“He’ll be writing music in America and I’ll be working at singing in Munich, so when we get together again there’ll be nothing we can’t do.”
“That’s wonderful,” agreed Rosemary, feeling the champagne.
“Meanwhile, another touch of champagne for Rosemary. Then she’ll be more able to rationalize the acts of her lymphatic glands. They only begin to function at eighteen.”
Dick laughed indulgently at Abe, whom he loved, and in whom he had long lost hope: “That’s medically incorrect and we’re going.” Catching the faint patronage Abe said lightly:
“Something tells me I’ll have a new score on Broadway long before you’ve finished your scientific treatise.”
“I hope so,” said Dick evenly. “I hope so. I may even abandon what you call my ‘scientific treatise.’”
“Oh, Dick!” Mary’s voice was startled, was shocked. Rosemary had never before seen Dick’s face utterly expressionless; she felt that this announcement was something momentous and she was inclined to exclaim with Mary “Oh, Dick!”
But suddenly Dick laughed again, added to his remark “—abandon it for another one,” and got up from the table.
“But Dick, sit down. I want to know—”
“I’ll tell you some time. Good night, Abe. Good night, Mary.”
“Good night, dear Dick.” Mary smiled as if she were going to be perfectly happy sitting there on the almost deserted boat. She was a brave, hopeful woman and she was following her husband somewhere, changing herself to this kind of person or that, without being able to lead him a step out of his path, and sometimes realizing with discouragement how deep in him the guarded secret of her direction lay. And yet an air of luck clung about her, as if she were a sort of token. . . .
XV
“What is it you are giving up?” demanded Rosemary, facing Dick earnestly in the taxi.
“Nothing of importance.”
“Are you a scientist?”
“I’m a doctor of medicine.”
“Oh-h!” she smiled delightedly. “My father was a doctor too. Then why don’t you—” she stopped.
“There’s no mystery. I didn’t disgrace myself at the height of my career, and hide away on the Riviera. I’m just not practising. You can’t tell, I’ll probably practise again some day.”
Rosemary put up her face quietly to be kissed. He looked at her for a moment as if he didn’t understand. Then holding her in the hollow of his arm he rubbed his cheek against her cheek’s softness, and then looked down at her for another long moment.
“Such a lovely child,” he said gravely.
She smiled up at him; her hands playing conventionally with the lapels of his coat. “I’m in love with you and Nicole. Actually that’s my secret—I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are. Honestly—I love you and Nicole—I do.”
—So many times he had heard this—even the formula was the same.
Suddenly she came toward him, her youth vanishing as she passed inside the focus of his eyes and he had kissed her breathlessly as if she were any age at all. Then she lay back against his arm and sighed.
“I’ve decided to give you up,” she said.
Dick started—had he said anything to imply that she possessed any part of him?
“But that’s very mean,” he managed to say lightly, “just when I was getting interested.”
“I’ve loved you so—” As if it had been for years. She was weeping a little now. “I’ve loved you so-o-o.”
Then he should have laughed, but he heard himself saying, “Not only are you beautiful but you are somehow on the grand scale. Everything you do, like pretending to be in love or pretending to be shy gets across.”
In the dark cave of the taxi, fragrant with the perfume Rosemary had bought with Nicole, she came close again, clinging to him. He kissed her without enjoying it. He knew that there was passion there, but there was no shadow of it in her eyes or on her mouth; there was a faint spray of champagne on her breath. She clung nearer desperately and once more he kissed her and was chilled by the innocence of her kiss, by the glance that at the moment of contact looked beyond him out into the darkness of the night, the darkness of the world. She did not know yet that splendor is something in the heart; at the moment when she realized that and melted into the passion of the universe he could take her without question or regret.
Her room in the hotel was diagonally across from theirs and nearer the elevator. When they reached the door she said suddenly:
“I know you don’t love me—I don’t expect it. But you said I should have told you about my birthday. Well, I did, and now for my birthday present I want you to come into my room a minute while I tell you something. Just one minute.”
They went in and he closed the door, and Rosemary stood close to him, not touching him. The night had drawn the color from her face—she was pale as pale now, she was a white carnation left after a dance.
“When you smile—” He had recovered his paternal attitude, perhaps because of Nicole’s silent proximity, “I always think I’ll see a gap where you’ve lost some baby teeth.”
But he was too late—she came close up against him with a forlorn whisper.
“Take me.”
“Take you where?”
Astonishment froze him rigid.
“Go on,” she whispered. “Oh, please go on, whatever they do. I don’t care if I don’t like it—I never expected to—I’ve always hated to think about it but now I don’t. I want you to.”
She was astonished at herself—she had never imagined she could talk like that. She was calling on things she had read, seen, dreamed through a decade of convent hours. Suddenly she knew too that it was one of her greatest rôles and she flung herself into it more passionately.
“This is not as it should be,” Dick deliberated. “Isn’t it just the champagne? Let’s more or less forget it.”
“Oh, no, NOW. I want you to do it now, take me, show me, I’m absolutely yours and I want to be.”
“For one thing, have you thought how much it would hurt Nicole?”
“She won’t know—this won’t have anything to do with her.”
He continued kindly.
“Then there’s the fact that I love Nicole.”