XX

When Dick got out of the elevator he followed a tortuous corridor and turned at length toward a distant voice outside a lighted door. Rosemary was in black pajamas; a luncheon table was still in the room; she was having coffee.

“You’re still beautiful,” he said. “A little more beautiful than ever.”

“Do vou want coffee, youngster?”

“I’m sorry I was so unpresentable this morning.”

“You didn’t look well – you all right now? Want coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

“You’re fine again, I was scared this morning. Mother’s coming over next month, if the company stays. She always asks me if I’ve seen you over here, as if she thought we were living next door. Mother always liked you – she always felt you were some one I ought to know.”

“Well, I’m glad she still thinks of me.”

“Oh, she does,” Rosemary reassured him. “A very great deal.”

“I’ve seen you here and there in pictures,” said Dick. “Once I had ’Daddy’s Girl’ run off just for myself!”

“I have a good part in this one if it isn’t cut.”

She crossed behind him, touching his shoulder as she passed. She phoned for the table to be taken away and settled in a big chair.

“I was just a little girl when I met you, Dick. Now I’m a woman.”

“I want to hear everything about you.”

“How is Nicole – and Lanier and Topsy?”

“They’re fine. They often speak of you —”

The phone rang. While she answered it Dick examined two novels – one by Edna Ferber, one by Albert McKisco. The waiter came for the table; bereft of its presence Rosemary seemed more alone in her black pajamas.

“…I have a caller… No, not very well. I’ve got to go to the costumer’s for a long fitting… No, not now…”

As though with the disappearance of the table she felt released, Rosemary smiled at Dick – that smile as if they two together had managed to get rid of all the trouble in the world and were now at peace in their own heaven…

“That’s done,” she said. “Do you realize I’ve spent the last hour getting ready for you?”

But again the phone called her. Dick got up to change his hat from the bed to the luggage stand, and in alarm Rosemary put her hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. “You’re not going!”

“No.”

When the communication was over he tried to drag the afternoon together saying: “I expect some nourishment from people now.”

“Me too,” Rosemary agreed. “The man that just phoned me once knew a second cousin of mine. Imagine calling anybody up for a reason like that!”

Now she lowered the lights for love. Why else should she want to shut off his view of her? He sent his words to her like letters, as though they left him some time before they reached her.

“Hard to sit here and be close to you, and not kiss you.” Then they kissed passionately in the centre of the floor. She pressed against him, and went back to her chair.

It could not go on being merely pleasant in the room. Forward or backward; when the phone rang once more he strolled into the bedchamber and lay down on her bed, opening Albert McKisco’s novel. Presently Rosemary came in and sat beside him.

“You have the longest eyelashes,” she remarked.

“We are now back at the Junior Prom. Among those present are Miss Rosemary Hoyt, the eyelash fancier —”

She kissed him and he pulled her down so that they lay side by side, and then they kissed till they were both breathless. Her breathing was young and eager and exciting. Her lips were faintly chapped but soft in the corners.

When they were still limbs and feet and clothes, struggles of his arms and back, and her throat and breasts, she whispered, “No, not now – those things are rhythmic.”

Disciplined he crushed his passion into a corner of his mind, but bearing up her fragility on his arms until she was poised half a foot above him, he said lightly:

“Darling – that doesn’t matter.”

Her face had changed with his looking up at it; there was the eternal moonlight in it.

“That would be poetic justice if it should be you,” she said. She twisted away from him, walked to the mirror, and boxed her disarranged hair with her hands. Presently she drew a chair close to the bed and stroked his cheek.

“Tell me the truth about you,” he demanded.

“I always have.”

“In a way – but nothing hangs together.”

They both laughed but he pursued.

“Are you actually a virgin?”

“No-o-o!” she sang. “I’ve slept with six hundred and forty men – if that’s the answer you want.”

“It’s none of my business.”

“Do you want me for a case in psychology?”

“Looking at you as a perfectly normal girl of twenty-two, living in the year nineteen twenty-eight, I guess you’ve taken a few shots at love.”

“It’s all been – abortive,” she said.

Dick couldn’t believe her. He could not decide whether she was deliberately building a barrier between them or whether this was intended to make an eventual surrender more significant.

“Let’s go walk in the Pincio,” he suggested.

He shook himself straight in his clothes and smoothed his hair. A moment had come and somehow passed. For three years Dick had been the ideal by which Rosemary measured other men and inevitably his stature had increased to heroic size. She did not want him to be like other men, yet here were the same exigent demands, as if he wanted to take some of herself away, carry it off in his pocket.

Walking on the greensward between cherubs and philosophers, fauns and falling water, she took his arm snugly, settling into it with a series of little readjustments, as if she wanted it to be right because it was going to be there forever. She plucked a twig and broke it, but she found no spring in it. Suddenly seeing what she wanted in Dick’s face she took his gloved hand and kissed it. Then she cavorted childishly for him until he smiled and she laughed and they began having a good time.

“I can’t go out with you to-night, darling, because I promised some people a long time ago. But if you’ll get up early I’ll take you out to the set tomorrow.”

He dined alone at the hotel, went to bed early, and met Rosemary in the lobby at half-past six. Beside him in the car she glowed away fresh and new in the morning sunshine. They went out through the Porta San Sebastiano and along the Appian Way until they came to the huge set of the forum, larger than the forum itself. Rosemary turned him over to a man who led him about the great props; the arches and tiers of seats and the sanded arena. She was working on a stage which represented a guard-room for Christian prisoners, and presently they went there and watched Nico-tera, one of many hopeful Valentinos, strut and pose before a dozen female “captives”, their eyes melancholy and startling with mascara.

Rosemary appeared in a knee-length tunic.

“Watch this,” she whispered to Dick. “I want your opinion. Everybody that’s seen the rushes says —”

“What are the rushes?”

“When they run off what they took the day before. They say it’s the first thing I’ve had sex appeal in.”

“I don’t notice it,”

“You wouldn’t! But I have.”

Nicotera in his leopard skin talked attentively to Rosemary while the electrician discussed something with the director, meanwhile leaning on him. Finally the director pushed his hand off roughly and wiped a sweating forehead, and Dick’s guide remarked: “He’s on the hop again, and how!”

“Who?” asked Dick, but before the man could answer the director walked swiftly over to them.

“Who’s on the hop – you’re on the hop yourself.” He spoke vehemently to Dick, as if to a jury. “When he’s on the hop he always thinks everybody else is, and how!” He glared at the guide a moment longer, then he clapped his hands: “All right – everybody on the set.”

It was like visiting a great turbulent family. An actress approached Dick and talked to him for five minutes under the impression that he was an actor recently arrived from London. Discovering her mistake she scuttled away in panic. The majority of the company felt either sharply superior or sharply inferior to the world outside, but the former feeling prevailed. They were people of bravery and industry; they were risen to a position of prominence in a nation that for a decade had wanted only to be entertained.

The session ended as the light grew misty – a fine light for painters, but, for the camera, not to be compared with the clear California air. Nico-tera followed Rosemary to the car and whispered something to her – she looked at him without smiling as she said good-by.

Dick and Rosemary had luncheon at the Castelli dei Caesari, a splendid restaurant in a high-terraced villa overlooking the ruined forum of an undetermined period of the decadence. Rosemary took a cocktail and a little wine, and Dick took enough so that his feeling of dissatisfaction left him. Afterward they drove back to the hotel, all flushed and happy, in a sort of exalted quiet. She wanted to be taken and she was, and what had begun with a childish infatuation on a beach was accomplished at last.

XXI

Rosemary had another dinner date, a birthday party for a member of the company. Dick ran into Collis Clay in the lobby, but he wanted to dine alone, and pretended an engagement at the Excelsior. He drank a cocktail with Collis and his vague dissatisfaction crystallized as impatience – he no longer had an excuse for playing truant to the clinic. This was less an infatuation than a romantic memory. Nicole was his girl – too often he was sick at heart about her, yet she was his girl. Time with Rosemary was self-indulgence – time with Collis was nothing plus nothing.

In the doorway of the Excelsior he ran into Baby Warren. Her large beautiful eyes, looking precisely like marbles, stared at him with surprise and curiosity. “I thought you were in America, Dick! Is Nicole with you?”

“I came back by way of Naples.”

The black band on his arm reminded her to say: “I’m so sorry to hear of your trouble.”

Inevitably they dined together.

“Tell me about everything,” she demanded.

Dick gave her a version of the facts, and Baby frowned. She found it necessary to blame someone for the catastrophe in her sister’s life.

“Do you think Doctor Dohmler took the right course with her from the first?”

“There’s not much variety in treatment any more – of course you try to find the right personality to handle a particular case.”

“Dick, I don’t pretend to advise you or to know much about it but don’t you think a change might be good for her – to get out of that atmosphere of sickness and live in the world like other people?”

“But you were keen for the clinic,” he reminded her. “You told me you’d never feel really safe about her —”

“That was when you were leading that hermit’s life on the Riviera, up on a hill way off from anybody. I didn’t mean to go back to that life. I meant, for instance, London. The English are the best-balanced race in the world.”

“They are not,” he disagreed.

“They are. I know them, you see. I meant it might be nice for you to take a house in London for the spring season – I know a dove of a house in Talbot Square you could get, furnished. I mean, living with sane, well-balanced English people.”

She would have gone on to tell him all the old propaganda stories of 1914 if he had not laughed and said:

“I’ve been reading a book by Michael Arlen and if that’s —”

She ruined Michael Arlen with a wave of her salad spoon.

“He only writes about degenerates. I mean the worthwhile English.”

As she thus dismissed her friends they were replaced in Dick’s mind only by a picture of the alien, unresponsive faces that peopled the small hotels of Europe.

“Of course it’s none of my business,” Baby repeated, as apreliminary to a further plunge, “but to leave her alone in an atmosphere like that —”

“I went to America because my father died.”

“I understand that, I told you how sorry I was.” She fiddled with the glass grapes on her necklace. “But there’s so much money now. Plenty for everything, and it ought to be used to get Nicole well.”

“For one thing I can’t see myself in London.”

“Why not? I should think you could work there as well as anywhere else.”

He sat back and looked at her. If she had ever suspected the rotted old truth, the real reason for Nicole’s illness, she had certainly determined to deny it to herself, shoving it back in a dusty closet like one of the paintings she bought by mistake.

They continued the conversation in the Ulpia, where Collis Clay came over to their table and sat down, and a gifted guitar player thrummed and rumbled “Suona Fanfara Mia” in the cellar piled with wine casks.

“It’s possible that I was the wrong person for Nicole,” Dick said. “Still she would probably have married someone of my type, someone she thought she could rely on – indefinitely.”

“You think she’d be happier with somebody else?” Baby thought aloud suddenly. “Of course it could be arranged.”

Only as she saw Dick bend forward with helpless laughter did she realize the preposterousness of her remark.

“Oh, you understand,” she assured him. “Don’t think for a moment that we’re not grateful for all you’ve done. And we know you’ve had a hard time —”

“For God’s sake,” he protested. “If I didn’t love Nicole it might be different.”

“But you do love Nicole?” she demanded in alarm.

Collis was catching up with the conversation now and Dick switched it quickly: “Suppose we talk about something else – about you, for instance. Why don’t you get married? We heard you were engaged to Lord Paley, the cousin of the —”

“Oh, no.” She became coy and elusive. “That was last year.”

“Why don’t you marry?” Dick insisted stubbornly.

“I don’t know. One of the men I loved was killed in the war, and the other one threw me over.”

“Tell me about it. Tell me about your private life, Baby, and your opinions. You never do – we always talk about Nicole.”

“Both of them were Englishmen. I don’t think there’s any higher type in the world than a first-rate Englishman, do you? If there is I haven’t met him. This man – oh, it’s a long story. I hate long stories, don’t you?”

“And how!” said Collis.

“Why, no – I like them if they’re good.”

“That’s something you do so well, Dick. You can keep a party moving by just a little sentence or a saying here and there. I think that’s a wonderful talent.”

“It’s a trick,” he said gently. That made three of her opinions he disagreed with.

“Of course I like formality – I like things to be just so, and on the grand scale. I know you probably don’t but you must admit it’s a sign of solidity in me.”

Dick did not even bother to dissent from this.

“Of course I know people say, Baby Warren is racing around over Europe, chasing one novelty after another, and missing the best things in life, but I think on the contrary that I’m one of the few people who really go after the best things. I’ve known the most interesting people of my time.” Her voice blurred with the tinny drumming of another guitar number, but she called over it, “I’ve made very few big mistakes —”

“– Only the very big ones, Baby.”

She had caught something facetious in his eye and she changed the subject. It seemed impossible for them to hold anything in common. But he admired something in her, and he deposited her at the Excelsior with a series of compliments that left her shimmering.

* * *

Rosemary insisted on treating Dick to lunch next day. They went to a little trattoria kept by an Italian who had worked in America, and ate ham and eggs and waffles. Afterward, they went to the hotel. Dick’s discovery that he was not in love with her, nor she with him, had added to rather than diminished his passion for her. Now that he knew he would not enter further into her life, she became the strange woman for him. He supposed many men meant no more than that when they said they were in love – not a wild submergence of soul, a dipping of all colors into an obscuring dye, such as his love for Nicole had been. Certain thoughts about Nicole, that she should die, sink into mental darkness, love another man, made him physically sick.

Nicotera was in Rosemary’s sitting-room, chattering about a professional matter. When Rosemary gave him his cue to go, he left with humorous protests and a rather insolent wink at Dick. As usual the phone clamored and Rosemary was engaged at it for ten minutes, to Dick’s increasing impatience.

“Let’s go up to my room,” he suggested, and she agreed.

She lay across his knees on a big sofa; he ran his fingers through the lovely forelocks of her hair.

“Let me be curious about you again?” he asked.

“What do you want to know?”

“About men. I’m curious, not to say prurient.”

“You mean how long after I met you?”

“Or before.”

“Oh, no.”

She was shocked. “There was nothing before. You were the first man I cared about. You’re still the only man I really care about.” She considered. “It was about a year, I think.”

“Who was it?”

“Oh, a man.”

He closed in on her evasion.

“I’ll bet I can tell you about it: the first affair was unsatisfactory and after that there was a long gap. The second was better, but you hadn’t been in love with the man in the first place. The third was all right —”

Torturing himself he ran on. “Then you had one real affair that fell of its own weight, and by that time you were getting afraid that you wouldn’t have anything to give to the man you finally loved.” He felt increasingly Victorian. “Afterwards there were half a dozen just episodic affairs, right up to the present. Is that close?”

She laughed between amusement and tears.

“It’s about as wrong as it could be,” she said, to Dick’s relief. “But some day I’m going to find somebody and love him and love him and never let him go.”

Now his phone rang and Dick recognized Nicotera’s voice, asking for Rosemary. He put his palm over the transmitter.

“Do you want to talk to him?”

She went to the phone and jabbered in a rapid Italian Dick could not understand.

“This telephoning takes time,” he said. “It’s after four and I have an engagement at five. You better go play with Signor Nicotera.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Then I think that while I’m here you ought to count him out.”

“It’s difficult.” She was suddenly crying. “Dick, I do love you, never anybody like you. But what have you got for me?”

“What has Nicotera got for anybody?”

“That’s different.”

– Because youth called to youth.

“He’s a spic!” he said. He was frantic with jealousy, he didn’t want to be hurt again.

“He’s only a baby,” she said, sniffling. “You know I’m yours first.”

In reaction he put his arms about her but she relaxed wearily backward; he held her like that for a moment as in the end of an adagio, her eyes closed, her hair falling straight back like that of a girl drowned.

“Dick, let me go. I never felt so mixed up in my life.”

He was a gruff red bird and instinctively she drew away from him as his unjustified jealousy began to snow over the qualities of consideration and understanding with which she felt at home.

“I want to know the truth,” he said.

“Yes, then. We’re a lot together, he wants to marry me, but I don’t want to. What of it? What do you expect me to do? You never asked me to marry you. Do you want me to play around forever with half-wits like Collis Clay?”

“You were with Nicotera last night?”

“That’s none of your business,” she sobbed. “Excuse me, Dick, it is your business. You and Mother are the only two people in the world I care about.”

“How about Nicotera?”

“How do I know?”

She had achieved the elusiveness that gives hidden significance to the least significant remarks.

“Is it like you felt toward me in Paris?”

“I feel comfortable and happy when I’m with you. In Paris it was different. But you never know how you once felt. Do you?”

He got up and began collecting his evening clothes – if he had to bring all the bitterness and hatred of the world into his heart, he was not going to be in love with her again.

“I don’t care about Nicotera!” she declared. “But I’ve got to go to Livorno with the company to-morrow. Oh, why did this have to happen?” There was a new flood of tears. “It’s such a shame. Why did you come here? Why couldn’t we just have the memory anyhow? I feel as if I’d quarrelled with Mother.”

As he began to dress, she got up and went to the door.

“I won’t go to the party to-night.” It was her last effort. “I’ll stay with you. I don’t want to go anyhow.”

The tide began to flow again, but he retreated from it.

“I’ll be in my room,” she said. “Good-by, Dick.”

“Good-by.”

“Oh, such a shame, such a shame. Oh, such a shame. What’s it all about anyhow?”

“I’ve wondered for a long time.”

“But why bring it to me?”

“I guess I’m the Black Death,” he said slowly. “I don’t seem to bring people happiness any more.”