“Mais pour nous heros,” he said, “il nous faut du temps, Nicole.
Nous ne pouvons pas faire de petits exercises d’heroisme—il faut faire les grandes compositions.”
“Talk English to me, Tommy.”
“Parlez francais avec moi, Nicole.”
“But the meanings are different—in French you can be heroic and gallant with dignity, and you know it.
But in English you can’t be heroic and gallant without being a little absurd, and you know that too.
That gives me an advantage.”
“But after all—” He chuckled suddenly.
“Even in English I’m brave, heroic and all that.”
She pretended to be groggy with wonderment but he was not abashed.
“I only know what I see in the cinema,” he said.
“Is it all like the movies?”
“The movies aren’t so bad—now this Ronald Colman—have you seen his pictures about the Corps d’Afrique du Nord?
They’re not bad at all.”
“Very well, whenever I go to the movies I’ll know you’re going through just that sort of thing at that moment.”
As she spoke, Nicole was aware of a small, pale, pretty young woman with lovely metallic hair, almost green in the deck lights, who had been sitting on the other side of Tommy and might have been part either of their conversation or of the one next to them.
She had obviously had a monopoly of Tommy, for now she abandoned hope of his attention with what was once called ill grace, and petulantly crossed the crescent of the deck.
“After all, I am a hero,” Tommy said calmly, only half joking.
“I have ferocious courage, US-ually, something like a lion, something like a drunken man.”
Nicole waited until the echo of his boast had died away in his mind—she knew he had probably never made such a statement before.
Then she looked among the strangers, and found as usual, the fierce neurotics, pretending calm, liking the country only in horror of the city, of the sound of their own voices which had set the tone and pitch. . . .
She asked:
“Who is the woman in white?”
“The one who was beside me?
Lady Caroline Sibly-Biers.”—They listened for a moment to her voice across the way:
“The man’s a scoundrel, but he’s a cat of the stripe.
We sat up all night playing two-handed chemin-de-fer, and he owes me a mille Swiss.”
Tommy laughed and said:
“She is now the wickedest woman in London— whenever I come back to Europe there is a new crop of the wickedest women from London.
She’s the very latest—though I believe there is now one other who’s considered almost as wicked.”
Nicole glanced again at the woman across the deck—she was fragile, tubercular—it was incredible that such narrow shoulders, such puny arms could bear aloft the pennon of decadence, last ensign of the fading empire.
Her resemblance was rather to one of John Held’s flat-chested flappers than to the hierarchy of tall languid blondes who had posed for painters and novelists since before the war.
Golding approached, fighting down the resonance of his huge bulk, which transmitted his will as through a gargantuan amplifier, and Nicole, still reluctant, yielded to his reiterated points: that the Margin was starting for Cannes immediately after dinner; that they could always pack in some caviare and champagne, even though they had dined; that in any case Dick was now on the phone, telling their chauffeur in Nice to drive their car back to Cannes and leave it in front of the Cafe des Alliees where the Divers could retrieve it.
They moved into the dining salon and Dick was placed next to Lady Sibly-Biers.
Nicole saw that his usually ruddy face was drained of blood; he talked in a dogmatic voice, of which only snatches reached Nicole:
“. . . It’s all right for you English, you’re doing a dance of death. . . . Sepoys in the ruined fort, I mean Sepoys at the gate and gaiety in the fort and all that.
The green hat, the crushed hat, no future.”
Lady Caroline answered him in short sentences spotted with the terminal “What?” the double-edged “Quite!” the depressing “Cheerio!” that always had a connotation of imminent peril, but Dick appeared oblivious to the warning signals.
Suddenly he made a particularly vehement pronouncement, the purport of which eluded Nicole, but she saw the young woman turn dark and sinewy, and heard her answer sharply:
“After all a chep’s a chep and a chum’s a chum.” Again he had offended some one—couldn’t he hold his tongue a little longer?
How long?
To death then.
At the piano, a fair-haired young Scotsman from the orchestra (entitled by its drum “The Ragtime College Jazzes of Edinboro”) had begun singing in a Danny Deever monotone, accompanying himself with low chords on the piano.
He pronounced his words with great precision, as though they impressed him almost intolerably.
“There was a young lady from hell, Who jumped at the sound of a bell, Because she was bad—bad—bad,
She jumped at the sound of a bell,
From hell (BOOMBOOM) From hell (TOOTTOOT)
There was a young lady from hell—”
“What is all this?” whispered Tommy to Nicole.
The girl on the other side of him supplied the answer: