Tender is the Night

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Book 1

I

On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel. Palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach. Lately it has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people; a decade ago it was almost deserted after its English clientele went north in April. Now, many bungalows are near it, but when this story begins only a dozen old villas rotted like water lilies among the pines between Gausse’s Hôtel des Étrangers and Cannes, five miles away.

A mile from the sea is an isolated railroad stop, where one June morning in 1925 a woman and her daughter arrived and went down to Gausse’s Hotel. The mother’s face was of a fading prettiness. However, one’s eye moved on quickly to her daughter, who had magic in her pink cheeks lit to a lovely flame. Her fine forehead sloped gently up to where her hair burst into waves of ash blonde and gold. Her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet, and shining. Her body was on the last edge of childhood—she was almost eighteen but the dew was still on her.

The mother said:

“Something tells me we’re not going to like this place.”

“I want to go home anyhow,” the girl answered.

“We’ll stay three days and then go home. I’ll wire right away for steamer tickets.”

At the hotel the girl made the reservation in idiomatic French, like something remembered. When they got their room on the ground floor she walked through the French windows and out a few steps onto the stone veranda that ran around the hotel. When she walked she carried herself like a ballet dancer. Fifty yards away the Mediterranean yielded up its pigments, moment by moment, to the brutal sunshine.

Of all the region only the beach stirred with activity. Three British nannies sat knitting. Closer to the sea a dozen persons were sitting under striped umbrellas, while their dozen children pursued fish in water or lay naked in the sun.

Rosemary came onto the beach, took off her bathrobe and dashed into the sea. She floated face down for a few yards and finding it shallow walked forward. When it was about breast high, she looked back toward shore: a bald man with a hairy chest in a monocle and a pair of tights was looking at her attentively. As Rosemary saw it, the man poured himself a glass of something from a bottle in his hand.

Rosemary laid her face on the water and swam to the raft. Reaching it she was out of breath, but a tanned woman with very white teeth looked down at her, and Rosemary, suddenly realizing the whiteness of her own body, turned on her back and swam toward shore. The hairy man holding the bottle spoke to her as she came out with a slow Oxford drawl. “You’re a fine swimmer.”

Rosemary looked for a place to sit. Obviously each family possessed the strip of sand immediately in front of its umbrella; besides there was much visiting and talking—the atmosphere of a community which did not welcome a stranger. Farther up sat a group with bodies as white as her own. They lay under small hand-parasols instead of beach umbrellas and had obviously spent less time at the place. Between the dark people and the light, Rosemary found room and spread out her peignoir on the sand.

Lying so, she first heard their voices. A white-haired woman in full evening dress, obviously worn since the previous evening, with a tiara on her head was saying something in a shrill scornful voice. Rosemary, feeling a vague antipathy to her and her companions, turned away.

Nearest her, on the other side, a young woman lay under a roof of umbrellas making out a list of things from a book open on the sand. She had a string of creamy pearls round her neck. Her face was hard and lovely. Her eyes met Rosemary’s but did not see her. Beyond her was a fine man in a jockey cap and red tights; then the woman Rosemary had seen on the raft; then a man with a long face and a golden, leonine head, with blue tights and no hat, talking very seriously to a young man in black tights. She thought they were mostly Americans, but something made them unlike the Americans she had known before.

The man of the monocle and bottle spoke suddenly out of the sky above Rosemary.

“My name is Campion. Here is a lady who says she saw you in Sorrento last week and knows who you are and would so like to meet you.”

Looking around with annoyance Rosemary saw the untanned people were waiting. She got up and went over to them.

“Mrs. Abrams—Mrs. McKisco—Mr. McKisco—Mr. Dumphry—”

“We know who you are,” spoke up the woman in evening dress. “You’re Rosemary Hoyt and I recognized you in Sorrento and asked the hotel clerk and we all think you’re perfectly marvellous and we want to know why you’re not back in America making another marvellous moving picture.”

The woman continued:

“We wanted to warn you about getting burned the first day.”

Rosemary looked at them all uncomfortably: Mrs. McKisco, a pretty young woman with an intensive manner, Mr. Dumphry, a young man, stout Mrs. Abrams, wishing her mother had come down here with her. She did not like these people, especially in comparison with those who had interested her at the other end of the beach. Her mother’s social gift got them out of unwelcome situations swiftly and firmly. But Rosemary had been a celebrity for only six months, and sometimes the French manners of her early childhood and the democratic manners of America made a certain confusion and let her in just such uncomfortable situations.

Mr. McKisco, freckle-and-red man of thirty turned to Rosemary and demanded aggressively:

“Been here long?”

“Only a day.”

“Oh.”

“Going to stay all summer?” asked Mrs. McKisco.

Without waiting for an answer Mr. McKisco got up to go in the water, followed by his wife, and Rosemary followed, too.

“Shall we go to the raft?” Mr. McKisco asked.

The man with the leonine head lay stretched out upon the raft and he greeted them as they reached it.

He had one of the saddest faces Rosemary had ever seen, the high cheekbones of an Indian, a long upper lip, and enormous deep-set dark golden eyes. In a minute he had dived into the water and swam toward shore. Rosemary and Mrs. McKisco watched him.

“He’s a good swimmer,” Rosemary said.

Mrs. McKisco’s answer came with surprising violence.

“Well, he’s a rotten musician.” She turned to her husband, who after two unsuccessful attempts had managed to climb on the raft. “I was just saying that Abe North may be a good swimmer but he’s a rotten musician.”

“Yes,” agreed McKisco.

The woman of the pearls had joined her two children in the water, and now Abe North came up under one of them like a volcanic island, raising him on his shoulders. The child yelled with fear and delight and the woman watched without a smile.

“Is that his wife?” Rosemary asked.

“No, that’s Mrs. Diver. They’re not at the hotel. Have you been abroad before?”

“Yes—I went to school in Paris.”

“Oh! Well then you probably know that if you want to enjoy yourself here you have to know some real French families. What do these people get out of it?” She pointed toward shore. “They just stick around with each other. Of course, we had letters of introduction and met all the best French artists and writers in Paris. That made it very nice.”

“I should think so.”

“My husband is finishing his first novel, you see.”

Rosemary said: “Oh, he is?” She was not thinking anything special, except wondering whether her mother had got to sleep in this heat.

“It’s on the idea of Ulysses,” continued Mrs. McKisco.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Violet, don’t go telling everybody the idea,” protested McKisco. “I don’t want it to get all around before the book’s published.”

Rosemary swam back to the shore, where she threw her peignoir over her already sore shoulders and lay down again in the sun.

Campion walked near her, stood a few feet away and Rosemary closed her eyes, pretending to be asleep; then she really fell asleep.

She awoke to find the beach deserted save for the man in the jockey cap, who was folding a last umbrella. He walked nearer and said:

“I was going to wake you before I left. It’s not good to get too burned right away.”

“Thank you.” Rosemary looked down at her crimson legs.

“Heavens!”

He looked at her and for a moment she lived in the bright blue worlds of his eyes, eagerly and confidently. She laughed cheerfully, inviting him to talk, but Dick Diver was already carrying a tent and a beach umbrella up to a waiting car, so she went into the water.

II

It was almost two when they went into the dining-room. Two waiters brought them luncheon.

“I fell in love on the beach,” said Rosemary.

“Who with?”

“First with a whole lot of people who looked nice. Then with one man.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“Just a little. Very handsome. With reddish hair. He’s married though—it’s usually the way.”

Her mother was her best friend and had put every effort into guiding her, not so rare a thing in the theatrical profession. Unlike other mothers, Mrs. Elsie Speers was not recompensing herself for a defeat of her own. She had been happily married and twice widowed. One of her husbands had been a cavalry officer and one an army doctor, and they both left something to her that she tried to keep for Rosemary. She had made her daughter hard and she had cultivated an idealism in her.

“Then you like it here?” she asked.

“It might be fun if we knew those people. There were some other people, but they weren’t nice. They recognized me—it seems everybody’s seen ‘Daddy’s Girl.’”

Mrs. Speers said: “That reminds me, when are you going to see Earl Brady?”

“I thought we might go this afternoon —if you’re rested.”

“I want you to go alone. It’s only a short way.”

“All right, Mother.”

“Let’s only stay three days, Mother,” Rosemary said when they were back in their rooms.

“How about the man you fell in love with on the beach?”

“I don’t love anybody but you, Mother, darling.”

Her shoulders were too burned to swim with the next day, so she and her mother hired a car and drove along the Riviera, the delta of many rivers. The chauffeur was a guide, and the well-known names—Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo—whispered of old kings who came here to dine or die. Most of all, there was the scent of the Russians along the coast—their closed book shops and grocery stores. Ten years ago, when the season ended in April, the doors of the Orthodox Church were locked, and the sweet champagnes they favored were put away until their return. “We’ll be back next season,” they said, but they never came back any more.

It was pleasant to drive back to the hotel in the late afternoon, above a sea.

Back at the hotel, Rosemary listened to the music realizing that there was a party somewhere, and she thought of the nice people on the beach. She thought she might meet them in the morning, but they obviously formed a self-sufficient little group closed to a stranger. She decided in any case not to spend her last two mornings with the other ones.

The matter was solved for her. The McKiscos were not yet there and she had scarcely spread her peignoir when two men left the group and came down toward her.

“Good morning,” said Dick Diver. “Look—sunburn or no sunburn, why did you stay away yesterday? We worried about you. We wondered if you wouldn’t come over this morning.”

He seemed kind and charming—his voice promised that he would take care of her, and that a little later he would open up whole new worlds for her. He managed the introduction so that her name wasn’t mentioned and then let her know easily that everyone knew who she was but were respecting her private life.

Nicole Diver was about twenty-four, Rosemary guessed.

“Are you here for a long time?” Nicole asked. Her voice was low.

Suddenly Rosemary let the possibility enter her mind that they might stay another week.

“Not very long,” she answered. “We’ve been abroad a long time—we landed in Sicily in March and we’ve been slowly working our way north. I got pneumonia making a picture last January and I’ve been recuperating.”

“Mercy! How did that happen?”

“Well, it was from swimming. One day I happened to have the grippe and didn’t know it, and they were taking a scene where I dove into a canal in Venice. I had to dive and dive and dive all morning. Mother had a doctor right there, but it was no use—I got pneumonia.” She changed the subject before they could speak. “Do you like it here—this place?”

“They have to like it,” said Abe North slowly. “They invented it.” He turned his noble head slowly so that his eyes rested with tenderness and affection on the two Divers.

“Oh, did you?”

“This is only the second season that the hotel’s been open in summer,” Nicole explained. “We persuaded Gausse to keep on a cook and a garçon and a chasseur—it paid its way and this year it’s doing even better.”

“But you’re not in the hotel.”

“We built a house, up at Tarmes.”

“The theory is,” said Dick, arranging an umbrella over Rosemary’s shoulder, “that all the northern places, like Deauville, were picked out by Russians and English who don’t mind the cold, while half of us Americans come from tropical climates—that’s why we’re beginning to come here.”

Abe North and Barban, the Frenchman, were talking about Morocco. Barban was a few years younger than Diver or North. He was tall and his body was hard and force was seen in his shoulders and upper arms. At first glance he seemed handsome—but there was a faint disgust always in his face. Rosemary examined their beach things—four large umbrellas, a portable bath house for dressing, new things that Rosemary had never seen, made after the War, and probably in the hands of the first of purchasers. She had guessed that they were fashionable people, but though her mother had brought her up to believe such people to be drones, she did not feel that way here.

She looked in turn at the three men. Actors and directors—those were the only men she had ever known, those and college boys, interested only in love at first sight, whom she had met at the Yale last fall.

These three were different. Barban was less civilized, more skeptical, his manners were formal. Abe North had humor that amused but puzzled her.

But Dick Diver—he was all complete there. Silently she admired him. His complexion was reddish, so was his short hair—a light growth of it rolled down his arms and hands. His eyes were of a bright, hard blue. His nose was somewhat pointed and there was never any doubt at whom he was looking or talking. His voice had some faint Irish melody in it, yet she felt hardness in him, self-control and self-discipline, her own virtues. Oh, she chose him, and Nicole, lifting her head, saw her choose him.

Toward noon the McKiscos, Mrs. Abrams, Mr. Dumphry, and Signor Campion came on the beach.

Mary North, the very tanned young woman whom Rosemary had met the first day on the raft, came in from swimming and said with a smile:

“Well, I HAVE felt there were too many people on the beach this summer,” Nicole admitted. “OUR beach that Dick made out of a pebble pile.”

“The day before you came, the married man, McKisco, and his wife were having words and she tossed some sand in his face. So he sat on top of her and rubbed her face in the sand. I wanted Dick to interfere,” Nicole said.

“I think,” said Dick Diver, “that I’ll go over and invite them to dinner.”

“No, you won’t,” Nicole told him quickly. “I’m not going to have MY nose rubbed in the sand. I’m a mean, hard woman,” she explained to Rosemary.

Rosemary thought she would not like to have Nicole for an enemy.

She stood with them as they took sherry and ate crackers. Dick Diver looked at her with cold blue eyes; his kind, strong mouth said thoughtfully:

“You’re the only girl I’ve seen for a long time that actually looked like something blooming.”

In her mother’s lap afterward Rosemary cried and cried.

“I love him, Mother. I’m desperately in love with him—I never knew I could feel that way about anybody. And he’s married and I like her too—it’s just hopeless. Oh, I love him so!”

“I’m curious to meet him.”

“She invited us to dinner Friday.”

“If you’re in love it ought to make you happy. You ought to laugh.”

Rosemary looked up and laughed. Her mother always had a great influence on her.