Tender Is the Night (19 page)

Dick was
straightening up; he had examined the gloves worn that day and thrown them into
a pile of soiled gloves in a corner of a trunk.
He had hung
up coat and vest and spread his shirt on another hanger—a trick of his own.
“You’ll wear a shirt that’s a little dirty where you won’t wear a mussed
shirt.” Nicole had come in and was dumping one of Abe’s extraordinary ash-trays
into the waste-basket when Rosemary tore into the room.

“DICK!
DICK! Come and see!”

Dick
jogged across the hall into her room. He knelt to Peterson’s heart, and felt
the pulse—the body was warm, the face, harassed and indirect in life, was gross
and bitter in death; the box of materials was held under one arm but the shoe
that dangled over the bedside was bare of polish and its sole was worn through.
By French law Dick had no right to touch the body but he moved the arm a little
to see something—there was a stain on the green coverlet, there would be faint
blood on the blanket beneath.

Dick
closed the door and stood thinking; he heard cautious steps in the corridor and
then Nicole calling him by name. Opening the door he whispered: “Bring the
couverture
and top blanket from one of our beds—don’t let
any one
see you.” Then, noticing the strained look on her
face, he added quickly, “Look here, you mustn’t get upset over this—it’s only
some nigger scrap.”

“I want
it to be over.”

The
body, as Dick lifted it, was light and ill-nourished. He held it so that
further hemorrhages from the wound would flow into the man’s clothes. Laying it
beside the bed he stripped off the coverlet and top blanket and then opening
the door an inch, listened—there was a clank of dishes down the hall followed
by a loud patronizing “
Mer
-CI, Madame,” but the
waiter went in the other direction, toward the service stairway. Quickly Dick
and Nicole exchanged bundles across the corridor; after spreading this covering
on Rosemary’s bed, Dick stood sweating in the warm twilight, considering.
Certain points had become apparent to him in the moment following his
examination of the body; first, that Abe’s first hostile Indian had tracked the
friendly Indian and discovered him in the corridor, and when the latter had
taken desperate refuge in Rosemary’s room, had hunted down and slain him;
second, that if the situation were allowed to develop naturally, no power on
earth could keep the smear off Rosemary—the paint was scarcely dry on the
Arbuckle case. Her contract was contingent upon an obligation to continue
rigidly and unexceptionally as “Daddy’s Girl.”

Automatically
Dick made the old motion of turning up his sleeves though he wore a sleeveless
undershirt, and bent over the body. Getting a purchase on the shoulders of the
coat he kicked open the door with his heel, and dragged the body quickly into a
plausible position in the corridor. He came back into Rosemary’s room and
smoothed back the grain of the plush floor rug. Then he went to the phone in
his suite and called the manager-owner of the hotel.

“
McBeth
?—
it’s
Doctor Diver
speaking—something very important. Are we on a more or less private line?”

It was
good that he had made the extra effort which had firmly entrenched him with Mr.
McBeth
. Here was one use for all the
pleasingness
that Dick had expended over a large area he
would never retrace. . . .

“Going
out of the suite we came on a dead Negro . . . in the hall . . . no, no, he’s a
civilian. Wait a minute now—I knew you didn’t want any guests to blunder on the
body so I’m phoning you. Of course I must ask you to keep my name out of it. I
don’t want any French red tape just because I discovered the man.”

What
exquisite consideration for the hotel! Only because Mr.
McBeth
,
with his own eyes, had seen these traits in Doctor Diver two nights before,
could he credit the story without question.

In a
minute Mr.
McBeth
arrived and in another minute he
was joined by a gendarme. In the interval he found time to whisper to Dick,
“You can be sure the name of any guest will be protected. I’m only too grateful
to you for your pains.”

Mr.
McBeth
took an immediate step that may only be imagined,
but that influenced the gendarme so as to make him pull his mustaches in a
frenzy of uneasiness and greed. He made perfunctory notes and sent a telephone
call to his post. Meanwhile with a celerity that Jules Peterson, as a business
man, would have quite understood, the remains were carried into another
apartment of one of the most fashionable hotels in the world.

Dick
went back to his salon.

“What
HAP-
pened
?” cried
Rosemary.
“Do all the Americans in
Paris
just shoot at each other all the time?”

“This
seems to be the open season,” he answered. “Where’s Nicole?”

“I think
she’s in the bathroom.”

She
adored him for saving her—disasters that could have attended upon the event had
passed in prophecy through her mind; and she had listened in wild worship to
his strong, sure, polite voice making it all right. But before she reached him
in a sway of soul and body his attention
focussed
on
something else: he went into the bedroom and toward the bathroom. And now
Rosemary, too, could hear, louder and louder, a verbal inhumanity that
penetrated the keyholes and the cracks in the doors, swept into the suite and
in the shape of horror took form again.

With the
idea that Nicole had fallen in the bathroom and hurt herself, Rosemary followed
Dick. That was not the condition of affairs at which she stared before Dick
shouldered her back and brusquely blocked her view.

Nicole
knelt beside the tub swaying sidewise and sidewise. “It’s you!” she cried,
“—it’s you come to intrude on the only privacy I have in the world—with your
spread with red blood on it. I’ll wear it for you—I’m not ashamed, though it
was such a pity. On All Fools Day we had a party on the
Zurichsee
,
and all the fools were there, and I wanted to come dressed in a spread but they
wouldn’t let me—”

“Control
yourself!”

“—so I
sat in the bathroom and they brought me a domino and said wear that. I did.
What else could I do?”

“Control
yourself, Nicole!”

“I never
expected you to love me—it was too late—only don’t come in the bathroom, the
only place I can go for privacy, dragging spreads with red blood on them and
asking me to fix them.”

“Control
yourself. Get up—”

Rosemary,
back in the salon, heard the bathroom door bang, and stood trembling: now she
knew what Violet
McKisco
had seen in the bathroom at
Villa Diana. She answered the ringing phone and almost cried with relief when
she found it was Collis Clay, who had traced her to the Divers’ apartment. She
asked him to come up while she got her hat, because she was afraid to go into
her room alone.

BOOK 2

In the
spring of 1917, when Doctor Richard Diver first arrived in
Zurich
, he was twenty-six years old, a fine
age for a man, indeed the very acme of bachelorhood. Even in war-time days, it
was a fine age for Dick, who was already too valuable, too much of a capital
investment to be shot off in a gun. Years later it seemed to him that even in
this sanctuary he did not escape lightly, but about that he never fully made up
his mind—in 1917 he laughed at the idea, saying apologetically that the war
didn’t touch him at all. Instructions from his local board were that he was to
complete his studies in
Zurich
and take a degree as he had planned.

Switzerland
was an island, washed on one side
by the waves of thunder around
Gorizia
and on another
by the cataracts along the
Somme
and the
Aisne
. For once there seemed more intriguing strangers
than sick ones in the cantons, but that had to be guessed at—the men who
whispered in the little cafés of
Berne
and
Geneva
were as likely to
be diamond salesmen or commercial
travellers
.
However, no one had missed the long trains of blinded or one-legged men, or
dying
trunks, that
crossed each other between the
bright lakes of
Constance
and Neuchâtel. In
the beer-halls and shop- windows were bright posters presenting the Swiss
defending their frontiers in 1914—with inspiring ferocity young men and old men
glared down from the mountains at phantom French and Germans; the purpose was
to assure the Swiss heart that it had shared the contagious glory of those
days. As the massacre continued the posters withered away, and no country was
more surprised than its sister republic when the
United States
bungled its way into
the war.

Doctor
Diver had seen around the edges of the war by that time: he was an Oxford
Rhodes Scholar from
Connecticut
in 1914. He returned home for a final year at Johns Hopkins, and took his degree.
In 1916 he managed to get to
Vienna
under the impression that, if he did not make haste, the great Freud would
eventually succumb to an
aeroplane
bomb. Even then
Vienna
was old with death
but Dick managed to get enough coal and oil to sit in his room in the
Damenstiff
Strasse
and write the
pamphlets that he later destroyed, but that, rewritten, were the backbone of
the book he published in
Zurich
in 1920.

Most of
us have a favorite, a heroic period, in our lives and that was Dick Diver’s.
For one thing he had no idea that he was charming, that the affection he gave
and inspired was anything unusual among healthy people. In his last year at
New Haven
some one
referred to him as “lucky Dick”—the name lingered
in his head.

“Lucky
Dick, you big stiff,” he would whisper to himself, walking around the last
sticks of flame in his room. “You hit it, my boy. Nobody knew it was there
before you came along.”

At the
beginning of 1917, when it was becoming difficult to find coal, Dick burned for
fuel almost a hundred textbooks that he had accumulated; but only, as he laid
each one on the fire, with an assurance chuckling inside him that he was
himself a digest of what was within the book, that he could brief it five years
from now, if it deserved to be briefed. This went on at any odd hour, if
necessary, with a floor rug over his shoulders, with the fine quiet of the
scholar which is nearest of all things to heavenly peace— but which, as will
presently be told, had to end.

For its
temporary continuance he thanked his body that had done the flying rings at
New Haven
, and now swam
in the winter
Danube
. With Elkins, second
secretary at the Embassy, he shared an apartment, and there were two nice girl
visitors—which was that and not too much of it, nor too much of the Embassy
either. His contact with Ed Elkins aroused in him a first faint doubt as to the
quality of his mental processes; he could not feel that they were profoundly
different from the thinking of Elkins—Elkins, who would name you all the
quarterbacks in New Haven for thirty years.

“—
And
Lucky Dick can’t be one of these clever men; he must be
less intact, even faintly destroyed. If life won’t do it for him it’s not a
substitute to get a disease, or a broken heart, or an inferiority complex,
though it’d be nice to build out some broken side till it was better than the
original structure.”

He
mocked at his reasoning, calling it specious and “American”—his criteria of
uncerebral
phrase-making was that it was American. He knew,
though, that the price of his intactness was incompleteness.

“The
best I can wish you, my child,” so said the Fairy
Blackstick
in Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring, “is a little misfortune.”

In some
moods he griped at his own reasoning: Could I help it that Pete Livingstone sat
in the locker-room Tap Day when everybody looked all over hell for him? And I
got an election when otherwise I wouldn’t have got
Elihu
,
knowing so few men. He was good and right and I ought to have sat in the
locker-room instead. Maybe I would, if I’d thought I had a chance at an
election. But Mercer kept coming to my room all those weeks. I guess I knew I
had a chance all right, all right. But it would have served me right if I’d
swallowed my pin in the shower and set up a conflict.

After
the lectures at the university he used to argue this point with a young
Rumanian intellectual who reassured him: “There’s no evidence that Goethe ever
had a ‘conflict’ in the modern sense, or a man like Jung, for instance. You’re
not a romantic philosopher— you’re a scientist.
Memory,
force, character—especially good sense.
That’s going to be your
trouble—judgment about yourself— once I knew a man who worked two years on the
brain of an armadillo, with the idea that he would sooner or later know more
about the brain of an armadillo than any one. I kept arguing with him that he
was not really pushing out the extension of the human range—it was too
arbitrary. And sure enough, when he sent his work to the medical journal they
refused it—they had just accepted a thesis by another man on the same subject.”