Tender Is the Night (23 page)

“To stay?”

“At
least till July.”

“I’m
leaving in June.”

“June is
a lovely month here,” the
Señora
commented. “You
should stay for June and then leave in July when it gets really too hot.”

“You’re
going where?” Dick asked Nicole.

“Somewhere
with my sister—somewhere exciting, I hope, because I’ve lost so much time. But
perhaps they’ll think I ought to go to a quiet place at first—perhaps
Como
. Why don’t you come
to
Como
?”

“Ah,
Como
—” began the
Señora
.

Within
the building a trio broke into
Suppe’s
“Light
Cavalry.” Nicole took advantage of this to stand up and the impression of her
youth and beauty grew on Dick until it welled up inside him in a compact
paroxysm of emotion. She
smiled,
a moving childish
smile that was like all the lost youth in the world.

“The
music’s too loud to talk against—suppose we walk around.
Buenas
noches
,
Señora
.”

“
G’t
night—
g’t
night.”

They
went down two steps to the path—where in a moment a shadow cut across it. She
took his arm.

“I have
some phonograph records my sister sent me from
America
,” she said. “Next time you
come here I’ll play them for you—I know a place to put the phonograph where no
one can hear.”

“That’ll
be nice.”

“Do you
know ‘
Hindustan
’?” she asked wistfully. “I’d
never heard it before, but I like it. And I’ve got ‘Why Do They Call Them
Babies?’ and ‘I’m Glad I Can Make You Cry.’ I suppose you’ve danced to all
those tunes in
Paris
?”

“I
haven’t been to
Paris
.”

Her
cream-colored dress, alternately blue or gray as they walked, and her very
blonde hair, dazzled Dick—whenever he turned toward her she was smiling a
little, her face lighting up like an angel’s when they came into the range of a
roadside arc. She thanked him for everything, rather as if he had taken her to
some party, and as Dick became less and less certain of his relation to her,
her confidence increased—there was that excitement about her that seemed to
reflect all the excitement of the world.

“I’m not
under any restraint at all,” she said. “I’ll play you two good tunes called
‘Wait Till the Cows Come Home’ and ‘Good-by, Alexander.’”

He was
late the next time, a week later, and Nicole was waiting for him at a point in
the path which he would pass walking from Franz’s house. Her hair drawn back of
her ears brushed her shoulders in such a way that the face seemed to have just
emerged from it, as if this were the exact moment when she was coming from a
wood into clear moonlight. The unknown yielded her up; Dick wished she had no
background, that she was just a girl lost with no address save the night from
which she had come. They went to the cache where she had left the phonograph,
turned a corner by the workshop, climbed a rock, and sat down behind a low
wall, facing miles and miles of rolling night.

They
were in
America
now, even Franz with his conception of Dick as an irresistible Lothario would
never have guessed that they had gone so far away. They were so sorry, dear;
they went down to meet each other in a taxi, honey; they had preferences in
smiles and had met in Hindustan, and shortly afterward they must have
quarrelled
, for nobody knew and nobody seemed to care—yet
finally one of them had gone and left the other crying, only to feel blue, to
feel sad.

The thin
tunes, holding lost times and future hopes in liaison, twisted upon the Valais
night. In the lulls of the phonograph a cricket held the scene together with a
single note. By and by Nicole stopped playing the machine and sang to him.

“Lay a silver dollar
On
the ground
And watch it roll
Because it’s round—”

On the
pure parting of her lips no breath hovered. Dick stood up suddenly.

“What’s
the matter, you don’t like it?”

“Of
course I do.”

“Our
cook at home taught it to me:

“A woman never knows
What
a good man she’s got
Till after she turns him down . . .”

“You
like it?”

She
smiled at him, making sure that the smile gathered up everything inside her and
directed it toward him, making him a profound promise of
herself
for so little, for the beat of a response, the assurance of a complimentary
vibration in him. Minute by minute the sweetness drained down into her out of the
willow trees, out of the dark world.

She
stood up too, and stumbling over the phonograph, was momentarily against him,
leaning into the hollow of his rounded shoulder.

“I’ve
got one more record,” she said. “—
Have
you heard ‘So
Long,
Letty
’? I suppose you have.”

“Honestly,
you don’t understand—I haven’t heard a thing.”

Nor
known, nor smelt, nor tasted, he might have added; only hot- cheeked girls in
hot secret rooms. The young maidens he had known at
New Haven
in 1914 kissed men, saying “There!
”,
hands at the man’s chest to push him away. Now there was
this scarcely saved waif of disaster bringing him the essence of a continent. .
. .

It was
May when he next found her. The luncheon in
Zurich
was a council of caution; obviously
the logic of his life tended away from the girl; yet when a stranger stared at
her from a nearby table, eyes burning disturbingly like an uncharted light, he
turned to the man with an urbane version of intimidation and broke the regard.

“He was
just a peeper,” he explained cheerfully. “He was just looking at your clothes.
Why do you have so many different clothes?”

“Sister
says we’re very rich,” she offered humbly. “Since Grandmother is dead.”

“I
forgive you.”

He was
enough older than Nicole to take pleasure in her youthful vanities and
delights, the way she paused fractionally in front of the hall mirror on
leaving the restaurant, so that the incorruptible quicksilver could give her
back to herself. He delighted in her stretching out her hands to new octaves
now that she found herself beautiful and rich. He tried honestly to divorce her
from any obsession that he had stitched her together—glad to see her build up
happiness and confidence apart from him; the difficulty was that, eventually,
Nicole brought everything to his feet, gifts of sacrificial ambrosia, of
worshipping myrtle.

The
first week of summer found Dick re-established in
Zurich
. He had arranged his pamphlets and
what work he had done in the Service into a pattern from which he intended to
make his revise of “A Psychology for Psychiatrists.” He thought he had a
publisher; he had established contact with a poor student who would iron out
his errors in German. Franz considered it a rash business, but Dick pointed out
the disarming modesty of the theme.

“This is
stuff I’ll never know so well again,” he insisted. “I have a hunch it’s a thing
that only fails to be basic because it’s never had material recognition. The
weakness of this profession is its attraction for the man a little crippled and
broken. Within the walls of the profession he compensates by tending toward the
clinical, the ‘practical’—he has won his battle without a struggle.

“On the
contrary, you are a good man, Franz, because fate selected you for your
profession before you were born. You better thank God you had no ‘bent’—I got
to be a psychiatrist because there was a girl at St. Hilda’s in
Oxford
that went to the
same lectures. Maybe I’m getting trite but I don’t want to let my current ideas
slide away with a few dozen glasses of beer.”

“All
right,” Franz answered. “You are an American. You can do this without
professional harm. I do not like these generalities. Soon you will be writing
little books called ‘Deep Thoughts for the Layman,’ so simplified that they are
positively guaranteed not to cause thinking. If my father were alive he would
look at you and grunt, Dick. He would take his napkin and fold it so, and hold
his napkin ring, this very one—” he held it up, a boar’s head was carved in the
brown wood—“and he would say, ‘Well my impression is—’ then he would look at
you and think suddenly ‘What is the use?’ then he would stop and grunt again;
then we would be at the end of dinner.”

“I am
alone to-day,” said Dick testily. “But I may not be alone to-morrow. After that
I’ll fold up my napkin like your father and grunt.”

Franz
waited a moment.

“How
about our patient?” he asked.

“I don’t
know.”

“Well,
you should know about her by now.”

“I like
her. She’s attractive. What do you want me to do—take her up in the edelweiss?”

“No, I
thought since you go in for scientific books you might have an idea.”

“—devote
my life to her?”

Franz
called his wife in the kitchen: “Du
lieber
Gott
!
Bitte
,
bringe
Dick
noch
ein
Glas
-Bier.”

“I don’t
want any more if I’ve got to see
Dohmler
.”

“We
think it’s best to have a program. Four weeks have passed away—apparently the
girl is in love with you. That’s not our business if we were in the world, but
here in the clinic we have a stake in the matter.”

“I’ll do
whatever Doctor
Dohmler
says,” Dick agreed.

But he
had little faith that
Dohmler
would throw much light
on the matter; he himself was the incalculable element involved. By no
conscious volition of his own, the thing had drifted into his hands. It
reminded him of a scene in his childhood when everyone in the house was looking
for the lost key to the silver closet, Dick knowing he had hid it under the
handkerchiefs in his mother’s top drawer; at that time he had experienced a
philosophical detachment, and this was repeated now when he and Franz went
together to Professor
Dohmler’s
office.

The
professor, his face beautiful under straight whiskers, like a vine-overgrown
veranda of some fine old house, disarmed him. Dick knew some individuals with
more talent, but no person of a class qualitatively superior to
Dohmler
.

—Six
months later he thought the same way when he saw
Dohmler
dead, the light out on the veranda, the vines of his whiskers tickling his
stiff white collar, the many battles that had swayed before the chink-like eyes
stilled forever under the frail delicate lids—

“. . .
Good morning, sir.” He stood formally, thrown back to the army.

Professor
Dohmler
interlaced his tranquil fingers. Franz spoke
in terms half of liaison officer, half of secretary, till his senior cut
through him in mid-sentence.

“We have
gone a certain way,” he said mildly. “It’s you, Doctor Diver, who can best help
us now.”

Routed
out, Dick confessed: “I’m not so straight on it myself.”

“I have
nothing to do with your personal reactions,” said
Dohmler
.
“But I have much to do with the fact that this so-called ‘transference,’” he
darted a short ironic look at Franz which the latter returned in kind, “must be
terminated. Miss Nicole does well indeed, but she is in no condition to survive
what she might interpret as a tragedy.”

Again
Franz began to speak, but Doctor
Dohmler
motioned him
silent.

“I
realize that your position has been difficult.”

“Yes, it
has.”

Now the
professor sat back and laughed, saying on the last syllable of his laughter,
with his sharp little gray eyes shining through: “Perhaps you have got
sentimentally involved yourself.”

Aware
that he was being drawn on, Dick, too, laughed.

“She’s a
pretty girl—anybody responds to that to a certain extent. I have no intention—”

Again
Franz tried to speak—again
Dohmler
stopped him with a
question directed pointedly at Dick. “Have you thought of going away?”

“I can’t
go away.”

Doctor
Dohmler
turned to Franz: “Then we can send Miss Warren
away.”

“As you
think best, Professor
Dohmler
,” Dick conceded. “It’s
certainly a situation.”

Professor
Dohmler
raised himself like a legless man mounting a
pair of crutches.