Tender Is the Night (42 page)

“At what?
What did you say?”

“I say
he walked, old
Warren
—he
walked!”

“But why not?”

“He was
supposed to be dying of general collapse . . . he got up and walked away, back
to
Chicago
, I
guess. . . . I don’t know
,
the nurse is here now. . .
. I don’t know, Franz—I’ve just heard about it. . . . Call me later.”

He spent
the better part of two hours tracing
Warren
’s
movements. The patient had found an opportunity between the change of day and
night nurses to resort to the bar where he had gulped down four whiskeys; he
paid his hotel bill with a thousand dollar note, instructing the desk that the
change should be sent after him, and departed, presumably for
America
. A last
minute dash by Dick and
Dangeu
to overtake him at the
station resulted only in Dick’s failing to meet Nicole; when they did meet in
the lobby of the hotel she seemed suddenly tired, and there was a tight purse
to her lips that disquieted him.

“How’s
father?” she demanded.

“He’s
much better. He seemed to have a good deal of reserve energy after all.” He
hesitated, breaking it to her easy. “In fact he got up and went away.”

Wanting
a drink, for the chase had occupied the dinner hour, he led her, puzzled,
toward the grill, and continued as they occupied two leather easy-chairs and
ordered a high-ball and a glass of beer: “The man who was taking care of him
made a wrong prognosis or something—wait a minute, I’ve hardly had time to
think the thing out myself.”

“He’s
GONE?”

“He got
the evening train for
Paris
.”

They sat
silent. From Nicole flowed a vast tragic apathy.

“It was
instinct,” Dick said, finally. “He was really dying, but he tried to get a
resumption of rhythm—he’s not the first person that ever walked off his
death-bed—like an old clock—you know, you shake it and somehow from sheer habit
it gets going again. Now your father—”

“Oh,
don’t tell me,” she said.

“His
principal fuel was fear,” he continued. “He got afraid, and off he went. He’ll
probably live till ninety—”

“Please
don’t tell me
any more
,” she said. “Please don’t—I
couldn’t stand
any more
.”

“All right.
The little devil I came down to see is hopeless. We may as well go back
to-morrow.”

“I don’t
see why you have to—come in contact with all this,” she burst forth.

“Oh,
don’t you? Sometimes I don’t either.”

She put
her hand on his.

“Oh, I’m
sorry I said that, Dick.”

Some one
had brought a phonograph into the bar and they sat listening to The Wedding of
the Painted Doll.

III

One
morning a week later, stopping at the desk for his mail, Dick became aware of
some extra commotion outside: Patient Von Cohn Morris was going away. His
parents, Australians, were putting his baggage vehemently into a large
limousine, and beside them stood Doctor
Ladislau
protesting with ineffectual attitudes against the violent
gesturings
of Morris, senior. The young man was regarding his embarkation with aloof
cynicism as Doctor Diver approached.

“Isn’t
this a little sudden, Mr. Morris?”

Mr.
Morris started as he saw Dick—his florid face and the large checks on his suit
seemed to turn off and on like electric lights. He approached Dick as though to
strike him.

“High
time we left, we and those who have come with us,” he began, and paused for
breath. “It is high time, Doctor Diver.
High time.”

“Will
you come in my office?” Dick suggested.

“Not I!
I’ll talk to you, but I’m washing my hands of you and your place.”

He shook
his finger at Dick. “I was just telling this doctor here. We’ve wasted our time
and our money.”

Doctor
Ladislau
stirred in a feeble negative,
signalling
up a vague Slavic evasiveness. Dick had never liked
Ladislau
.
He managed to walk the excited Australian along the path in the direction of
his office, trying to persuade him to enter; but the man shook his head.

“It’s
you, Doctor Diver, YOU, the very man. I went to Doctor
Ladislau
because you were not to be found, Doctor Diver, and because Doctor
Gregorovius
is not expected until the nightfall, and I
would not wait. No, sir! I would not wait a minute after my son told me the
truth.”

He came
up menacingly to Dick, who kept his hands loose enough to drop him if it seemed
necessary. “My son is here for alcoholism, and he told us he smelt liquor on
your breath.
Yes, sir!”
He made a quick, apparently
unsuccessful sniff. “Not once, but twice Von Cohn says he has smelt liquor on
your breath. I and my lady have never touched a drop of it in our lives. We
hand Von Cohn to you to be cured, and within a month he twice smells liquor on
your breath! What kind of cure is that there?”

Dick
hesitated; Mr. Morris was quite capable of making a scene on the clinic drive.

“After
all, Mr. Morris, some people are not going to give up what they regard as food
because of your son—”

“But
you’re a doctor, man!” cried Morris furiously. “When the workmen drink their
beer that’s bad ‘
cess
to them—but you’re here
supposing to cure—”

“This
has gone too far. Your son came to us because of kleptomania.”

“What
was behind it?” The man was almost shrieking.
“Drink—black
drink.
Do you know what color black is? It’s black! My own uncle was
hung by the neck because of it, you hear? My son comes to a sanitarium, and a
doctor reeks of it!”

“I must
ask you to leave.”

“You ASK
me! We ARE leaving!”

“If you
could be a little temperate we could tell you the results of the treatment to
date. Naturally, since you feel as you do, we would not want your son as a
patient—”

“You
dare to use the word temperate to me?”

Dick
called to Doctor
Ladislau
and as he approached, said:
“Will you represent us in saying good-by to the patient and to his family?”

He bowed
slightly to Morris and went into his office, and stood rigid for a moment just
inside the door. He watched until they drove away, the gross parents, the
bland, degenerate offspring: it was easy to prophesy the family’s swing around
Europe
, bullying their betters with hard ignorance and
hard money. But what absorbed Dick after the disappearance of the caravan was
the question as to what extent he had provoked this. He drank claret with each
meal, took a nightcap, generally in the form of hot rum, and sometimes he
tippled with gin in the afternoons—gin was the most difficult to detect on the
breath. He was averaging a half- pint of alcohol a day, too much for his system
to burn up.

Dismissing
a tendency to justify himself, he sat down at his desk and wrote out, like a
prescription, a régime that would cut his liquor in half. Doctors, chauffeurs,
and Protestant clergymen could never smell of liquor, as could painters,
brokers, cavalry leaders; Dick blamed himself only for indiscretion. But the
matter was by no means clarified half an hour later when Franz, revivified by
an Alpine fortnight, rolled up the drive, so eager to resume work that he was
plunged in it before he reached his office. Dick met him there.

“How was
Mount Everest
?”

“We
could very well have done
Mount Everest
the
rate we were doing. We thought of it. How goes it all? How is my
Kaethe
, how is your Nicole?”

“All
goes smooth domestically. But my God, Franz, we had a rotten scene this
morning.”

“How?
What was it?”

Dick
walked around the room while Franz got in touch with his villa by telephone.
After the family exchange was over, Dick said: “The Morris boy was taken
away—there was a row.”

Franz’s
buoyant face fell.

“I knew
he’d left. I met
Ladislau
on the veranda.”

“What
did
Ladislau
say?”

“Just
that young Morris had gone—that you’d tell me about it. What about it?”

“The usual incoherent reasons.”

“He was
a devil, that boy.”

“He was
a case for anesthesia,” Dick agreed. “Anyhow, the father had beaten
Ladislau
into a colonial subject by the time I came along.
What about
Ladislau
? Do we keep him? I say no—he’s
not much of a man, he can’t seem to cope with anything.” Dick hesitated on the
verge of the truth, swung away to give himself space within which to
recapitulate. Franz perched on the edge of a desk, still in his linen duster
and travelling gloves. Dick said:

“One of
the remarks the boy made to his father was that your distinguished collaborator
was a drunkard. The man is a fanatic, and the descendant seems to have caught
traces of
vin
-du-pays on me.”

Franz
sat down, musing on his lower lip. “You can tell me at length,” he said
finally.

“Why not now?”
Dick suggested. “You must know I’m the last man to abuse liquor.” His
eyes and Franz’s glinted on each other, pair on pair. “
Ladislau
let the man get so worked up that I was on the defensive. It might have
happened in front of patients, and you can imagine how hard it could be to
defend yourself in a situation like that!”

Franz
took off his gloves and coat. He went to the door and told the secretary,
“Don’t disturb us.” Coming back into the room he flung himself at the long
table and fooled with his mail, reasoning as little as is characteristic of
people in such postures, rather summoning up a suitable mask for what he had to
say.

“Dick, I
know well that you are a temperate, well-balanced man, even though we do not
entirely agree on the subject of alcohol. But a time has come—Dick, I must say
frankly that I have been aware several times that you have had a drink when it
was not the moment to have one. There is some reason. Why not try another leave
of abstinence?”

“Absence,”
Dick corrected him automatically. “It’s no solution for me to go away.”

They
were both chafed, Franz at having his return marred and blurred.

“Sometimes
you don’t use your common sense, Dick.”

“I never
understood what common sense meant applied to complicated problems—unless it means
that a general practitioner can perform a better operation than a specialist.”

He was
seized by an overwhelming disgust for the situation. To explain, to patch—these
were not natural functions at their age— better to continue with the cracked
echo of an old truth in the ears.

“This is
no go,” he said suddenly.

“Well,
that’s occurred to me,” Franz admitted. “Your heart isn’t in this project any
more, Dick.”

“I know.
I want to leave—we could strike some arrangement about taking Nicole’s money
out gradually.”

“I have
thought about that too, Dick—I have seen this coming. I am able to arrange
other backing, and it will be possible to take all your money out by the end of
the year.”

Dick had
not intended to come to a decision so quickly, nor was he prepared for Franz’s
so ready acquiescence in the break, yet he was relieved. Not without
desperation he had long felt the ethics of his profession dissolving into a
lifeless mass.

The
Divers would return to the
Riviera
,
which was home. The Villa Diana had been rented again for the summer, so they
divided the intervening time between German spas and French cathedral towns
where they were always happy for a few days. Dick wrote a little with no
particular method; it was one of those parts of life that is an
awaiting
; not upon Nicole’s health, which seemed to thrive
on travel, nor upon work, but simply an awaiting. The factor that gave
purposefulness to the period was the children.

Dick’s
interest in them increased with their ages, now eleven and nine. He managed to reach
them over the heads of employees on the principle that both the forcing of
children and the fear of forcing them were inadequate substitutes for the long,
careful watchfulness, the checking and balancing and reckoning of accounts, to
the end that there should be no slip below a certain level of duty. He came to
know them much better than Nicole did, and in expansive moods over the wines of
several countries he talked and played with them at length. They had that
wistful charm, almost sadness, peculiar to children who have learned early not
to cry or laugh with abandon; they were apparently moved to no extremes of
emotion, but content with a simple regimentation and the simple pleasures
allowed them. They lived on the even tenor found advisable in the experience of
old families of the Western world, brought up rather than brought out. Dick
thought, for example, that nothing was more conducive to the development of
observation than compulsory silence.