about things.
“Your friends still like you, Dick. But you say awful things to people when you’ve been drinking. I’ve spent most of my time defending you this summer.”
“That remark is one of Doctor Eliot’s classics.”
“It’s true. Nobody cares whether you drink or not—” She hesitated, “even when Abe drank hardest, he never offended people like you do.”
“You’re all so dull,” he said.
“But we’re all there is!” cried Mary. “If you don’t like nice people, try the ones who aren’t nice, and see how you like that! All people want is to have a good time and if you make them unhappy you cut yourself off from nourishment.”
“Have I been nourished?” he asked.
Mary was having a good time, though she did not know it, as she had sat down with him only out of fear. Again she refused a drink and said: “Self-indulgence is back of it. Of course, after Abe you can imagine how I feel about it—since I watched the progress of a good man toward alcoholism—”
Down the steps tripped Lady Caroline Sibly-Biers with blithe theatricality.
Dick felt fine—he was already well in advance of the day; arrived at where a man should be at the end of a good dinner, yet he showed only a fine, considered, restrained interest in Mary. His eyes, for the moment clear as a child’s, asked her sympathy and stealing over him he felt the old necessity of convincing her that he was the last man in the world and she was the last woman.
. . . Then he would not have to look at those two other figures, a man and a woman, black and white and metallic against the sky. . . .
“You once liked me, didn’t you?” he asked.
“LIKED you—I LOVED you. Everybody loved you. You could’ve had anybody you wanted for the asking—”
“There has always been something between you and me.”
She bit eagerly. “Has there, Dick?”
“Always—I knew your troubles and how brave you were about them.” But the old interior laughter had begun inside him and he knew he couldn’t keep