I slant forward against the wind and pull my coat together without losing step with Dick. We are chanting nonsense:
“Oh—oh—oh—oh
Other flamingoes than me,
Oh—oh—oh— oh
Other flamingoes than me—”
Life is fun with Dick—the people in deck chairs look at us, and a woman is trying to hear what we are singing. Dick is tired of singing it, so go on alone, Dick. You will walk differently alone, dear, through a thicker atmosphere, forcing your way through the shadows of chairs, through the dripping smoke of the funnels. You will feel your own reflection sliding along the eyes of those who look at you. You are no longer insulated; but I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.
Sitting on the stanchion of this life-boat I look seaward and let my hair blow and shine. I am motionless against the sky and the boat is made to carry my form onward into the blue obscurity of the future, I am Pallas Athene carved reverently on the front of a galley. The waters are lapping in the public toilets and the agate green foliage of spray changes and complains about the stern.
. . . We travelled a lot that year—from WoolloomoolooBay to Biskra. On the edge of the Sahara we ran into a plague of locusts and the chauffeur explained kindly that they were bumble-bees. The sky was low at night, full of the presence of a strange and watchful God. Oh, the poor little naked Ouled Nail; the night was noisy with drums from Senegal and flutes and whining camels, and the natives pattering about in shoes made of old automobile tires.
But I was gone again by that time—trains and beaches they were all one. That was why he took me travelling but after my second child, my little girl, Topsy, was born everything got dark again.
. . . If I could get word to my husband who has seen fit to desert me here, to leave me in the hands of incompetents. You tell me my baby is black—that’s farcical, that’s very cheap. We went to Africa merely to see Timgad, since my principal interest in life is archeology. I am tired of knowing nothing and being reminded of it all the time.
. . . When I get well I want to be a fine person like you, Dick—I would study medicine except it’s too late. We must spend my money and have a house—I’m tired of apartments and waiting for you. You’re bored with Zurich and you can’t find time for writing here and you say that it’s a confession of weakness for a scientist not to write. And I’ll look over the whole field of knowledge and pick out something and really know about it, so I’ll have it to hang on to if I go to pieces again. You’ll help me, Dick, so I won’t feel so guilty. We’ll live near a warm beach where we can be brown and young together.
. . . This is going to be Dick’s work house. Oh, the idea came to us both at the same moment. We had passed Tarmes a dozen times and we rode up here and found the houses empty, except two stables. When we bought we acted through a Frenchman but the navy sent spies up here in no time when they found that Americans had bought part of a hill village. They looked for cannons all through the building material, and finally Baby had to twitch wires for us at the Affaires Etrangeres in Paris.
No one comes to the Riviera in summer, so we expect to have a few guests and to work. There are some French people here—Mistinguet last week, surprised to find the hotel open, and Picasso and the man who wrote Pas sur la Bouche.
. . . Dick, why did you register Mr. and Mrs. Diver instead of Doctor and Mrs. Diver? I just wondered—it just floated through my mind.—You’ve taught me that work is everything and I believe you. You used to say a man knows things and when he stops knowing things he’s like anybody else, and the thing is to get power before he stops knowing things. If you want to turn things topsy-turvy, all right, but must your Nicole follow you walking on her hands, darling?
. . . Tommy says I am silent. Since I was well the first time I talked a lot to Dick late at night, both of us sitting up in bed and lighting cigarettes, then diving down afterward out of the blue dawn and into the pillows, to keep the light from our eyes. Sometimes I sing, and play with the animals, and I have a few friends too—Mary, for instance. When Mary and I talk neither of us listens to the other. Talk is men. When I talk I say to myself that I am probably Dick. Already I have even been my son, remembering how wise and slow he is. Sometimes I am Doctor Dohmler and one time I may even be an aspect of you, Tommy Barban. Tommy is in love with me, I think, but gently, reassuringly. Enough, though, so that he and Dick have begun to disapprove of each other. All in all, everything has never gone better. I am among friends who like me. I am here on this tranquil beach with my husband and two children. Everything is all right—if I can finish translating this damn recipe for chicken a la Maryland into French. My toes feel warm in the sand.
“Yes, I’ll look. More new people—oh, that girl—yes. Who did you say she looked like. . . . No, I haven’t, we don’t get much chance to see the new American pictures over here. Rosemary who? Well, we’re getting very fashionable for July—seems very peculiar to me. Yes, she’s lovely, but there can be too many people.”
XI
Doctor Richard Diver and Mrs. Elsie Speers sat in the Cafe des Alliees in August, under cool and dusty trees. The sparkle of the mica was dulled by the baked ground, and a few gusts of mistral from down the coast seeped through the Esterel and rocked the fishing boats in the harbor, pointing the masts here and there at a featureless sky.
“I had a letter this morning,” said Mrs. Speers. “What a terrible time you all must have had with those Negroes! But Rosemary said you were perfectly wonderful to her.”
“Rosemary ought to have a service stripe. It was pretty harrowing— the only person it didn’t disturb was Abe North—he flew off to Havre—he probably doesn’t know about it yet.”
“I’m sorry Mrs. Diver was upset,” she said carefully.
Rosemary had written:
Nicole seemed Out of her Mind. I didn’t want to come South with them because I felt Dick had enough on his hands.
“She’s all right now.” He spoke almost impatiently. “So you’re leaving to-morrow. When will you sail?”
“Right away.”
“My God, it’s awful to have you go.”
“We’re glad we came here. We’ve had a good time, thanks to you. You’re the first man Rosemary ever cared for.”
Another gust of wind strained around the porphyry hills of la Napoule. There was a hint in the air that the earth
