Tender Is the Night Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 naïveté responded whole-heartedly to
the expensive simplicity of the Divers, unaware of its complexity and its lack
of innocence, 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 furthermost 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 crackers. 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 influence on her.
    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 reconstruction, 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
basketballs, 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,
painted faces.
    After
ten minutes a young man with hair the color of canary 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 familiarity Rosemary followed him into half darkness. Here and
there figures spotted the twilight, turning up ashen faces to her like souls in
purgatory watching the passage of a mortal through. There were whispers and
soft voices and, apparently from afar, the gentle tremolo of a small organ.
Turning the corner made by some flats, they came upon the white crackling glow
of a stage, where a French actor—his shirt front, collar, and cuffs tinted a
brilliant pink—and an American actress stood motionless face to face. They
stared at each other with dogged eyes, as though they had been in the same
position for hours; and still for a long time nothing happened, no one moved. A
bank of lights went off with a savage hiss, went on again; the plaintive tap of
a hammer begged admission to nowhere in the distance; a blue face appeared
among the blinding lights above, called something unintelligible into the upper
blackness. Then the silence was broken by a voice in front of Rosemary.
    “Baby,
you don’t take off the stockings, you can spoil ten more pairs. That dress is
fifteen pounds.”
    Stepping
backward the speaker ran against Rosemary, whereupon the