Tender Is the Night (24 page)

“But it
is a professional situation,” he cried quietly.

He
sighed himself back into his chair, waiting for the reverberating thunder to
die out about the room. Dick saw that
Dohmler
had
reached his climax, and he was not sure that he himself had survived it. When
the thunder had diminished Franz managed to get his word in.

“Doctor
Diver is a man of fine character,” he said. “I feel he only has to appreciate
the situation in order to deal correctly with it. In my opinion Dick can
co-operate right here, without any one going away.”

“How do
you feel about that?”
Professor
Dohmler asked Dick.

Dick
felt churlish in the face of the situation; at the same time he realized in the
silence after
Dohmler’s
pronouncement that the state
of
inanimation
could not be indefinitely prolonged;
suddenly he spilled everything.

“I’m
half in love with her—the question of marrying her has passed through my mind.”

“
Tch
!
Tch
!” uttered Franz.

“Wait.”
Dohmler
warned him. Franz refused to wait: “What! And
devote half your life to being doctor and nurse and all—never! I know what
these cases are. One time in twenty it’s finished in the first push—better
never see her again!”

“What do
you think?”
Dohmler
asked Dick.

“Of
course Franz is right.”

VII

It was
late afternoon when they wound up the discussion as to what Dick should
do,
he must be most kind and yet eliminate himself. When the
doctors stood up at last, Dick’s eyes fell outside the window to where a light
rain was falling—Nicole was waiting, expectant, somewhere in that rain. When,
presently, he went out buttoning his oil-skin at the throat, pulling down the
brim of his hat, he came upon her immediately under the roof of the main
entrance.

“I know
a new place we can go,” she said. “When I was ill I didn’t mind sitting inside
with the others in the evening—what they said seemed like everything else.
Naturally now I see them as ill and it’s—it’s—”

“You’ll
be leaving soon.”

“Oh, soon.
My sister, Beth, but she’s always been called Baby, she’s coming in a few weeks
to take me somewhere; after that I’ll be back here for a last month.”

“The older sister?”

“Oh, quite a bit older.
She’s twenty-four—she’s very English. She lives in
London
with my father’s
sister. She was engaged to an Englishman but he was killed—I never saw him.”

Her
face, ivory gold against the blurred sunset that strove through the rain, had a
promise Dick had never seen before: the high cheek- bones, the faintly wan
quality, cool rather than feverish, was reminiscent of the frame of a promising
colt—a creature whose life did not promise to be only a projection of youth
upon a grayer screen, but instead, a true growing; the face would be handsome
in middle life; it would be handsome in old age: the essential structure and
the economy were there.

“What
are you looking at?”

“I was
just thinking that you’re going to be rather happy.”

Nicole
was frightened: “Am I? All right—things couldn’t be worse than they have been.”

In the
covered woodshed to which she had led him, she sat cross- legged upon her golf
shoes, her
burberry
wound about her and her cheeks
stung alive by the damp air. Gravely she returned his gaze, taking in his
somewhat proud carriage that never quite yielded to the wooden post against
which he leaned; she looked into his face that always tried to discipline
itself into molds of attentive seriousness, after excursions into joys and
mockeries of its own. That part of him which seemed to fit his reddish Irish
coloring she knew least; she was afraid of it, yet more anxious to explore—this
was his more masculine side: the other part, the trained part, the
consideration in the polite eyes, she expropriated without question, as most
women did.

“At
least this institution has been good for languages,” said Nicole. “I’ve spoken
French with two doctors, and German with the nurses, and Italian, or something
like it, with a couple of scrub- women and one of the patients, and I’ve picked
up a lot of Spanish from another.”

“That’s
fine.”

He tried
to arrange an attitude but no logic seemed forthcoming.

“—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 dust 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.”

VIII

During
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—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 whom 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-
Krapælin
and Post-
Krapælin
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.