Tender is the Night
By F. Scott Fitzgerald () Published by Planet eBook. Visit the site to download free
eBooks of classic literature, books and novels.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-
Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
Already with thee! tender is the night...
... But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
—Ode to a Nightingale
TO
GERALD and SARA
MANY FÊTES Tender is the Night
Book Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
I
On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half
way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a
large, proud, rosecolored hotel. Deferential 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 bun-
galows cluster near it, but when this story begins only the
cupolas of a dozen old villas rotted like water lilies among
the massed pines between Gausse’s Hôtel des Étrangers and
Cannes, five miles away.
The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were
one. In the early morning the distant image of Cannes, the
pink and cream of old fortifications, the purple Alp that
bounded Italy, were cast across the water and lay quavering
in the ripples and rings sent up by sea-plants through the
clear shallows. Before eight a man came down to the beach
in a blue bathrobe and with much preliminary application
to his person of the chilly water, and much grunting and
loud breathing, floundered a minute in the sea. When he
had gone, beach and bay were quiet for an hour. Merchant-
men crawled westward on the horizon; bus boys shouted
in the hotel court; the dew dried upon the pines. In anoth-
er hour the horns of motors began to blow down from the Tender is the Night
winding road along the low range of the Maures, which sep-
arates the littoral from true Provençal France.
A mile from the sea, where pines give way to dusty pop-
lars, is an isolated railroad stop, whence one June morning
in 1925 a victoria brought a woman and her daughter down
to Gausse’s Hotel. The mother’s face was of a fading pret-
tiness that would soon be patted with broken veins; her
expression was both tranquil and aware in a pleasant way.
However, one’s eye moved on quickly to her daughter, who
had magic in her pink palms and her cheeks lit to a love-
ly flame, like the thrilling flush of children after their cold
baths in the evening. Her fine forehead sloped gently up to
where her hair, bordering it like an armorial shield, burst
into lovelocks and waves and curlicues of ash blonde and
gold. Her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet, and shining, the
color of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surface
from the strong young pump of her heart. Her body hovered
delicately on the last edge of childhood—she was almost
eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her.
As sea and sky appeared below them in a thin, hot line
the mother said:
‘Something tells me we’re not going to like this place.’
‘I want to go home anyhow,’ the girl answered.
They both spoke cheerfully but were obviously without
direction and bored by the fact—moreover, just any direc-
tion would not do. They wanted high excitement, not from
the necessity of stimulating jaded nerves but with the avid-
ity of prize-winning schoolchildren who deserved their
vacations. Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
‘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 but
rather flat French, like something remembered. When they
were installed on the ground floor she walked into the glare
of the French windows and out a few steps onto the stone
veranda that ran the length of the hotel. When she walked
she carried herself like a balletdancer, not slumped down
on her hips but held up in the small of her back. Out there
the hot light clipped close her shadow and she retreated—it
was too bright to see. Fifty yards away the Mediterranean
yielded up its pigments, moment by moment, to the brutal
sunshine; below the balustrade a faded Buick cooked on the
hotel drive.
Indeed, of all the region only the beach stirred with ac-
tivity. Three British nannies sat knitting the slow pattern of
Victorian England, the pattern of the forties, the sixties, and
the eighties, into sweaters and socks, to the tune of gossip as
formalized as incantation; closer to the sea a dozen persons
kept house under striped umbrellas, while their dozen chil-
dren pursued unintimidated fish through the shallows or
lay naked and glistening with cocoanut oil out in the sun.
As Rosemary came onto the beach a boy of twelve ran
past her and dashed into the sea with exultant cries. Feel-
ing the impactive scrutiny of strange faces, she took off her
bathrobe and followed. She floated face down for a few yards
and finding it shallow staggered to her feet and plodded for-
ward, dragging slim legs like weights against the resistance
of the water. When it was about breast high, she glanced Tender is the Night
back toward shore: a bald man in a monocle and a pair of
tights, his tufted chest thrown out, his brash navel sucked
in, was regarding her attentively. As Rosemary returned the
gaze the man dislodged the monocle, which went into hid-
ing amid the facetious whiskers of his chest, and poured
himself a glass of something from a bottle in his hand.
Rosemary laid her face on the water and swam a choppy
little fourbeat crawl out to the raft. The water reached up for
her, pulled her down tenderly out of the heat, seeped in her
hair and ran into the corners of her body. She turned round
and round in it, embracing it, wallowing in it. Reaching the
raft she was out of breath, but a tanned woman with very
white teeth looked down at her, and Rosemary, suddenly
conscious of the raw whiteness of her own body, turned on
her back and drifted toward shore. The hairy man holding
the bottle spoke to her as she came out.
‘I say—they have sharks out behind the raft.’ He was of
indeterminate nationality, but spoke English with a slow
Oxford drawl. ‘Yesterday they devoured two British sailors
from the flotte at Golfe Juan.’
‘Heavens!’ exclaimed Rosemary.
‘They come in for the refuse from the flotte.’
Glazing his eyes to indicate that he had only spoken in
order to warn her, he minced off two steps and poured him-
self another drink.
Not unpleasantly self-conscious, since there had been
a slight sway of attention toward her during this conver-
sation, Rosemary looked for a place to sit. Obviously each
family possessed the strip of sand immediately in front of its Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
umbrella; besides there was much visiting and talking back
and forth—the atmosphere of a community upon which it
would be presumptuous to intrude. Farther up, where the
beach was strewn with pebbles and dead sea-weed, sat a
group with flesh as white as her own. They lay under small
hand-parasols instead of beach umbrellas and were obvi-
ously less indigenous to the place. Between the dark people
and the light, Rosemary found room and spread out her pei-
gnoir on the sand.
Lying so, she first heard their voices and felt their feet
skirt her body and their shapes pass between the sun and
herself. The breath of an inquisitive dog blew warm and ner-
vous on her neck; she could feel her skin broiling a little in
the heat and hear the small exhausted wa-waa of the expir-
ing waves. Presently her ear distinguished individual voices
and she became aware that some one referred to scornfully
as ‘that North guy’ had kidnapped a waiter from a café in
Cannes last night in order to saw him in two. The sponsor of
the story was a white-haired woman in full evening dress,
obviously a relic of the previous evening, for a tiara still
clung to her head and a discouraged orchid expired from
her shoulder. Rosemary, forming a vague antipathy to her
and her companions, turned away.
Nearest her, on the other side, a young woman lay un-
der a roof of umbrellas making out a list of things from a
book open on the sand. Her bathing suit was pulled off her
shoulders and her back, a ruddy, orange brown, set off by a
string of creamy pearls, shone in the sun. Her face was hard
and lovely and pitiful. Her eyes met Rosemary’s but did not Tender is the Night
see her. Beyond her was a fine man in a jockey cap and red-
striped tights; then the woman Rosemary had seen on the
raft, and who looked back at her, seeing her; then a man
with a long face and a golden, leonine head, with blue tights
and no hat, talking very seriously to an unmistakably Latin
young man in black tights, both of them picking at little
pieces of seaweed in the sand. She thought they were mostly
Americans, but something made them unlike the Ameri-
cans she had known of late.
After a while she realized that the man in the jockey
cap was giving a quiet little performance for this group; he
moved gravely about with a rake, ostensibly removing grav-
el and meanwhile developing some esoteric burlesque held
in suspension by his grave face. Its faintest ramification had
become hilarious, until whatever he said released a burst of
laughter. Even those who, like herself, were too far away to
hear, sent out antennæ of attention until the only person on
the beach not caught up in it was the young woman with
the string of pearls. Perhaps from modesty of possession she
responded to each salvo of amusement by bending closer
over her list.
The man of the monocle and bottle spoke suddenly out
of the sky above Rosemary.
‘You are a ripping swimmer.’
She demurred.
‘Jolly good. 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.’
Glancing around with concealed annoyance Rosemary Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
saw the untanned people were waiting. Reluctantly 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 eve-
ning 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 pic-
ture.’
They made a superfluous gesture of moving over for her.
The woman who had recognized her was not a Jewess, de-
spite her name. She was one of those elderly ‘good sports’
preserved by an imperviousness to experience and a good
digestion into another generation.
‘We wanted to warn you about getting burned the first
day,’ she continued cheerily, ‘because YOUR skin is impor-
tant, but there seems to be so darn much formality on this
beach that we didn’t know whether you’d mind.’ Tender is the Night
II
‘We thought maybe you were in the plot,’ said Mrs.
McKisco. She was a shabby-eyed, pretty young woman with
a disheartening intensity. ‘We don’t know who’s in the plot
and who isn’t. One man my husband had been particularly
nice to turned out to be a chief character—practically the
assistant hero.’
‘The plot?’ inquired Rosemary, half understanding. ‘Is
there a plot?’
‘My dear, we don’t KNOW,’ said Mrs. Abrams, with a
convulsive, stout woman’s chuckle. ‘We’re not in it. We’re
the gallery.’
Mr. Dumphry, a tow-headed effeminate young man, re-
marked: ‘Mama Abrams is a plot in herself,’ and Campion
shook his monocle at him, saying: ‘Now, Royal, don’t be too
ghastly for words.’ Rosemary looked at them all uncom-
fortably, wishing her mother had come down here with her.
She did not like these people, especially in her immediate
comparison of them with those who had interested her at
the other end of the beach. Her mother’s modest but com-
pact 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
adolescence and the democratic manners of America, these
latter superimposed, made a certain confusion and let her Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
in for just such things.
Mr. McKisco, a scrawny, freckle-and-red man of thirty,
did not find the topic of the ‘plot’ amusing. He had been
staring at the sea— now after a swift glance at his wife he
turned to Rosemary and demanded aggressively:
‘Been here long?’
‘Only a day.’
‘Oh.’
Evidently feeling that the subject had been thoroughly
changed, he looked in turn at the others.
‘Going to stay all summer?’ asked Mrs. McKisco, inno-
cently. ‘If you do you can watch the plot unfold.’
‘For God’s sake, Violet, drop the subject!’ exploded her
husband. ‘Get a new joke, for God’s sake!’
Mrs. McKisco swayed toward Mrs. Abrams and breathed
audibly:
‘He’s nervous.’
‘I’m not nervous,’ disagreed McKisco. ‘It just happens
I’m not nervous at all.’
He was burning visibly—a grayish flush had spread over
his face, dissolving all his expressions into a vast ineffectu-
ality. Suddenly remotely conscious of his condition he got
up to go in the water, followed by his wife, and seizing the
opportunity Rosemary followed.
Mr. McKisco drew a long breath, flung himself into the
shallows and began a stiff-armed batting of the Mediter-
ranean, obviously intended to suggest a crawl—his breath
exhausted he arose and looked around with an expression
of surprise that he was still in sight of shore. Tender is the Night
‘I haven’t learned to breathe yet. I never quite understood
how they breathed.’ He looked at Rosemary inquiringly.
‘I think you breathe out under water,’ she explained. ‘And
every fourth beat you roll your head over for air.’
‘The breathing’s the hardest part for me. Shall we go to
the raft?’
The man with the leonine head lay stretched out upon
the raft, which tipped back and forth with the motion of the
water. As Mrs. McKisco reached for it a sudden tilt struck
her arm up roughly, whereupon the man started up and
pulled her on board.
‘I was afraid it hit you.’ His voice was slow and shy; he
had one of the saddest faces Rosemary had ever seen, the
high cheekbones of an Indian, a long upper lip, and enor-
mous deep-set dark golden eyes. He had spoken out of the
side of his mouth, as if he hoped his words would reach Mrs.
McKisco by a circuitous and unobtrusive route; in a minute
he had shoved off into the water and his long body lay mo-
tionless toward shore.
Rosemary and Mrs. McKisco watched him. When he
had exhausted his momentum he abruptly bent double, his
thin thighs rose above the surface, and he disappeared to-
tally, leaving scarcely a fleck of foam behind.
‘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, and having attained his balance was trying to
make some kind of compensatory flourish, achieving only Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
an extra stagger. ‘I was just saying that Abe North may be a
good swimmer but he’s a rotten musician.’
‘Yes,’ agreed McKisco, grudgingly. Obviously he had cre-
ated his wife’s world, and allowed her few liberties in it.
‘Antheil’s my man.’ Mrs. McKisco turned challengingly
to Rosemary, ‘Anthiel and Joyce. I don’t suppose you ever
hear much about those sort of people in Hollywood, but my
husband wrote the first criticism of Ulysses that ever ap-
peared in America.’
‘I wish I had a cigarette,’ said McKisco calmly. ‘That’s
more important to me just now.’
‘He’s got insides—don’t you think so, Albert?’
Her voice faded off suddenly. 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 with a lovely peace, with-
out a smile.
‘Is that his wife?’ Rosemary asked.
‘No, that’s Mrs. Diver. They’re not at the hotel.’ Her eyes,
photographic, did not move from the woman’s face. After a
moment she turned vehemently to Rosemary.
‘Have you been abroad before?’
‘Yes—I went to school in Paris.’
‘Oh! Well then you probably know that if you want to en-
joy yourself here the thing is to get to know some real French
families. What do these people get out of it?’ She pointed
her left shoulder toward shore. ‘They just stick around with
each other in little cliques. Of course, we had letters of in- Tender is the Night
troduction 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 any-
thing special, except wondering whether her mother had
got to sleep in this heat.
‘It’s on the idea of Ulysses,’ continued Mrs. McKisco.
‘Only instead of taking twenty-four hours my husband takes
a hundred years. He takes a decayed old French aristocrat
and puts him in contrast with the mechanical age—‘
‘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. The man with the jockey cap was now go-
ing from umbrella to umbrella carrying a bottle and little
glasses in his hands; presently he and his friends grew live-
lier and closer together and now they were all under a single
assemblage of umbrellas—she gathered that some one was
leaving and that this was a last drink on the beach. Even the
children knew that excitement was generating under that
umbrella and turned toward it—and it seemed to Rosemary
that it all came from the man in the jockey cap.
Noon dominated sea and sky—even the white line of
Cannes, five miles off, had faded to a mirage of what was
fresh and cool; a robin-breasted sailing boat pulled in be-
hind it a strand from the outer, darker sea. It seemed that Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
there was no life anywhere in all this expanse of coast ex-
cept under the filtered sunlight of those umbrellas, where
something went on amid the color and the murmur.
Campion walked near her, stood a few feet away and
Rosemary closed her eyes, pretending to be asleep; then
she half-opened them and watched two dim, blurred pillars
that were legs. The man tried to edge his way into a sand-
colored cloud, but the cloud floated off into the vast hot sky.
Rosemary fell really asleep.
She awoke drenched with sweat to find the beach desert-
ed save for the man in the jockey cap, who was folding a last
umbrella. As Rosemary lay blinking, 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!’
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 to wash off the
sweat. He came back and gathering up a rake, a shovel, and
a sieve, stowed them in a crevice of a rock. He glanced up
and down the beach to see if he had left anything.
‘Do you know what time it is?’ Rosemary asked.
‘It’s about half-past one.’
They faced the seascape together momentarily.
‘It’s not a bad time,’ said Dick Diver. ‘It’s not one of worst
times of the day.’ Tender is the Night
He looked at her and for a moment she lived in the bright
blue worlds of his eyes, eagerly and confidently. Then he
shouldered his last piece of junk and went up to his car, and
Rosemary came out of the water, shook out her peignoir and
walked up to the hotel. Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
III
It was almost two when they went into the dining-room.
Back and forth over the deserted tables a heavy pattern of
beams and shadows swayed with the motion of the pines
outside. Two waiters, piling plates and talking loud Italian,
fell silent when they came in and brought them a tired ver-
sion of the table d’hôte 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.’ She was
eating, ravenously. ‘He’s married though—it’s usually the
way.’
Her mother was her best friend and had put every last
possibility into the guiding of her, not so rare a thing in
the theatrical profession, but rather special in that Mrs. El-
sie Speers was not recompensing herself for a defeat of her
own. She had no personal bitterness or resentments about
life—twice satisfactorily married and twice widowed, her
cheerful stoicism had each time deepened. One of her hus-
bands had been a cavalry officer and one an army doctor,
and they both left something to her that she tried to pres-
ent intact to Rosemary. By not sparing Rosemary she had Tender is the Night
made her hard—by not sparing her own labor and devotion
she had cultivated an idealism in Rosemary, which at pres-
ent was directed toward herself and saw the world through
her eyes. So that while Rosemary was a ‘simple’ child she
was protected by a double sheath of her mother’s armor and
her own—she had a mature distrust of the trivial, the facile
and the vulgar. However, with Rosemary’s sudden success
in pictures Mrs. Speers felt that it was time she were spiri-
tually weaned; it would please rather than pain her if this
somewhat bouncing, breathless and exigent idealism would
focus on something except herself.
‘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—
no matter where we go everybody’s seen ‘Daddy’s Girl.’’
Mrs. Speers waited for the glow of egotism to subside;
then she said in a matter-of-fact way: ‘That reminds me,
when are you going to see Earl Brady?’
‘I thought we might go this afternoon—if you’re rested.’
‘You go—I’m not going.’
‘We’ll wait till to-morrow then.’
‘I want you to go alone. It’s only a short way—it isn’t as if
you didn’t speak French.’
‘Mother—aren’t there some things I don’t have to do?’
‘Oh, well then go later—but some day before we leave.’
‘All right, Mother.’
After lunch they were both overwhelmed by the sudden
flatness that comes over American travellers in quiet foreign
places. No stimuli worked upon them, no voices called them Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
from without, no fragments of their own thoughts came
suddenly from the minds of others, and missing the clamor
of Empire they felt that life was not continuing here.
‘Let’s only stay three days, Mother,’ Rosemary said when
they were back in their rooms. Outside a light wind blew
the heat around, straining it through the trees and sending
little hot gusts through the shutters.
‘How about the man you fell in love with on the beach?’
‘I don’t love anybody but you, Mother, darling.’
Rosemary stopped in the lobby and spoke to Gausse père
about trains. The concierge, lounging in light-brown khaki
by the desk, stared at her rigidly, then suddenly remembered
the manners of his métier. She took the bus and rode with
a pair of obsequious waiters to the station, embarrassed by
their deferential silence, wanting to urge them: ‘Go on, talk,
enjoy yourselves. It doesn’t bother me.’
The first-class compartment was stifling; the vivid ad-
vertising cards of the railroad companies—The Pont du
Gard at Arles, the Amphitheatre at Orange, winter sports
at Chamonix—were fresher than the long motionless sea
outside. Unlike American trains that were absorbed in an
intense destiny of their own, and scornful of people on an-
other world less swift and breathless, this train was part of
the country through which it passed. Its breath stirred the
dust from the palm leaves, the cinders mingled with the
dry dung in the gardens. Rosemary was sure she could lean
from the window and pull flowers with her hand.
A dozen cabbies slept in their hacks outside the Cannes
station. Over on the promenade the Casino, the smart Tender is the Night
shops, and the great hotels turned blank iron masks to the
summer sea. It was unbelievable that there could ever have
been a ‘season,’ and Rosemary, half in the grip of fashion,
became a little selfconscious, as though she were displaying
an unhealthy taste for the moribund; as though people were
wondering why she was here in the lull between the gaiety
of last winter and next winter, while up north the true world
thundered by.
As she came out of a drug store with a bottle of cocoanut
oil, a woman, whom she recognized as Mrs. Diver, crossed
her path with arms full of sofa cushions, and went to a car
parked down the street. A long, low black dog barked at her,
a dozing chauffeur woke with a start. She sat in the car, her
lovely face set, controlled, her eyes brave and watchful, look-
ing straight ahead toward nothing. Her dress was bright red
and her brown legs were bare. She had thick, dark, gold hair
like a chow’s.
With half an hour to wait for her train Rosemary sat
down in the Café des Alliés on the Croisette, where the
trees made a green twilight over the tables and an orches-
tra wooed an imaginary public of cosmopolites with the
Nice Carnival Song and last year’s American tune. She had
bought Le Temps and The Saturday Evening Post for her
mother, and as she drank her citronade she opened the lat-
ter at the memoirs of a Russian princess, finding the dim
conventions of the nineties realer and nearer than the
headlines of the French paper. It was the same feeling that
had oppressed her at the hotel—accustomed to seeing the
starkest grotesqueries of a continent heavily underlined as Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
comedy or tragedy, untrained to the task of separating out
the essential for herself, she now began to feel that French
life was empty and stale. This feeling was surcharged by lis-
tening to the sad tunes of the orchestra, reminiscent of the
melancholy music played for acrobats in vaudeville. She was
glad to go back to Gausse’s Hotel.
Her shoulders were too burned to swim with the next
day, so she and her mother hired a car—after much hag-
gling, for Rosemary had formed her valuations of money
in France—and drove along the Riviera, the delta of many
rivers. The chauffeur, a Russian Czar of the period of Ivan
the Terrible, was a self-appointed guide, and the resplen-
dent names—Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo—began to glow
through their torpid camouflage, whispering of old kings
come here to dine or die, of rajahs tossing Buddha’s eyes
to English ballerinas, of Russian princes turning the weeks
into Baltic twilights in the lost caviare days. 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 sea-
son 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 this was premature, for they were never coming
back any more.
It was pleasant to drive back to the hotel in the late af-
ternoon, above a sea as mysteriously colored as the agates
and cornelians of childhood, green as green milk, blue as
laundry water, wine dark. It was pleasant to pass people eat-
ing outside their doors, and to hear the fierce mechanical Tender is the Night
pianos behind the vines of country estaminets. When they
turned off the Corniche d’Or and down to Gausse’s Hotel
through the darkening banks of trees, set one behind an-
other in many greens, the moon already hovered over the
ruins of the aqueducts... .
Somewhere in the hills behind the hotel there was a
dance, and Rosemary listened to the music through the
ghostly moonshine of her mosquito net, realizing that there
was gaiety too somewhere about, and she thought of the
nice people on the beach. She thought she might meet them
in the morning, but they obviously formed a selfsufficient
little group, and once their umbrellas, bamboo rugs, dogs,
and children were set out in place the part of the plage was
literally fenced in. She resolved in any case not to spend her
last two mornings with the other ones. Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
IV
The matter was solved for her. The McKiscos were not yet
there and she had scarcely spread her peignoir when two
men—the man with the jockey cap and the tall blonde man,
given to sawing waiters in two— left the group and came
down toward her.
‘Good morning,’ said Dick Diver. He broke down.
‘Look—sunburn or no sunburn, why did you stay away yes-
terday? We worried about you.’
She sat up and her happy little laugh welcomed their in-
trusion.
‘We wondered,’ Dick Diver said, ‘if you wouldn’t come
over this morning. We go in, we take food and drink, so it’s
a substantial invitation.’
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, unroll an endless succession
of magnificent possibilities. 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
the completeness of her private life—a courtesy that Rose-
mary had not met with save from professional people since
her success.
Nicole Diver, her brown back hanging from her pearls,
was looking through a recipe book for chicken Maryland. Tender is the Night
She was about twentyfour, Rosemary guessed—her face
could have been described in terms of conventional pret-
tiness, but the effect was that it had been made first on the
heroic scale with strong structure and marking, as if the
features and vividness of brow and coloring, everything we
associate with temperament and character had been molded
with a Rodinesque intention, and then chiseled away in the
direction of prettiness to a point where a single slip would
have irreparably diminished its force and quality. With the
mouth the sculptor had taken desperate chances—it was the
cupid’s bow of a magazine cover, yet it shared the distinc-
tion of the rest.
‘Are you here for a long time?’ Nicole asked. Her voice
was low, almost harsh.
Suddenly Rosemary let the possibility enter her mind
that they might stay another week.
‘Not very long,’ she answered vaguely. ‘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,’ Rosemary was rather re-
luctant at embarking upon personal revelations. ‘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. It
was a very expensive set, so 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 deter-
minedly before they could speak. ‘Do you like it here—this Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
place?’
‘They have to like it,’ said Abe North slowly. ‘They in-
vented 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 to clip
a square of sunlight off Rosemary’s shoulder, ‘that all the
northern places, like Deauville, were picked out by Rus-
sians 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.’
The young man of Latin aspect had been turning the
pages of The New York Herald.
‘Well, what nationality are these people?’ he demanded,
suddenly, and read with a slight French intonation, ‘‘Regis-
tered at the Hotel Palace at Vevey are Mr. Pandely Vlasco,
Mme. Bonneasse’—I don’t exaggerate—‘Corinna Medonca,
Mme. Pasche, Seraphim Tullio, Maria Amalia Roto Mais,
Moises Teubel, Mme. Paragoris, Apostle Alexandre, Yo-
landa Yosfuglu and Geneveva de Momus!’ She attracts me
most— Geneveva de Momus. Almost worth running up to
Vevey to take a look at Geneveva de Momus.’
He stood up with sudden restlessness, stretching himself Tender is the Night
with one sharp movement. He was a few years younger than
Diver or North. He was tall and his body was hard but over-
spare save for the bunched force gathered in his shoulders
and upper arms. At first glance he seemed conventional-
ly handsome—but there was a faint disgust always in his
face which marred the full fierce lustre of his brown eyes.
Yet one remembered them afterward, when one had forgot-
ten the inability of the mouth to endure boredom and the
young forehead with its furrows of fretful and unprofitable
pain.
‘We found some fine ones in the news of Americans last
week,’ said Nicole. ‘Mrs. Evelyn Oyster and—what were the
others?’
‘There was Mr. S. Flesh,’ said Diver, getting up also. He
took his rake and began to work seriously at getting small
stones out of the sand.
‘Oh, yes—S. Flesh—doesn’t he give you the creeps?’
It was quiet alone with Nicole—Rosemary found it even
quieter than with her mother. Abe North and Barban, the
Frenchman, were talking about Morocco, and Nicole hav-
ing copied her recipe picked up a piece of sewing. Rosemary
examined their appurtenances—four large parasols that
made a canopy of shade, a portable bath house for dressing,
a pneumatic rubber horse, new things that Rosemary had
never seen, from the first burst of luxury manufacturing
after the War, and probably in the hands of the first of pur-
chasers. She had gathered that they were fashionable people,
but though her mother had brought her up to beware such
people as drones, she did not feel that way here. Even in Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
their absolute immobility, complete as that of the morning,
she felt a purpose, a working over something, a direction,
an act of creation different from any she had known. Her
immature mind made no speculations upon the nature of
their relation to each other, she was only concerned with
their attitude toward herself—but she perceived the web of
some pleasant interrelation, which she expressed with the
thought that they seemed to have a very good time.
She looked in turn at the three men, temporarily expro-
priating them. All three were personable in different ways;
all were of a special gentleness that she felt was part of their
lives, past and future, not circumstanced by events, not at all
like the company manners of actors, and she detected also a
far-reaching delicacy that was different from the rough and
ready good fellowship of directors, who represented the in-
tellectuals in her life. Actors and directors—those were the
only men she had ever known, those and the heterogeneous,
indistinguishable mass of college boys, interested only in
love at first sight, whom she had met at the Yale prom last
fall.
These three were different. Barban was less civilized,
more skeptical and scoffing, his manners were formal, even
perfunctory. Abe North had, under his shyness, a desperate
humor that amused but puzzled her. Her serious nature dis-
trusted its ability to make a supreme impression on him.
But Dick Diver—he was all complete there. Silently she
admired him. His complexion was reddish and weather-
burned, so was his short hair—a light growth of it rolled
down his arms and hands. His eyes were of a bright, hard Tender is the Night
blue. His nose was somewhat pointed and there was nev-
er any doubt at whom he was looking or talking—and this
is a flattering attention, for who looks at us?— glances fall
upon us, curious or disinterested, nothing more. His voice,
with some faint Irish melody running through it, wooed the
world, yet she felt the layer of hardness in him, of self-con-
trol and of self-discipline, her own virtues. Oh, she chose
him, and Nicole, lifting her head saw her choose him, heard
the little sigh at the fact that he was already possessed.
Toward noon the McKiscos, Mrs. Abrams, Mr. Dumphry,
and Signor Campion came on the beach. They had brought
a new umbrella that they set up with side glances toward
the Divers, and crept under with satisfied expressions—all
save Mr. McKisco, who remained derisively without. In his
raking Dick had passed near them and now he returned to
the umbrellas.
‘The two young men are reading the Book of Etiquette
together,’ he said in a low voice.
‘Planning to mix wit de quality,’ said Abe.
Mary North, the very tanned young woman whom Rose-
mary had encountered the first day on the raft, came in from
swimming and said with a smile that was a rakish gleam:
‘So Mr. and Mrs. Neverquiver have arrived.’
‘They’re this man’s friends,’ Nicole reminded her, indi-
cating Abe. ‘Why doesn’t he go and speak to them? Don’t
you think they’re attractive?’
‘I think they’re very attractive,’ Abe agreed. ‘I just don’t
think they’re attractive, that’s all.’
‘Well, I HAVE felt there were too many people on the Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
beach this summer,’ Nicole admitted. ‘OUR beach that Dick
made out of a pebble pile.’ She considered, and then lower-
ing her voice out of the range of the trio of nannies who
sat back under another umbrella. ‘Still, they’re preferable to
those British last summer who kept shouting about: ‘Isn’t
the sea blue? Isn’t the sky white? Isn’t little Nellie’s nose
red?’’
Rosemary thought she would not like to have Nicole for
an enemy.
‘But you didn’t see the fight,’ Nicole continued. ‘The day
before you came, the married man, the one with the name
that sounds like a substitute for gasoline or butter—‘
‘McKisco?’
‘Yes—well they were having words and she tossed some
sand in his face. So naturally he sat on top of her and rubbed
her face in the sand. We were—electrified. I wanted Dick to
interfere.’
‘I think,’ said Dick Diver, staring down abstractedly at
the straw mat, ‘that I’ll go over and invite them to dinner.’
‘No, you won’t,’ Nicole told him quickly.
‘I think it would be a very good thing. They’re here—let’s
adjust ourselves.’
‘We’re very well adjusted,’ she insisted, laughing. ‘I’m not
going to have MY nose rubbed in the sand. I’m a mean, hard
woman,’ she explained to Rosemary, and then raising her
voice, ‘Children, put on your bathing suits!’
Rosemary felt that this swim would become the typi-
cal one of her life, the one that would always pop up in her
memory at the mention of swimming. Simultaneously the Tender is the Night
whole party moved toward the water, super-ready from the
long, forced inaction, passing from the heat to the cool with
the gourmandise of a tingling curry eaten with chilled white
wine. The Divers’ day was spaced like the day of the older
civilizations to yield the utmost from the materials at hand,
and to give all the transitions their full value, and she did
not know that there would be another transition presently
from the utter absorption of the swim to the garrulity of the
Provençal lunch hour. But again she had the sense that Dick
was taking care of her, and she delighted in responding to
the eventual movement as if it had been an order.
Nicole handed her husband the curious garment on
which she had been working. He went into the dressing tent
and inspired a commotion by appearing in a moment clad
in transparent black lace drawers. Close inspection revealed
that actually they were lined with fleshcolored cloth.
‘Well, if that isn’t a pansys trick!’ exclaimed Mr. McKis-
co contemptuously—then turning quickly to Mr. Dumphry
and Mr. Campion, he added, ‘Oh, I beg your pardon.’
Rosemary bubbled with delight at the trunks. Her na-
ïveté responded whole-heartedly to the expensive simplicity
of the Divers, unaware of its complexity and its lack of in-
nocence, unaware that it was all a selection of quality rather
than quantity from the run of the world’s bazaar; and that
the simplicity of behavior also, the nursery-like peace and
good will, the emphasis on the simpler virtues, was part of
a desperate bargain with the gods and had been attained
through struggles she could not have guessed at. At that
moment the Divers represented externally the exact fur- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
thermost evolution of a class, so that most people seemed
awkward beside them—in reality a qualitative change had
already set in that was not at all apparent to Rosemary.
She stood with them as they took sherry and ate crack-
ers. Dick Diver looked at her with cold blue eyes; his kind,
strong mouth said thoughtfully and deliberately:
‘You’re the only girl I’ve seen for a long time that actually
did look 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 gave a beautiful little shiver of
her face and laughed. Her mother always had a great influ-
ence on her. Tender is the Night
V
Rosemary went to Monte Carlo nearly as sulkily as it
was possible for her to be. She rode up the rugged hill to
La Turbie, to an old Gaumont lot in process of reconstruc-
tion, and as she stood by the grilled entrance waiting for
an answer to the message on her card, she might have been
looking into Hollywood. The bizarre débris of some recent
picture, a decayed street scene in India, a great cardboard
whale, a monstrous tree bearing cherries large as basket-
balls, bloomed there by exotic dispensation, autochthonous
as the pale amaranth, mimosa, cork oak or dwarfed pine.
There were a quick-lunch shack and two barnlike stages and
everywhere about the lot, groups of waiting, hopeful, paint-
ed faces.
After ten minutes a young man with hair the color of ca-
nary feathers hurried down to the gate.
‘Come in, Miss Hoyt. Mr. Brady’s on the set, but he’s very
anxious to see you. I’m sorry you were kept waiting, but you
know some of these French dames are worse about pushing
themselves in—‘
The studio manager opened a small door in the blank
wall of stage building and with sudden glad familiar-
ity Rosemary followed him into half darkness. Here and
there figures spotted the twilight, turning up ashen fac-
es to her like souls in purgatory watching the passage of a
