room, almost ascetic, almost clean, darkened to the glare of the sea. Simplest of pleasures — simplest of places. Tommy ordered two cognacs, and when the door closed behind the waiter, he sat in the only chair, dark, scarred and handsome, his eyebrows arched and upcurling, a fighting Puck, an earnest Satan.
Before they had finished the brandy they suddenly moved together and met standing up; then they were sitting on the bed and he kissed her hardy knees. Struggling a little still, like a decapitated animal she forgot about Dick and her new white eyes, forgot Tommy himself and sank deeper and deeper into the minutes and the moment.
… When he got up to open a shutter and find out what caused the increasing clamor below their windows, his figure was darker and stronger than Dick’s, with high lights along the rope-twists of muscle. Momentarily he had forgotten her too — almost in the second of his flesh breaking from hers she had a foretaste that things were going to be different than she had expected. She felt the nameless fear which precedes all emotions, joyous or sorrowful, inevitable as a hum of thunder precedes a storm.
Tommy peered cautiously from the balcony and reported.
“All I can see is two women on the balcony below this. They’re talking about weather and tipping back and forth in American rocking-chairs.”
“Making all that noise?”
“The noise is coming from somewhere below them. Listen.”
“Oh, way down South in the land of cotton.
Hotels bum and business rotten
Look away—”
“It’s Americans.”
Nicole flung her arms wide on the bed and stared at the ceiling; the powder had dampened on her to make a milky surface. She liked the bareness of the room, the sound of the single fly navigating overhead. Tommy brought the chair over to the bed and swept the clothes off it to sit down; she liked the economy of the weightless dress and espadrilles that mingled with his ducks upon the floor.
He inspected the oblong white torso joined abruptly to the brown limbs and head, and said, laughing gravely:
“You are all new like a baby.”
“With white eyes.”
“I’ll take care of that.”
“It’s very hard taking care of white eyes — especially the ones made in Chicago.”
“I know all the old Languedoc peasant remedies.”
“Kiss me, on the lips, Tommy.”
“That’s so American,” he said, kissing her nevertheless. “When I was in America last there were girls who would tear you apart with their lips, tear themselves too, until their faces were scarlet with the blood around the lips all brought out in a patch — but nothing further.”
Nicole leaned up on one elbow.
“I like this room,” she said.
“I find it somewhat meagre. Darling, I’m glad you wouldn’t wait until we got to Monte Carlo.”
“Why only meagre? Why, this is a wonderful room, Tommy — like the bare tables in so many Cézannes and Picassos.”
“I don’t know.” He did not try to understand her. “There’s that noise again. My God, has there been a murder?”
He went to the window and reported once more:
“It seems to be two American sailors fighting and a lot more cheering them on. They are from your battleship off shore.” He wrapped a towel around himself and went farther out on the balcony. “They have poules with them. I have heard about this now — the women follow them from place to place wherever the ship goes. But what women! One would think with their pay they could find better women! Why the women who followed Korniloff! Why we never looked at anything less than a ballerina!”
Nicole was glad he had known so many women, so that the word itself meant nothing to him; she would be able to hold him so long as the person in her transcended the universals of her body.
“Hit him where it hurts!”
“Yah-h-h-h!”
“Hey, what I tell you get inside that right!”
“Come on, Dulschmit, you son!”
“Yaa-Yaa!”
“YA-YEH-YAH!”
Tommy turned away.
“This place seems to have outlived its usefulness, you agree?”
She agreed, but they clung together for a moment before dressing, and then for a while longer it seemed as good enough a palace as any… .
Dressing at last Tommy exclaimed:
“My God, those two women in the rocking-chairs on the balcony below us haven’t moved. They’re trying to talk this matter out of existence. They’re here on an economical holiday, and all the American navy and all the whores in Europe couldn’t spoil it.”
He came over gently and surrounded her, pulling the shoulder strap of her slip into place with his teeth; then a sound split the air outside: Cr-ACK — BOOM-M-m-m! It was the battleship sounding a recall.
Now, down below their window, it was pandemonium indeed — for the boat was moving to shores as yet unannounced. Waiters called accounts and demanded settlements in impassioned voices, there were oaths and denials; the tossing of bills too large and change too small; passouts were assisted to the boats, and the voices of the naval police chopped with quick commands through all voices. There were cries, tears, shrieks, promises as the first launch shoved off and the women crowded forward on the wharf, screaming and waving.
Tommy saw a girl rush out upon the balcony below waving a napkin, and before he could see whether or not the rocking Englishwomen gave in at last and acknowledged her presence, there was a knock at their own door. Outside, excited female voices made them agree to unlock it, disclosing two girls, young, thin and barbaric, unfound rather than lost, in the hall. One of them wept chokingly.
“Kwee wave off your porch?” implored the other in passionate American. “Kwee please? Wave at the boy friends? Kwee, please. The other rooms is all locked.”
“With pleasure,” Tommy said.
The girls rushed out on the balcony and presently their voices struck a loud treble over the din.
“‘By, Charlie! Charlie, look up!”
“Send a wire gen’al alivery Nice!”
“Charlie! He don’t see me.”
One of the girls hoisted her skirt suddenly, pulled and ripped at her pink step-ins and tore them to a sizable flag; then, screaming “Ben! Ben!” she waved it wildly. As Tommy and Nicole left the room it still fluttered against the blue sky. Oh, say can you see the tender color of remembered flesh? — while at the stern of the battleship arose in rivalry the Star-Spangled Banner.
They dined at the new Beach Casino at Monte Carlo … much later they swam in Beaulieu in a roofless cavern of white moonlight formed by a circlet of pale boulders about a cup of phosphorescent water, facing Monaco and the blur of Mentone. She liked his bringing her there to the eastward vision and the novel tricks of wind and water; it was all as new as they were to each other. Symbolically she lay across his saddle-bow as surely as if he had wolfed her away from Damascus and they had come out upon the Mongolian plain. Moment by moment all that Dick had taught her fell away and she was ever nearer to what she had been in the beginning, prototype of that obscure yielding up of swords that was going on in the world about her. Tangled with love in the moonlight she welcomed the anarchy of her lover.
They awoke together finding the moon gone down and the air cool. She struggled up demanding the time and Tommy called it roughly at three.