Tender Is the Night (25 page)

This
title would look monumental in German.*

Ein
Versuch
die
Neurosen
und
Psychosen
gleichmässig
und
pragmatisch
zu
klassifizieren
auf
Grund
der
Untersuchung
von
fünfzehn
hundert
pre-
Krapaelin
und post-
Krapaelin
Fällen
wie
siz
diagnostiziert
sein
würden
in
der
Terminologie
von den
verschiedenen
Schulen
der
Gegenwart
—and another
sonorous paragraph—
Zusammen
mit
einer
Chronologic
solcher
Subdivisionen
der
Meinung
welche
unabhängig
entstanden
sind
.

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 trained-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
Pelz
, 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 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 complimentary 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 confrere 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, Swiss
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
Kursal
.
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-LO.” 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
de 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.

When
they changed to the mountain train the music was drowned by the rushing water
released from the hydraulic chamber. Almost overhead was
Caux
,
where the thousand windows of a hotel burned in the late sun.

But the
approach was different—a leather-lunged engine pushed the passengers round and
round in a corkscrew, mounting, rising; they chugged through low-level clouds
and for a moment Dick lost Nicole’s face in the spray of the slanting donkey
engine; they skirted a lost streak of wind with the hotel growing in size at
each spiral, until with a vast surprise they were there, on top of the
sunshine.

In the
confusion of arrival, as Dick slung his knapsack and started forward on the
platform to get his bicycle, Nicole was beside him.

“Aren’t
you at our hotel?” she asked.

“I’m
economizing.”

“Will
you come down and have dinner?” Some confusion with baggage ensued. “This is my
sister—Doctor Diver from
Zurich
.”

Dick
bowed to a young woman of twenty-five, tall and confident. She was both
formidable and vulnerable, he decided, remembering other women with flower-like
mouths grooved for bits.

“I’ll
drop in after dinner,” Dick promised. “First I must get acclimated.”

He
wheeled off his bicycle, feeling Nicole’s eyes following him, feeling her
helpless first love, feeling it twist around inside him. He went three hundred
yards up the slope to the other hotel, he engaged a room and found himself
washing without a memory of the intervening ten minutes, only a sort of drunken
flush pierced with voices, unimportant voices that did not know how much he was
loved.

They were
waiting for him and incomplete without him. He was still the incalculable
element; Miss Warren and the young Italian wore their anticipation as obviously
as Nicole. The salon of the hotel, a room of fabled acoustics, was stripped for
dancing but there was a small gallery of Englishwomen of a certain age, with
neckbands, dyed hair and faces powdered pinkish gray; and of American women of
a certain age, with snowy-white transformations, black dresses and lips of
cherry red. Miss Warren and Marmora were at a corner table—Nicole was
diagonally across from them forty yards away, and as Dick arrived he heard her
voice:

“Can you
hear me? I’m speaking naturally.”

“Perfectly,”

“Hello,
Doctor Diver.”

“What’s
this?”

“You
realize the people in the centre of the floor can’t hear what I say, but you
can?”

“A
waiter told us about it,” said Miss Warren. “Corner to corner— it’s like
wireless.”

It was
exciting up on the mountain, like a ship at sea. Presently Marmora’s parents
joined them. They treated the
Warrens
with respect—Dick gathered that their fortunes had something to do with a bank
in
Milan
that
had something to do with the
Warren
fortunes. But Baby Warren wanted to talk to Dick, wanted to talk to him with
the impetus that sent her out vagrantly toward all new men, as though she were
on an inelastic tether and considered that she might as well get to the end of
it as soon as possible. She crossed and
recrossed
her
knees frequently in the manner of tall restless virgins.

“—Nicole
told me that you took part care of her, and had a lot to do with her getting
well. What I can’t understand is what WE’RE supposed to do—they were so
indefinite at the sanitarium; they only told me she ought to be natural and
gay. I knew the
Marmoras
were up here so I asked
Tino
to meet us at the funicular. And you see what
happens—the very first thing Nicole has him crawling over the sides of the car
as if they were both insane—”

“That
was absolutely normal,” Dick laughed. “I’d call it a good sign. They were
showing off for each other.”

“But how
can
I
tell? Before I knew it, almost in front of my eyes, she had her
hair cut off, in
Zurich
,
because of a picture in ‘Vanity Fair.’”

“That’s
all right. She’s a schizoid—a permanent eccentric. You can’t change that.”

“What is
it?”

“Just what I said—an eccentric.”

“Well,
how can
any one
tell what’s eccentric and what’s
crazy?”

“Nothing
is going to be crazy—Nicole is all fresh and happy, you needn’t be afraid.”

Baby
shifted her knees about—she was a compendium of all the discontented women who
had loved Byron a hundred years before, yet, in spite of the tragic affair with
the guards’ officer there was something wooden and
onanistic
about her.

“I don’t
mind the responsibility,” she declared, “but I’m in the air. We’ve never had
anything like this in the family before—we know Nicole had some shock and my
opinion is it was about a boy, but we don’t really know. Father says he would
have shot him if he could have found out.”