read, he pretended to be tired and shut his eyes but she was still watching him, and though still she was half asleep from the hangover of the drug, she was relieved and almost happy that he was hers again.
It was worse with his eyes shut for it gave a rhythm of finding and losing, finding and losing; but so as not to appear restless he lay like that until noon. At luncheon things were better—it was always a fine meal; a thousand lunches in inns and restaurants, wagon-lits, buffets, and aeroplanes were a mighty collation to have taken together. The familiar hurry of the train waiters, the little bottles of wine and mineral water, the excellent food of the Paris- Lyons-Mediterranee gave them the illusion that everything was the same as before, but it was almost the first trip he had ever taken with Nicole that was a going away rather than a going toward. He drank a whole bottle of wine save for Nicole’s single glass; they talked about the house and the children. But once back in the compartment a silence fell over them like the silence in the restaurant across from the Luxembourg. Receding from a grief, it seems necessary to retrace the same steps that brought us there. An unfamiliar impatience settled on Dick; suddenly Nicole said:
“It seemed too bad to leave Rosemary like that—do you suppose she’ll be all right?”
“Of course. She could take care of herself anywhere—” Lest this belittle Nicole’s ability to do likewise, he added, “After all, she’s an actress, and even though her mother’s in the background she HAS to look out for herself.”
“She’s very attractive.”
“She’s an infant.”
“She’s attractive though.”
They talked aimlessly back and forth, each speaking for the other.
“She’s not as intelligent as I thought,” Dick offered.
“She’s quite smart.”
“Not very, though—there’s a persistent aroma of the nursery.”
“She’s very—very pretty,” Nicole said in a detached, emphatic way, “and I thought she was very good in the picture.”
“She was well directed. Thinking it over, it wasn’t very individual.”
“I thought it was. I can see how she’d be very attractive to men.”
His heart twisted. To what men? How many men?
—Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?
—Please do, it’s too light in here.
Where now? And with whom?
“In a few years she’ll look ten years older than you.”
“On the contrary. I sketched her one night on a theatre program, I think she’ll last.”
They were both restless in the night. In a day or two Dick would try to banish the ghost of Rosemary before it became walled up with them, but for the moment he had no force to do it. Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure and the memory so possessed him that for the moment there was nothing to do but to pretend. This was more difficult because he was currently annoyed with Nicole, who, after all these years, should recognize symptoms of strain in herself and guard against them. Twice within a fortnight she had broken up: there had been the night of the dinner at Tarmes when he had found her in her bedroom dissolved in crazy laughter telling Mrs. McKisco she could not go in the bathroom because the key was thrown down the well. Mrs. McKisco was astonished and resentful, baffled and yet in a way comprehending. Dick had not been particularly alarmed then, for afterward Nicole was repentant. She called at Gausse’s Hotel but the McKiscos were gone.
The collapse in Paris was another matter, adding significance to the first one. It prophesied possibly a new cycle, a new pousse of the malady. Having gone through unprofessional agonies during her long relapse following Topsy’s birth, he had, perforce, hardened himself about her, making a cleavage between Nicole sick and Nicole well. This made it difficult now to distinguish between his self- protective professional detachment and some new coldness in his heart. As an indifference cherished, or left to atrophy, becomes an emptiness, to this extent he had learned to become empty of Nicole, serving her against his will with negations and emotional neglect. One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.
XII
He found Nicole in the garden with her arms folded high on her shoulders. She looked at him with straight gray eyes, with a child’s searching wonder.
“I went to Cannes,” he said. “I ran into Mrs. Speers. She’s leaving to-morrow. She wanted to come up and say good-by to you, but I slew the idea.”
“I’m sorry. I’d like to have seen her. I like her.”
“Who else do you think I saw—Bartholomew Tailor.”
“You didn’t.”
“I couldn’t have missed that face of his, the old experienced weasel. He was looking over the ground for Ciro’s Menagerie— they’ll all be down next year. I suspected Mrs. Abrams was a sort of outpost.”
“And Baby was outraged the first summer we came here.”
“They don’t really give a damn where they are, so I don’t see why they don’t stay and freeze in Deauville.”
“Can’t we start rumors about cholera or something?”
“I told Bartholomew that some categories died off like flies here— I told him the life of a suck was as short as the life of a machine-gunner in the war.”
