Tender is the Night (26 page)

“—Music too. Hope you didn't think I was only interested in ragtime. I practise every day—the last few months I've been taking a course in Zurich on the history of music. In fact it was all that kept me going at times—music and the drawing.” She leaned suddenly and twisted a loose strip from the sole of her shoe, and then looked up. “I'd like to draw you just the way you are now.”

It made him sad when she brought out her accomplishments for his approval.

“I envy you. At present I don't seem to be interested in anything except my work.”

“Oh, I think that's fine for a man,” she said quickly. “But for a girl I think she ought to have lots of minor accomplishments and pass them on to her children.”

“I suppose so,” said Dick with deliberated indifference.

Nicole sat quiet. Dick wished she would speak so that he could play the easy rôle of wet blanket, but now she sat quiet.

“You're all well,” he said. “Try to forget the past; don't overdo things for a year or so. Go back to America and be a débutante and fall in love—and be happy.”

“I couldn't fall in love.” Her injured shoe scraped a cocoon of must from the log on which she sat.

“Sure you can,” Dick insisted. “Not for a year maybe, but sooner or later.” Then he added brutally: “You can have a perfectly normal life with a houseful of beautiful descendants. The very fact that you could make a complete comeback at your age proves that the precipitating factors were pretty near everything. Young woman, you'll be pulling your weight long after your friends are carried off screaming.”

—But there was a look of pain in her eyes as she took the rough dose, the harsh reminder.

“I know I wouldn't be fit to marry any one for a long time,” she said humbly.

Dick was too upset to say any more. He looked out into the grain field trying to recover his hard brassy attitude.

“You'll be all right—everybody here believes in you. Why, Doctor Gregory is so proud of you that he'll probably——”

“I hate Doctor Gregory.”

“Well, you shouldn't.”

Nicole's world had fallen to pieces, but it was only a flimsy and scarcely created world; beneath it her emotions and instincts fought on. Was it an hour ago she had waited by the entrance, wearing her hope like a corsage at her belt?

… Dress stay crisp for him, button stay put, bloom narcissus—air stay still and sweet.

“It will be nice to have fun again,” she fumbled on. For a moment she entertained a desperate idea of telling him how rich she was, what big houses she lived in, that really she was a valuable property—for a moment she made herself into her grandfather, Sid Warren, the horse-trader. But she survived the temptation to confuse all values and shut these matters into their Victorian side-chambers—even though there was no home left to her, save emptiness and pain.

“I have to go back to the clinic. It's not raining now.”

Dick walked beside her, feeling her unhappiness, and wanting to drink the rain that touched her cheek.

“I have some new records,” she said. “I can hardly wait to play them. Do you know——”

After supper that evening, Dick thought, he would finish the break; also he wanted to kick Franz's bottom for having partially introduced him to such a sordid business. He waited in the hall. His eyes followed a beret, not wet with waiting like Nicole's beret, but covering a skull recently operated on. Beneath it human eyes peered, found him and came over:

“Bonjour, Docteur.”

“Bonjour, Monsieur.”

“Il fait beau temps.”

“Oui, merveilleux.”

“Vous êtes ici maintenant?”

“Non, pour la journée seulement.”

“Ah, bon. Alors—au revoir, Monsieur.”

Glad at having survived another contact, the wretch in the beret moved away. Dick waited. Presently a nurse came downstairs and delivered him a message.

“Miss Warren asks to be excused, Doctor. She wants to lie down. She wants to have dinner upstairs to-night.”

The nurse hung on his response, half expecting him to imply that Miss Warren's attitude was pathological.

“Oh, I see. Well—” He rearranged the flow of his own saliva, the pulse of his heart. “I hope she feels better. Thanks.”

He was puzzled and discontent. At any rate it freed him.

Leaving a note for Franz begging off from supper, he walked through the countryside to the tram station. As he reached the platform, with spring twilight gilding the rails and the glass in the slot machines, he began to feel that the station, the hospital, was hovering between being centripetal and centrifugal. He felt frightened. He was glad when the substantial cobble-stones of Zurich clicked once more under his shoes.

He expected to hear from Nicole next day but there was no word. Wondering if she was ill, he called the clinic and talked to Franz.

“She came downstairs to luncheon yesterday and to-day,” said Franz. “She seemed a little abstracted and in the clouds. How did it go off?”

Dick tried to plunge over the Alpine crevasse between the sexes.

“We didn't get to it—at least I didn't think we did. I tried to be distant, but I didn't think enough happened to change her attitude if it ever went deep.”

Perhaps his vanity had been hurt that there was no coup de grâce to administer.

“From some things she said to her nurse I'm inclined to think she understood.”

“All right.”

“It was the best thing that could have happened. She doesn't seem over-agitated—only a little in the clouds.”

“All right, then.”

“Dick, come soon and see me.”

D
URING
the next weeks Dick experienced a vast dissatisfaction. The pathological origin and mechanistic defeat of the affair left a flat and metallic taste. Nicole's emotions had been used unfairly—what if they turned out to have been his own? Necessarily he must absent himself from felicity a while
³⁹
—in dreams he saw her walking on the clinic path swinging her wide straw hat….

One time he saw her in person; as he walked past the Palace Hotel, a magnificent Rolls curved into the half-moon entrance. Small within its gigantic proportions, and buoyed up by the power of a hundred superfluous horses, sat Nicole and a young woman who he assumed was her sister. Nicole saw him and momentarily her lips parted in an expression of fright. Dick shifted his hat and passed, yet for a moment
the air around him was loud with the circlings of all the goblins on the Gross-Münster. He tried to write the matter out of his mind in a memorandum that went into detail as to the solemn régime before her; the possibilities of another “push” of the malady under the stresses which the world would inevitably supply—in all a memorandum that would have been convincing to any one save to him who had written it.

The total value of this effort was to make him realize once more how far his emotions were involved; thenceforth he resolutely provided antidotes. One was the telephone girl from Bar-sur-Aube, now touring Europe from Nice to Coblenz, in a desperate roundup of the men she had known in her never-to-be-equalled holiday; another was the making of arrangements to get home on a government transport in August; a third was a consequent intensification of work on his proofs for the book that this autumn was to be presented to the German-speaking world of psychiatry.

Dick had outgrown the book; he wanted now to do more spade work; if he got an exchange fellowship he could count on plenty of routine.

Meanwhile he had projected a new work:
An Attempt at a Uniform and Pragmatic Classification of the Neuroses and Psychoses, Based on an Examination of Fifteen Hundred Pre-Kraepelin and Post-Kraepelin Cases as they would be Diagnosed in the Terminology of the Different Contemporary Schools
—and another sonorous paragraph—
Together with a Chronology of Such Subdivisions of Opinion as Have Arisen Independently.

This title would look monumental in German.
*

Going into Montreux Dick pedalled slowly, gaping at the Jugenhorn whenever possible, and blinded by glimpses of the lake through the alleys of the shore hotels. He was
conscious of the groups of English, emergent after four years and walking with detective-story suspicion in their eyes, as though they were about to be assaulted in this questionable country by German train-bands. There were building and awakening everywhere on this mound of débris formed by a mountain torrent. At Berne and at Lausanne on the way south, Dick had been eagerly asked if there would be Americans this year. “By August, if not in June?”

He wore leather shorts, an army shirt, mountain shoes. In his knapsack were a cotton suit and a change of underwear. At the Glion funicular he checked his bicycle and took a small beer on the terrace of the station buffet, meanwhile watching the little bug crawl down the eighty-degree slope of the hill. His ear was full of dried blood from la Tour de Peilz, where he had sprinted under the impression that he was a spoiled athlete. He asked for alcohol and cleared up the exterior while the funicular slid down into port. He saw his bicycle embarked, slung his knapsack into the lower compartment of the car, and followed it in.

Mountain-climbing cars are built on a slant similar to the angle of a hat-brim of a man who doesn't want to be recognized. As water gushed from the chamber under the car, Dick was impressed with the ingenuity of the whole idea—a complementary car was now taking on mountain water at the top and would pull the lightened car up by gravity, as soon as the brakes were released. It must have been a great inspiration. In the seat across, a couple of British were discussing the cable itself.

“The ones made in England always last five or six years. Two years ago the Germans underbid us, and how long do you think their cable lasted?”

“How long?”

“A year and ten months. Then the Swiss sold it to the Italians. They don't have rigid inspections of cables.”

“I can see it would be a terrible thing for Switzerland if a cable broke.”

The conductor shut a door; he telephoned his confrère among the undulati, and with a jerk the car was pulled upward, heading for a pinpoint on an emerald hill above. After
it cleared the low roofs, the skies of Vaud, Valais, Savoy, and Geneva spread around the passengers in cyclorama. On the centre of the lake, cooled by the piercing current of the Rhône, lay the true centre of the Western World. Upon it floated swans like boats and boats like swans, both lost in the nothingness of the heartless beauty. It was a bright day, with sun glittering on the grass beach below and the white courts of the Kursaal. The figures on the courts threw no shadows.

When Chillon and the island palace of Salagnon came into view Dick turned his eyes inward. The funicular was above the highest houses of the shore; on both sides a tangle of foliage and flowers culminated at intervals in masses of color. It was a rail-side garden, and in the car was a sign: Défense de cueillir les fleurs.

Though one must not pick flowers on the way up, the blossoms trailed in as they passed—Dorothy Perkins roses dragged patiently through each compartment slowly waggling with the motion of the funicular, letting go at the last to swing back to their rosy cluster. Again and again these branches went through the car.

In the compartment above and in front of Dick's, a group of English were standing up and exclaiming upon the backdrop of sky, when suddenly there was a confusion among them—they parted to give passage to a couple of young people who made apologies and scrambled over into the rear compartment of the funicular—Dick's compartment. The young man was a Latin with the eyes of a stuffed deer; the girl was Nicole.

The two climbers gasped momentarily from their efforts; as they settled into seats, laughing and crowding the English to the corners, Nicole said, “Hel
l
o.” She was lovely to look at; immediately Dick saw that something was different; in a second he realized it was her fine-spun hair, bobbed like Irene Castle's and fluffed into curls. She wore a sweater of powder blue and a white tennis skirt—she was the first morning in May and every taint of the clinic was departed.

“Plunk!” she gasped. “Whoo-oo that guard. They'll
arrest us at the next stop. Doctor Diver, the Conte di Marmora.”

“Gee-imminy!” She felt her new hair, panting. “Sister bought first-class tickets—it's a matter of principle with her.” She and Marmora exchanged glances and shouted: “Then we found that first-class is the hearse part behind the chauffeur—shut in with curtains for a rainy day, so you can't see anything. But Sister's very dignified—” Again Nicole and Marmora laughed with young intimacy.

“Where you bound?” asked Dick.

“Caux. You, too?” Nicole looked at his costume. “That your bicycle they got up in front?”

“Yes. I'm going to coast down Monday.”

“With me on your handle-bars? I mean, really—will you? I can't think of more fun.”

“But I will carry you down in my arms,” Marmora protested intensely. “I will roller-skate you—or I will throw you and you will fall slowly like a feather.”

The delight in Nicole's face—to be a feather again instead of a plummet, to float and not to drag. She was a carnival to watch—at times primly coy, posing, grimacing and gesturing—sometimes the shadow fell and the dignity of old suffering flowed down into her finger tips. Dick wished himself away from her, fearing that he was a reminder of a world well left behind. He resolved to go to the other hotel.

When the funicular came to rest those new to it stirred in suspension between the blues of two heavens. It was merely for a mysterious exchange between the conductor of the car going up and the conductor of the car coming down. Then up and up over a forest path and a gorge—then again up a hill that became solid with narcissus, from passengers to sky. The people in Montreux playing tennis in the lakeside courts were pinpoints now. Something new was in the air; freshness—freshness embodying itself in music as the car slid into Glion and they heard the orchestra in the hotel garden.