Nicole had chosen this part of the wall on which to sit, because the cliff shaded to a slanting meadow with a cultivated vegetable garden. Through a cluster of boughs she saw two men carrying rakes and spades and talking in a counterpoint of Niçoise and Provençal. Attracted by their words and gestures she caught the sense:
“I laid her down here.”
“I took her behind the vines there.”
“She doesn’t care—neither does he. It was that sacred dog. Well, I laid her down here—”
“You got the rake?”
“You got it yourself, you clown.”
“Well, I don’t care where you laid her down. Until that night I never even felt a woman’s breast against my chest since I married— twelve years ago. And now you tell me—”
“But listen about the dog—”
Nicole watched them through the boughs; it seemed all right what they were saying—one thing was good for one person, another for another. Yet it was a man’s world she had overheard; going back to the house she became doubtful again.
Dick and Tommy were on the terrace. She walked through them and into the house, brought out a sketch pad and began a head of Tommy.
“Hands never idle—distaff flying,” Dick said lightly. How could he talk so trivially with the blood still drained down from his cheeks so that the auburn lather of beard showed red as his eyes? She turned to Tommy saying:
“I can always do something. I used to have a nice active little Polynesian ape and juggle him around for hours till people began to make the most dismal rough jokes—”
She kept her eyes resolutely away from Dick. Presently he excused himself and went inside—she saw him pour himself two glasses of water, and she hardened further.
“Nicole—” Tommy began but interrupted himself to clear the harshness from his throat.
“I’m going to get you some special camphor rub,” she suggested. “It’s American—Dick believes in it. I’ll be just a minute.”
“I must go really.”
Dick came out and sat down. “Believes in what?” When she returned with the jar neither of the men had moved, though she gathered they had had some sort of excited conversation about nothing.
The chauffeur was at the door, with a bag containing Tommy’s clothes of the night before. The sight of Tommy in clothes borrowed from Dick moved her sadly, falsely, as though Tommy were not able to afford such clothes.
“When you get to the hotel rub this into your throat and chest and then inhale it,” she said.
“Say, there,” Dick murmured as Tommy went down the steps, “don’t give Tommy the whole jar—it has to be ordered from Paris—it’s out of stock down here.”
Tommy came back within hearing and the three of them stood in the sunshine, Tommy squarely before the car so that it seemed by leaning forward he would tip it upon his back.
Nicole stepped down to the path.
“Now catch it,” she advised him. “It’s extremely rare.”
She heard Dick grow silent at her side; she took a step off from him and waved as the car drove off with Tommy and the special camphor rub. Then she turned to take her own medicine.
“There was no necessity for that gesture,” Dick said. “There are four of us here—and for years whenever there’s a cough—”
They looked at each other.
“We can always get another jar—” then she lost her nerve and presently followed him upstairs where he lay down on his own bed and said nothing.
“Do you want lunch to be brought up to you?” she asked.
He nodded and continued to lie quiescent, staring at the ceiling. Doubtfully she went to give the order. Upstairs again she looked into his room—the blue eyes, like searchlights, played on a dark sky. She stood a minute in the doorway, aware of the sin she had committed against him, half afraid to come in. . . . She put out her hand as if to rub his head, but he turned away like a suspicious animal. Nicole could stand the situation no longer; in a kitchen-maid’s panic she ran downstairs, afraid of what the stricken man above would feed on while she must still continue her dry suckling at his lean chest.
In a week Nicole forgot her flash about Tommy—she had not much memory for people and forgot them easily. But in the first hot blast of June she heard he was in Nice. He wrote a little note to them both—and she opened it under the parasol, together with other mail they had brought from the house. After reading it she tossed it over to Dick, and in exchange he threw a telegram into the lap of her beach pajamas:
Dears will be at Gausses to-morrow unfortunately without mother am counting on seeing you.
“I’ll be glad to see her,” said Nicole, grimly.
VII
But she went to the beach with Dick next morning with a renewal of her apprehension that Dick was contriving at some desperate solution. Since the evening on Golding’s yacht she had sensed what was going on. So delicately balanced was she between an old foothold that had always guaranteed her security, and the imminence of a leap from which she must alight changed in the very chemistry of blood and muscle, that she did not dare bring the matter into the true forefront of consciousness. The figures of Dick and herself, mutating, undefined, appeared as spooks caught up into a fantastic dance. For months every word had seemed to have an overtone of some other meaning, soon to be resolved under circumstances that Dick would determine. Though this state of mind was perhaps more hopeful,—the long years of sheer being had had an enlivening effect on the parts of her nature that early illness had killed, that Dick had not reached—through no fault of his but simply because no one nature can extend entirely inside another—it was still disquieting. The most unhappy aspect of their relations was Dick’s growing indifference, at present personified by too much drink; Nicole did not know whether she was to be crushed or spared— Dick’s voice, throbbing with insincerity, confused the issue; she couldn’t guess how he was going to behave next upon the tortuously slow unrolling of the carpet, nor what would happen at the end, at the moment of the leap.
For what might occur thereafter she had no anxiety—she suspected that that would be the lifting of a burden, an unblinding of eyes. Nicole had been designed for change, for flight, with money as fins and wings. The new state of things would be no more than if a racing chassis, concealed for years under the body of a family limousine, should be stripped to its original self. Nicole could feel the fresh breeze already—the wrench it was she feared, and the dark manner of its coming.