Doctor Richard Diver and Mrs. Elsie Speers sat in the Café des Alliées in August, under cool and dusty trees. The sparkle of the mica was dulled by the baked ground, and a few gusts of mistral from down the coast seeped through the Esterel and rocked the fishing boats in the harbor, pointing the masts here and there at a featureless sky.
“I had a letter this morning,” said Mrs. Speers. “What a terrible time you all must have had with those Negroes! But Rosemary said you were perfectly wonderful to her.”
“Rosemary ought to have a service stripe. It was pretty harrowing — the only person it didn’t disturb was Abe North — he flew off to Havre — he probably doesn’t know about it yet.”
“I’m sorry Mrs. Diver was upset,” she said carefully.
Rosemary had written:
Nicole seemed Out of her Mind. I didn’t want to come South with them because I felt Dick had enough on his hands.
“She’s all right now.” He spoke almost impatiently. “So you’re leaving to-morrow. When will you sail?”
“Right away.”
“My God, it’s awful to have you go.”
“We’re glad we came here. We’ve had a good time, thanks to you. You’re the first man Rosemary ever cared for.”
Another gust of wind strained around the porphyry hills of la Napoule. There was a hint in the air that the earth was hurrying on toward other weather; the lush midsummer moment outside of time was already over.
“Rosemary’s had crushes but sooner or later she always turned the man over to me —” Mrs. Speers laughed, “— for dissection.”
“So I was spared.”
“There was nothing I could have done. She was in love with you before I ever saw you. I told her to go ahead.”
He saw that no provision had been made for him, or for Nicole, in Mrs. Speers’ plans — and he saw that her amorality sprang from the conditions of her own withdrawal. It was her right, the pension on which her own emotions had retired. Women are necessarily capable of almost anything in their struggle for survival and can scarcely be convicted of such man-made crimes as “cruelty.” So long as the shuffle of love and pain went on within proper walls Mrs. Speers could view it with as much detachment and humor as a eunuch. She had not even allowed for the possibility of Rosemary’s being damaged — or was she certain that she couldn’t be?
“If what you say is true I don’t think it did her any harm.” He was keeping up to the end the pretense that he could still think objectively about Rosemary. “She’s over it already. Still — so many of the important times in life begin by seeming incidental.”
“This wasn’t incidental,” Mrs. Speers insisted. “You were the first man — you’re an ideal to her. In every letter she says that.”
“She’s so polite.”
“You and Rosemary are the politest people I’ve ever known, but she means this.”
“My politeness is a trick of the heart.”
This was partly true. From his father Dick had learned the somewhat conscious good manners of the young Southerner coming north after the Civil War. Often he used them and just as often he despised them because they were not a protest against how unpleasant selfishness was but against how unpleasant it looked.
“I’m in love with Rosemary,” he told her suddenly. “It’s a kind of self-indulgence saying that to you.”
It seemed very strange and official to him, as if the very tables and chairs in the Café des Alliées would remember it forever. Already he felt her absence from these skies: on the beach he could only remember the sun-torn flesh of her shoulder; at Tarmes he crushed out her footprints as he crossed the garden; and now the orchestra launching into the Nice Carnival Song, an echo of last year’s vanished gaieties, started the little dance that went on all about her. In a hundred hours she had come to possess all the world’s dark magic; the blinding belladonna, the caffein converting physical into nervous energy, the mandragora that imposes harmony.
With an effort he once more accepted the fiction that he shared Mrs. Speers’ detachment.
“You and Rosemary aren’t really alike,” he said. “The wisdom she got from you is all molded up into her persona, into the mask she faces the world with. She doesn’t think; her real depths are Irish and romantic and illogical.”
Mrs. Speers knew too that Rosemary, for all her delicate surface, was a young mustang, perceptibly by Captain Doctor Hoyt, U.S.A. Cross-sectioned, Rosemary would have displayed an enormous heart, liver and soul, all crammed close together under the lovely shell.
Saying good-by, Dick was aware of Elsie Speers’ full charm, aware that she meant rather more to him than merely a last unwillingly relinquished fragment of Rosemary. He could possibly have made up Rosemary — he could never have made up her mother. If the cloak, spurs and brilliants in which Rosemary had walked off were things with which he had endowed her, it was nice in contrast to watch her mother’s grace knowing it was surely something he had not evoked. She had an air of seeming to wait, as if for a man to get through with something more important than herself, a battle or an operation, during which he must not be hurried or interfered with. When the man had finished she would be waiting, without fret or impatience, somewhere on a highstool, turning the pages of a newspaper.
“Good-by — and I want you both to remember always how fond of you Nicole and I have grown.”
Back at the Villa Diana, he went to his work-room, and opened the shutters, closed against the mid-day glare. On his two long tables, in ordered confusion, lay the materials of his book. Volume I, concerned with Classification, had achieved some success in a small subsidized edition. He was negotiating for its reissue. Volume II was to be a great amplification of his first little book, A Psychology for Psychiatrists. Like so many men he had found that he had only one or two ideas — that his little collection of pamphlets now in its fiftieth German edition contained the germ of all he would ever think or know.
But he was currently uneasy about the whole thing. He resented the wasted years at New Haven, but mostly he felt a discrepancy between the growing luxury in which the Divers lived, and the need for display which apparently went along with it. Remembering his Rumanian friend’s story, about the man who had worked for years on the brain of an armadillo, he suspected that patient Germans were sitting close to the libraries of Berlin and Vienna callously anticipating him. He had about decided to brief the work in its present condition and publish it in an undocumented volume of a hundred thousand words as an introduction to more scholarly volumes to follow.
He confirmed this decision walking around the rays of late afternoon in his work-room. With the new plan he could be through by spring. It seemed to him that when a man with his energy was pursued for a year by increasing doubts, it indicated some fault in the plan.
He laid the bars of gilded metal that he used as paperweights along the sheaves of notes. He swept up, for no servant was allowed in here, treated his washroom sketchily with Bon Ami, repaired a screen and sent off an order to a publishing house in Zurich. Then he drank an ounce of gin with twice as much water.
He saw Nicole in the garden. Presently he must encounter her and the prospect gave him a leaden feeling. Before her he must keep up a perfect front, now and to-morrow, next week and next year. All night in Paris he had held her in his arms while she slept light under the luminol; in the early morning he broke in upon her confusion before it could form, with words of tenderness and protection, and she slept again with his face against the warm scent of her hair. Before she woke he had arranged everything at the phone in the next room. Rosemary was to move to another hotel. She was to be “Daddy’s Girl” and even to give up saying good-by to them. The proprietor of the hotel, Mr. McBeth, was to be the three Chinese monkeys. Packing amid the piled boxes and tissue paper of many purchases, Dick and Nicole left for the Riviera at noon.
Then there was a reaction. As they settled down in the wagon-lit Dick saw that Nicole was waiting for it, and it came quickly and desperately, before the train was out of the ceinture — his only instinct was to step off while the train was still going slow, rush back and see where Rosemary was, what she was doing. He opened a book and bent his pince-nez upon it, aware that Nicole was watching him from her pillow across the compartment. Unable to read, he pretended to be tired and shut his eyes but she was still watching him, and though still she was half asleep from the hangover of the drug, she was relieved and almost happy that he was hers again.
It was worse with his eyes shut for it gave a rhythm of finding and losing, finding and losing; but so as not to appear restless he lay like that until noon. At luncheon things were better — it was always a fine meal; a thousand lunches in inns and restaurants, wagon-lits, buffets, and aeroplanes were a mighty collation to have taken together. The familiar hurry of the train waiters, the little bottles of wine and mineral water, the excellent food of the Paris-Lyons-Méditerranee gave them the illusion that everything was the same as before, but it was almost the first trip he had ever taken with Nicole that was a going away rather than a going toward. He drank a whole bottle of wine save for Nicole’s single glass; they talked about the house and the children. But once back in the compartment a silence fell over them like the silence in the restaurant across from the Luxembourg. Receding from a grief, it seems necessary to retrace the same steps that brought us there. An unfamiliar impatience settled on Dick; suddenly Nicole said:
“It seemed too bad to leave Rosemary like that — do you suppose she’ll be all right?”
“Of course. She could take care of herself anywhere —” Lest this belittle Nicole’s ability to do likewise, he added, “After all, she’s an actress, and even though her mother’s in the background she HAS to look out for herself.”
“She’s very attractive.”
“She’s an infant.”
“She’s attractive though.”
They talked aimlessly back and forth, each speaking for the other.
“She’s not as intelligent as I thought,” Dick offered.
“She’s quite smart.”
“Not very, though — there’s a persistent aroma of the nursery.”
“She’s very — very pretty,” Nicole said in a detached, emphatic way, “and I thought she was very good in the picture.”
“She was well directed. Thinking it over, it wasn’t very individual.”
“I thought it was. I can see how she’d be very attractive to men.”
His heart twisted. To what men? How many men?
— Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?
— Please do, it’s too light in here.
Where now? And with whom?
“In a few years she’ll look ten years older than you.”
“On the contrary. I sketched her one night on a theatre program, I think she’ll last.”
They were both restless in the night. In a day or two Dick would try to banish the ghost of Rosemary before it became walled up with them, but for the moment he had no force to do it. Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure and the memory so possessed him that for the moment there was nothing to do but to pretend. This was more difficult because he was currently annoyed with Nicole, who, after all these years, should recognize symptoms of strain in herself and guard against them. Twice within a fortnight she had broken up: there had been the night of the dinner at Tarmes when he had found her in her bedroom dissolved in crazy laughter telling Mrs. McKisco she could not go in the bathroom because the key was thrown down the well. Mrs. McKisco was astonished and resentful, baffled and yet in a way comprehending. Dick had not been particularly alarmed then, for afterward Nicole was repentant. She called at Gausse’s Hotel but the McKiscos were gone.
The collapse in Paris was another matter, adding significance to the first one. It prophesied possibly a new cycle, a new pousse of the malady. Having gone through unprofessional agonies during her long relapse following Topsy’s birth, he had, perforce, hardened himself about her, making a cleavage between Nicole sick and Nicole well. This made it difficult now to distinguish between his self- protective professional detachment and some new coldness in his heart. As an indifference cherished, or left to atrophy, becomes an emptiness, to this extent he had learned to become empty of Nicole, serving her against his will with negations and emotional neglect. One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.
He found Nicole in the garden with her arms folded high on her shoulders. She looked at him with straight gray eyes, with a child’s searching wonder.
“I went to Cannes,” he said. “I ran into Mrs. Speers. She’s leaving to-morrow. She wanted to come up and say good-by to you, but I slew the idea.”
“I’m sorry. I’d like to have seen her. I like her.”
“Who else do you think I saw — Bartholomew Tailor.”
“You didn’t.”
“I couldn’t have missed that face of his, the old experienced weasel. He was looking over the ground for Ciro’s Menagerie — they’ll all be down next year. I suspected Mrs. Abrams was a sort of outpost.”
“And Baby was outraged the first summer we came here.”
“They don’t really give a damn where they are, so I don’t see why they don’t stay and freeze in Deauville.”
“Can’t we start rumors about cholera or something?”
“I told Bartholomew that some categories died off like flies here — I told him the life of a suck was as short as the life of a machine-gunner in the war.”
“You didn’t.”
“No, I didn’t,” he admitted. “He was very pleasant. It was a beautiful sight, he and I shaking hands there on the boulevard. The meeting of Sigmund Freud and Ward McAllister.”
Dick didn’t want to talk — he wanted to be alone so that his thoughts about work and the future would overpower his thoughts of love and to-day. Nicole knew about it but only darkly and tragically, hating him a little in an animal way, yet wanting to rub against his shoulder.
“The darling,” Dick said lightly.
He went into the house, forgetting something he wanted to do there, and then remembering it was the piano. He sat down whistling and played by ear:
“Just picture you upon my knee
With tea for two and two for tea
And me for you and you for me —”
Through the melody flowed a sudden realization that Nicole, hearing it, would guess quickly at a nostalgia for the past fortnight. He broke off with a casual chord and left the piano.
It was hard to know where to go. He glanced about the house that Nicole had made, that Nicole’s grandfather had paid for. He owned only his work house and the ground on which it stood. Out of three thousand a year and what dribbled in from his publications he paid for his clothes and personal expenses, for cellar charges, and for Lanier’s education, so far confined to a nurse’s wage. Never had a move been contemplated without Dick’s figuring his share. Living rather ascetically, travelling third-class when he was alone, with the cheapest wine, and good care of his clothes, and penalizing himself for any extravagances, he maintained a qualified financial independence. After a certain point, though, it was difficult — again and again it was necessary to decide together as to the uses to which Nicole’s money should be put. Naturally Nicole, wanting to own him, wanting him to stand still forever, encouraged any slackness on his part, and in multiplying ways he was constantly inundated by a trickling of goods and money. The inception of the idea of the cliff villa which they had elaborated as a fantasy one day was a typical example of the forces divorcing them from the first simple arrangements in Zurich.
“Wouldn’t it be fun if —” it had been; and then, “Won’t it be fun when —”
It was not so much fun. His work became confused with Nicole’s problems; in addition, her income had increased so fast of late that it seemed to belittle his work. Also, for the purpose of her cure, he had for many years pretended to a rigid domesticity from which he was drifting away, and this pretense became more arduous in this effortless immobility, in which he was inevitably subjected to microscopic examination. When Dick could no longer play what he wanted to play on the piano, it was an indication that life was being refined down to a point. He stayed in the big room a long time listening to the buzz of the electric clock, listening to time.
In November the waves grew black and dashed over the sea wall onto the shore road — such summer life as had survived disappeared and the beaches were melancholy and desolate under the mistral and rain. Gausse’s Hotel was closed for repairs and enlargement and the scaffolding of the summer Casino at Juan les Pins grew larger and more formidable. Going into Cannes or Nice, Dick and Nicole met new people — members of orchestras, restaurateurs, horticultural enthusiasts, shipbuilders — for Dick had bought an old dinghy — and members of the Syndicat d’Initiative. They knew their servants well and gave thought to the children’s education. In December, Nicole seemed well-knit again; when a month had passed without tension, without the tight mouth, the unmotivated smile, the unfathomable remark, they went to the Swiss Alps for the Christmas holidays.
With his cap, Dick slapped the snow from his dark blue ski-suit before going inside. The great hall, its floor pockmarked by two decades of hobnails, was cleared for the tea dance, and four-score young Americans, domiciled in schools near Gstaad, bounced about to the frolic of “Don’t Bring Lulu,” or exploded violently with the first percussions of the Charleston. It was a colony of the young, simple, and expensive — the Sturmtruppen of the rich were at St. Moritz. Baby Warren felt that she had made a gesture of renunciation in joining the Divers here.
Dick picked out the two sisters easily across the delicately haunted, soft-swaying room — they were poster-like, formidable in their snow costumes, Nicole’s of cerulean blue, Baby’s of brick red. The young Englishman was talking to them; but they were paying no attention, lulled to the staring point by the adolescent dance.
Nicole’s snow-warm face lighted up further as she saw Dick. “Where is he?”
“He missed the train — I’m meeting him later.” Dick sat down, swinging a heavy boot over his knee. “You two look very striking together. Every once in a while I forget we’re in the same party and get a big shock at seeing you.”
Baby was a tall, fine-looking woman, deeply engaged in being almost thirty. Symptomatically she had pulled two men with her from London, one scarcely down from Cambridge, one old and hard with Victorian lecheries. Baby had certain spinsters’ characteristics — she was alien from touch, she started if she was touched suddenly, and such lingering touches as kisses and embraces slipped directly through the flesh into the forefront of her consciousness. She made few gestures with her trunk, her body proper — instead, she stamped her foot and tossed her head in almost an old-fashioned way. She relished the foretaste of death, prefigured by the catastrophes of friends — persistently she clung to the idea of Nicole’s tragic destiny.
Baby’s younger Englishman had been chaperoning the women down appropriate inclines and harrowing them on the bob-run. Dick, having turned an ankle in a too ambitious telemark, loafed gratefully about the “nursery slope” with the children or drank kvass with a Russian doctor at the hotel.
“Please be happy, Dick,” Nicole urged him. “Why don’t you meet some of these ickle durls and dance with them in the afternoon?”
“What would I say to them?”
Her low almost harsh voice rose a few notes, simulating a plaintive coquetry: “Say: ‘Ickle durl, oo is de pwettiest sing.’ What do you think you say?”
“I don’t like ickle durls. They smell of castile soap and peppermint. When I dance with them, I feel as if I’m pushing a baby carriage.”
It was a dangerous subject — he was careful, to the point of self- consciousness, to stare far over the heads of young maidens.
“There’s a lot of business,” said Baby. “First place, there’s news from home — the property we used to call the station property. The railroads only bought the centre of it at first. Now they’ve bought the rest, and it belonged to Mother. It’s a question of investing the money.”
Pretending to be repelled by this gross turn in the conversation, the Englishman made for a girl on the floor. Following him for an instant with the uncertain eyes of an American girl in the grip of a life-long Anglophilia, Baby continued defiantly:
“It’s a lot of money. It’s three hundred thousand apiece. I keep an eye on my own investments but Nicole doesn’t know anything about securities, and I don’t suppose you do either.”
“I’ve got to meet the train,” Dick said evasively.
Outside he inhaled damp snowflakes that he could no longer see against the darkening sky. Three children sledding past shouted a warning in some strange language; he heard them yell at the next bend and a little farther on he heard sleigh-bells coming up the hill in the dark. The holiday station glittered with expectancy, boys and girls waiting for new boys and girls, and by the time the train arrived, Dick had caught the rhythm, and pretended to Franz Gregorovius that he was clipping off a half-hour from an endless roll of pleasures. But Franz had some intensity of purpose at the moment that fought through any superimposition of mood on Dick’s part. “I may get up to Zurich for a day,” Dick had written, “or you can manage to come to Lausanne.” Franz had managed to come all the way to Gstaad.
He was forty. Upon his healthy maturity reposed a set of pleasant official manners, but he was most at home in a somewhat stuffy safety from which he could despise the broken rich whom he re- educated. His scientific heredity might have bequeathed him a wider world but he seemed to have deliberately chosen the standpoint of an humbler class, a choice typified by his selection of a wife. At the hotel Baby Warren made a quick examination of him, and failing to find any of the hall-marks she respected, the subtler virtues or courtesies by which the privileged classes recognized one another, treated him thereafter with her second manner. Nicole was always a little afraid of him. Dick liked him, as he liked his friends, without reservations.
For the evening they were sliding down the hill into the village, on those little sleds which serve the same purpose as gondolas do in Venice. Their destination was a hotel with an old-fashioned Swiss tap-room, wooden and resounding, a room of clocks, kegs, steins, and antlers. Many parties at long tables blurred into one great party and ate fondue — a peculiarly indigestible form of Welsh rarebit, mitigated by hot spiced wine.
It was jolly in the big room; the younger Englishman remarked it and Dick conceded that there was no other word. With the pert heady wine he relaxed and pretended that the world was all put together again by the gray-haired men of the golden nineties who shouted old glees at the piano, by the young voices and the bright costumes toned into the room by the swirling smoke. For a moment he felt that they were in a ship with landfall just ahead; in the faces of all the girls was the same innocent expectation of the possibilities inherent in the situation and the night. He looked to see if that special girl was there and got an impression that she was at the table behind them — then he forgot her and invented a rigmarole and tried to make his party have a good time.
“I must talk to you,” said Franz in English. “I have only twenty- four hours to spend here.”
“I suspected you had something on your mind.”
“I have a plan that is — so marvellous.” His hand fell upon Dick’s knee. “I have a plan that will be the making of us two.”
“Well?”
“Dick — there is a clinic we could have together — the old clinic of Braun on the Zugersee. The plant is all modern except for a few points. He is sick — he wants to go up in Austria, to die probably. It is a chance that is just insuperable. You and me — what a pair! Now don’t say anything yet until I finish.”
From the yellow glint in Baby’s eyes, Dick saw she was listening.
“We must undertake it together. It would not bind you too tight — it would give you a base, a laboratory, a centre. You could stay in residence say no more than half the year, when the weather is fine. In winter you could go to France or America and write your texts fresh from clinical experience.” He lowered his voice. “And for the convalescence in your family, there are the atmosphere and regularity of the clinic at hand.” Dick’s expression did not encourage this note so Franz dropped it with the punctuation of his tongue leaving his lip quickly. “We could be partners. I the executive manager, you the theoretician, the brilliant consultant and all that. I know myself — I know I have no genius and you have. But, in my way, I am thought very capable; I am utterly competent at the most modern clinical methods. Sometimes for months I have served as the practical head of the old clinic. The professor says this plan is excellent, he advises me to go ahead. He says he is going to live forever, and work up to the last minute.”
Dick formed imaginary pictures of the prospect as a preliminary to any exercise of judgment.
“What’s the financial angle?” he asked.
Franz threw up his chin, his eyebrows, the transient wrinkles of his forehead, his hands, his elbows, his shoulders; he strained up the muscles of his legs, so that the cloth of his trousers bulged, pushed up his heart into his throat and his voice into the roof of his mouth.
“There we have it! Money!” he bewailed. “I have little money. The price in American money is two hundred thousand dollars. The innovation — ary —” he tasted the coinage doubtfully, “— steps, that you will agree are necessary, will cost twenty thousand dollars American. But the clinic is a gold mine — I tell you, I haven’t seen the books. For an investment of two hundred and twenty thousand dollars we have an assured income of —”
Baby’s curiosity was such that Dick brought her into the conversation.
“In your experience, Baby,” he demanded, “have you found that when a European wants to see an American VERY pressingly it is invariably something concerned with money?”
“What is it?” she said innocently.
“This young Privat-dozent thinks that he and I ought to launch into big business and try to attract nervous breakdowns from America.”
Worried, Franz stared at Baby as Dick continued:
“But who are we, Franz? You bear a big name and I’ve written two textbooks. Is that enough to attract anybody? And I haven’t got that much money — I haven’t got a tenth of it.” Franz smiled cynically. “Honestly I haven’t. Nicole and Baby are rich as Croesus but I haven’t managed to get my hands on any of it yet.”
They were all listening now — Dick wondered if the girl at the table behind was listening too. The idea attracted him. He decided to let Baby speak for him, as one often lets women raise their voices over issues that are not in their hands. Baby became suddenly her grandfather, cool and experimental.
“I think it’s a suggestion you ought to consider, Dick. I don’t know what Doctor Gregory was saying — but it seems to me —”
Behind him the girl had leaned forward into a smoke ring and was picking up something from the floor. Nicole’s face, fitted into his own across the table — her beauty, tentatively nesting and posing, flowed into his love, ever braced to protect it.
“Consider it, Dick,” Franz urged excitedly. “When one writes on psychiatry, one should have actual clinical contacts. Jung writes, Bleuler writes, Freud writes, Forel writes, Adler writes — also they are in constant contact with mental disorder.”
“Dick has me,” laughed Nicole. “I should think that’d be enough mental disorder for one man.”
“That’s different,” said Franz cautiously.
Baby was thinking that if Nicole lived beside a clinic she would always feel quite safe about her.
“We must think it over carefully,” she said.
Though amused at her insolence, Dick did not encourage it.
“The decision concerns me, Baby,” he said gently. “It’s nice of you to want to buy me a clinic.”
Realizing she had meddled, Baby withdrew hurriedly:
“Of course, it’s entirely your affair.”
“A thing as important as this will take weeks to decide. I wonder how I like the picture of Nicole and me anchored to Zurich —” He turned to Franz, anticipating: “— I know. Zurich has a gashouse and running water and electric light — I lived there three years.”
“I will leave you to think it over,” said Franz. “I am confident —”
One hundred pair of five-pound boots had begun to clump toward the door, and they joined the press. Outside in the crisp moonlight, Dick saw the girl tying her sled to one of the sleighs ahead. They piled into their own sleigh and at the crisp-cracking whips the horses strained, breasting the dark air. Past them figures ran and scrambled, the younger ones shoving each other from sleds and runners, landing in the soft snow, then panting after the horses to drop exhausted on a sled or wail that they were abandoned. On either side the fields were beneficently tranquil; the space through which the cavalcade moved was high and limitless. In the country there was less noise as though they were all listening atavistically for wolves in the wide snow.
In Saanen, they poured into the municipal dance, crowded with cow herders, hotel servants, shop-keepers, ski teachers, guides, tourists, peasants. To come into the warm enclosed place after the pantheistic animal feeling without, was to reassume some absurd and impressive knightly name, as thunderous as spurred boots in war, as football cleats on the cement of a locker-room floor. There was conventional yodelling, and the familiar rhythm of it separated Dick from what he had first found romantic in the scene. At first he thought it was because he had hounded the girl out of his consciousness; then it came to him under the form of what Baby had said: “We must think it over carefully —” and the unsaid lines back of that: “We own you, and you’ll admit it sooner or later. It is absurd to keep up the pretense of independence.”
It had been years since Dick had bottled up malice against a creature — since freshman year at New Haven when he had come upon a popular essay about “mental hygiene.” Now he lost his temper at Baby and simultaneously tried to coop it up within him, resenting her cold rich insolence. It would be hundreds of years before any emergent Amazons would ever grasp the fact that a man is vulnerable only in his pride, but delicate as Humpty-Dumpty once that is meddled with — though some of them paid the fact a cautious lip- service. Doctor Diver’s profession of sorting the broken shells of another sort of egg had given him a dread of breakage. But:
“There’s too much good manners,” he said on the way back to Gstaad in the smooth sleigh.
“Well, I think that’s nice,” said Baby.
“No, it isn’t,” he insisted to the anonymous bundle of fur. “Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves. Now, human respect — you don’t call a man a coward or a liar lightly, but if you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what SHOULD be respected in them.”
“I think Americans take their manners rather seriously,” said the elder Englishman.
“I guess so,” said Dick. “My father had the kind of manners he inherited from the days when you shot first and apologized afterward. Men armed — why, you Europeans haven’t carried arms in civil life since the beginning of the eighteenth century —”
“Not actually, perhaps —”
“Not ACT-ually. Not really.”
“Dick, you’ve always had such beautiful manners,” said Baby conciliatingly.
The women were regarding him across the zoo of robes with some alarm. The younger Englishman did not understand — he was one of the kind who were always jumping around cornices and balconies, as if they thought they were in the rigging of a ship — and filled the ride to the hotel with a preposterous story about a boxing match with his best friend in which they loved and bruised each other for an hour, always with great reserve. Dick became facetious.
“So every time he hit you you considered him an even better friend?”
“I respected him more.”
“It’s the premise I don’t understand. You and your best friend scrap about a trivial matter —”
“If you don’t understand, I can’t explain it to you,” said the young Englishman coldly.
— This is what I’ll get if I begin saying what I think, Dick said to himself.
He was ashamed at baiting the man, realizing that the absurdity of the story rested in the immaturity of the attitude combined with the sophisticated method of its narration.
The carnival spirit was strong and they went with the crowd into the grill, where a Tunisian barman manipulated the illumination in a counterpoint, whose other melody was the moon off the ice rink staring in the big windows. In that light, Dick found the girl devitalized, and uninteresting — he turned from her to enjoy the darkness, the cigarette points going green and silver when the lights shone red, the band of white that fell across the dancers as the door to the bar was opened and closed.
“Now tell me, Franz,” he demanded, “do you think after sitting up all night drinking beer, you can go back and convince your patients that you have any character? Don’t you think they’ll see you’re a gastropath?”
“I’m going to bed,” Nicole announced. Dick accompanied her to the door of the elevator.
“I’d come with you but I must show Franz that I’m not intended for a clinician.”
Nicole walked into the elevator.
“Baby has lots of common sense,” she said meditatively.
“Baby is one of —”
The door slashed shut — facing a mechanical hum, Dick finished the sentence in his mind, “— Baby is a trivial, selfish woman.”
But two days later, sleighing to the station with Franz, Dick admitted that he thought favorably upon the matter.
“We’re beginning to turn in a circle,” he admitted. “Living on this scale, there’s an unavoidable series of strains, and Nicole doesn’t survive them. The pastoral quality down on the summer Riviera is all changing anyhow — next year they’ll have a Season.”
They passed the crisp green rinks where Wiener waltzes blared and the colors of many mountain schools flashed against the pale-blue skies.
“— I hope we’ll be able to do it, Franz. There’s nobody I’d rather try it with than you —”
Good-by, Gstaad! Good-by, fresh faces, cold sweet flowers, flakes in the darkness. Good-by, Gstaad, good-by!
Dick awoke at five after a long dream of war, walked to the window and stared out it at the Zugersee. His dream had begun in sombre majesty; navy blue uniforms crossed a dark plaza behind bands playing the second movement of Prokofieff’s “Love of Three Oranges.” Presently there were fire engines, symbols of disaster, and a ghastly uprising of the mutilated in a dressing station. He turned on his bed-lamp light and made a thorough note of it ending with the half-ironic phrase: “Non-combatant’s shell-shock.”
As he sat on the side of his bed, he felt the room, the house and the night as empty. In the next room Nicole muttered something desolate and he felt sorry for whatever loneliness she was feeling in her sleep. For him time stood still and then every few years accelerated in a rush, like the quick re-wind of a film, but for Nicole the years slipped away by clock and calendar and birthday, with the added poignance of her perishable beauty.
Even this past year and a half on the Zugersee seemed wasted time for her, the seasons marked only by the workmen on the road turning pink in May, brown in July, black in September, white again in Spring. She had come out of her first illness alive with new hopes, expecting so much, yet deprived of any subsistence except Dick, bringing up children she could only pretend gently to love, guided orphans. The people she liked, rebels mostly, disturbed her and were bad for her — she sought in them the vitality that had made them independent or creative or rugged, sought in vain — for their secrets were buried deep in childhood struggles they had forgotten. They were more interested in Nicole’s exterior harmony and charm, the other face of her illness. She led a lonely life owning Dick who did not want to be owned.
Many times he had tried unsuccessfully to let go his hold on her. They had many fine times together, fine talks between the loves of the white nights, but always when he turned away from her into himself he left her holding Nothing in her hands and staring at it, calling it many names, but knowing it was only the hope that he would come back soon.
He scrunched his pillow hard, lay down, and put the back of his neck against it as a Japanese does to slow the circulation, and slept again for a time. Later, while he shaved, Nicole awoke and marched around, giving abrupt, succinct orders to children and servants. Lanier came in to watch his father shave — living beside a psychiatric clinic he had developed an extraordinary confidence in and admiration for his father, together with an exaggerated indifference toward most other adults; the patients appeared to him either in their odd aspects, or else as devitalized, over-correct creatures without personality. He was a handsome, promising boy and Dick devoted much time to him, in the relationship of a sympathetic but exacting officer and respectful enlisted man.
“Why,” Lanier asked, “do you always leave a little lather on the top of your hair when you shave?”
Cautiously Dick parted soapy lips: “I have never been able to find out. I’ve often wondered. I think it’s because I get the first finger soapy when I make the line of my side-burn, but how it gets up on top of my head I don’t know.”
“I’m going to watch it all to-morrow.”
“That’s your only question before breakfast?”
“I don’t really call it a question.”
“That’s one on you.”
Half an hour later Dick started up to the administration building. He was thirty-eight — still declining a beard he yet had a more medical aura about him than he had worn upon the Riviera. For eighteen months now he had lived at the clinic — certainly one of the best-appointed in Europe. Like Dohmler’s it was of the modern type — no longer a single dark and sinister building but a small, scattered, yet deceitfully integrated village — Dick and Nicole had added much in the domain of taste, so that the plant was a thing of beauty, visited by every psychologist passing through Zurich. With the addition of a caddy house it might very well have been a country club. The Eglantine and the Beeches, houses for those sunk into eternal darkness, were screened by little copses from the main building, camouflaged strong-points. Behind was a large truck farm, worked partly by the patients. The workshops for ergo- therapy were three, placed under a single roof and there Doctor Diver began his morning’s inspection. The carpentry shop, full of sunlight, exuded the sweetness of sawdust, of a lost age of wood; always half a dozen men were there, hammering, planing, buzzing — silent men, who lifted solemn eyes from their work as he passed through. Himself a good carpenter, he discussed with them the efficiency of some tools for a moment in a quiet, personal, interested voice. Adjoining was the book-bindery, adapted to the most mobile of patients who were not always, however, those who had the greatest chance for recovery. The last chamber was devoted to beadwork, weaving and work in brass. The faces of the patients here wore the expression of one who had just sighed profoundly, dismissing something insoluble — but their sighs only marked the beginning of another ceaseless round of ratiocination, not in a line as with normal people but in the same circle. Round, round, and round. Around forever. But the bright colors of the stuffs they worked with gave strangers a momentary illusion that all was well, as in a kindergarten. These patients brightened as Doctor Diver came in. Most of them liked him better than they liked Doctor Gregorovius. Those who had once lived in the great world invariably liked him better. There were a few who thought he neglected them, or that he was not simple, or that he posed. Their responses were not dissimilar to those that Dick evoked in non- professional life, but here they were warped and distorted.
One Englishwoman spoke to him always about a subject which she considered her own.
“Have we got music to-night?”
“I don’t know,” he answered. “I haven’t seen Doctor Ladislau. How did you enjoy the music that Mrs. Sachs and Mr. Longstreet gave us last night?”
“It was so-so.”
“I thought it was fine — especially the Chopin.”
“I thought it was so-so.”
“When are you going to play for us yourself?”
She shrugged her shoulders, as pleased at this question as she had been for several years.
“Some time. But I only play so-so.”
They knew that she did not play at all — she had had two sisters who were brilliant musicians, but she had never been able to learn the notes when they had been young together.
From the workshop Dick went to visit the Eglantine and the Beeches. Exteriorly these houses were as cheerful as the others; Nicole had designed the decoration and the furniture on a necessary base of concealed grills and bars and immovable furniture. She had worked with so much imagination — the inventive quality, which she lacked, being supplied by the problem itself — that no instructed visitor would have dreamed that the light, graceful filagree work at a window was a strong, unyielding end of a tether, that the pieces reflecting modern tubular tendencies were stancher than the massive creations of the Edwardians — even the flowers lay in iron fingers and every casual ornament and fixture was as necessary as a girder in a skyscraper. Her tireless eyes had made each room yield up its greatest usefulness. Complimented, she referred to herself brusquely as a master plumber.
For those whose compasses were not depolarized there seemed many odd things in these houses. Doctor Diver was often amused in the Eglantine, the men’s building — here there was a strange little exhibitionist who thought that if he could walk unclothed and unmolested from the êtoile to the Place de la Concorde he would solve many things — and, perhaps, Dick thought, he was quite right.
His most interesting case was in the main building. The patient was a woman of thirty who had been in the clinic six months; she was an American painter who had lived long in Paris. They had no very satisfactory history of her. A cousin had happened upon her all mad and gone and after an unsatisfactory interlude at one of the whoopee cures that fringed the city, dedicated largely to tourist victims of drug and drink, he had managed to get her to Switzerland. On her admittance she had been exceptionally pretty — now she was a living agonizing sore. All blood tests had failed to give a positive reaction and the trouble was unsatisfactorily catalogued as nervous eczema. For two months she had lain under it, as imprisoned as in the Iron Maiden. She was coherent, even brilliant, within the limits of her special hallucinations.
She was particularly his patient. During spells of overexcitement he was the only doctor who could “do anything with her.” Several weeks ago, on one of many nights that she had passed in sleepless torture Franz had succeeded in hypnotizing her into a few hours of needed rest, but he had never again succeeded. Hypnosis was a tool that Dick had distrusted and seldom used, for he knew that he could not always summon up the mood in himself — he had once tried it on Nicole and she had scornfully laughed at him.
The woman in room twenty could not see him when he came in — the area about her eyes was too tightly swollen. She spoke in a strong, rich, deep, thrilling voice.
“How long will this last? Is it going to be forever?”
“It’s not going to be very long now. Doctor Ladislau tells me there are whole areas cleared up.”
“If I knew what I had done to deserve this I could accept it with equanimity.”
“It isn’t wise to be mystical about it — we recognize it as a nervous phenomenon. It’s related to the blush — when you were a girl, did you blush easily?”
She lay with her face turned to the ceiling.
“I have found nothing to blush for since I cut my wisdom teeth.”
“Haven’t you committed your share of petty sins and mistakes?”
“I have nothing to reproach myself with.”
“You’re very fortunate.”
The woman thought a moment; her voice came up through her bandaged face afflicted with subterranean melodies:
“I’m sharing the fate of the women of my time who challenged men to battle.”
“To your vast surprise it was just like all battles,” he answered, adopting her formal diction.
“Just like all battles.” She thought this over. “You pick a set- up, or else win a Pyrrhic victory, or you’re wrecked and ruined — you’re a ghostly echo from a broken wall.”
“You are neither wrecked nor ruined,” he told her. “Are you quite sure you’ve been in a real battle?”
“Look at me!” she cried furiously.
“You’ve suffered, but many women suffered before they mistook themselves for men.” It was becoming an argument and he retreated. “In any case you mustn’t confuse a single failure with a final defeat.”
She sneered. “Beautiful words,” and the phrase transpiring up through the crust of pain humbled him.
“We would like to go into the true reasons that brought you here —” he began but she interrupted.
“I am here as a symbol of something. I thought perhaps you would know what it was.”
“You are sick,” he said mechanically.
“Then what was it I had almost found?”
“A greater sickness.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all.” With disgust he heard himself lying, but here and now the vastness of the subject could only be compressed into a lie. “Outside of that there’s only confusion and chaos. I won’t lecture to you — we have too acute a realization of your physical suffering. But it’s only by meeting the problems of every day, no matter how trifling and boring they seem, that you can make things drop back into place again. After that — perhaps you’ll be able again to examine —”
He had slowed up to avoid the inevitable end of his thought: “— the frontiers of consciousness.” The frontiers that artists must explore were not for her, ever. She was fine-spun, inbred — eventually she might find rest in some quiet mysticism. Exploration was for those with a measure of peasant blood, those with big thighs and thick ankles who could take punishment as they took bread and salt, on every inch of flesh and spirit.
— Not for you, he almost said. It’s too tough a game for you.
Yet in the awful majesty of her pain he went out to her unreservedly, almost sexually. He wanted to gather her up in his arms, as he so often had Nicole, and cherish even her mistakes, so deeply were they part of her. The orange light through the drawn blind, the sarcophagus of her figure on the bed, the spot of face, the voice searching the vacuity of her illness and finding only remote abstractions.
As he arose the tears fled lava-like into her bandages.
“That is for something,” she whispered. “Something must come out of it.”
He stooped and kissed her forehead.
“We must all try to be good,” he said.
Leaving her room he sent the nurse in to her. There were other patients to see: an American girl of fifteen who had been brought up on the basis that childhood was intended to be all fun — his visit was provoked by the fact that she had just hacked off all her hair with a nail scissors. There was nothing much to be done for her — a family history of neurosis and nothing stable in her past to build on. The father, normal and conscientious himself, had tried to protect a nervous brood from life’s troubles and had succeeded merely in preventing them from developing powers of adjustment to life’s inevitable surprises. There was little that Dick could say: “Helen, when you’re in doubt you must ask a nurse, you must learn to take advice. Promise me you will.”
What was a promise with the head sick? He looked in upon a frail exile from the Caucasus buckled securely in a sort of hammock which in turn was submerged in a warm medical bath, and upon the three daughters of a Portuguese general who slid almost imperceptibly toward paresis. He went into the room next to them and told a collapsed psychiatrist that he was better, always better, and the man tried to read his face for conviction, since he hung on the real world only through such reassurance as he could find in the resonance, or lack of it, in Doctor Diver’s voice. After that Dick discharged a shiftless orderly and by then it was the lunch hour.
Meals with the patients were a chore he approached with apathy. The gathering, which of course did not include residents at the Eglantine or the Beeches, was conventional enough at first sight, but over it brooded always a heavy melancholy. Such doctors as were present kept up a conversation but most of the patients, as if exhausted by their morning’s endeavor, or depressed by the company, spoke little, and ate looking into their plates.
Luncheon over, Dick returned to his villa. Nicole was in the salon wearing a strange expression.
“Read that,” she said.
He opened the letter. It was from a woman recently discharged, though with skepticism on the part of the faculty. It accused him in no uncertain terms of having seduced her daughter, who had been at her mother’s side during the crucial stage of the illness. It presumed that Mrs. Diver would be glad to have this information and learn what her husband was “really like.”
Dick read the letter again. Couched in clear and concise English he yet recognized it as the letter of a maniac. Upon a single occasion he had let the girl, a flirtatious little brunette, ride into Zurich with him, upon her request, and in the evening had brought her back to the clinic. In an idle, almost indulgent way, he kissed her. Later, she tried to carry the affair further, but he was not interested and subsequently, probably consequently, the girl had come to dislike him, and taken her mother away.
“This letter is deranged,” he said. “I had no relations of any kind with that girl. I didn’t even like her.”
“Yes, I’ve tried thinking that,” said Nicole.
“Surely you don’t believe it?”
“I’ve been sitting here.”
He sank his voice to a reproachful note and sat beside her.
“This is absurd. This is a letter from a mental patient.”
“I was a mental patient.”
He stood up and spoke more authoritatively.
“Suppose we don’t have any nonsense, Nicole. Go and round up the children and we’ll start.”
In the car, with Dick driving, they followed the little promontories of the lake, catching the burn of light and water in the windshield, tunnelling through cascades of evergreen. It was Dick’s car, a Renault so dwarfish that they all stuck out of it except the children, between whom Mademoiselle towered mastlike in the rear seat. They knew every kilometer of the road — where they would smell the pine needles and the black stove smoke. A high sun with a face traced on it beat fierce on the straw hats of the children.
Nicole was silent; Dick was uneasy at her straight hard gaze. Often he felt lonely with her, and frequently she tired him with the short floods of personal revelations that she reserved exclusively for him, “I’m like this — I’m more like that,” but this afternoon he would have been glad had she rattled on in staccato for a while and given him glimpses of her thoughts. The situation was always most threatening when she backed up into herself and closed the doors behind her.
At Zug Mademoiselle got out and left them. The Divers approached the Agiri Fair through a menagerie of mammoth steamrollers that made way for them. Dick parked the car, and as Nicole looked at him without moving, he said: “Come on, darl.” Her lips drew apart into a sudden awful smile, and his belly quailed, but as if he hadn’t seen it he repeated: “Come on. So the children can get out.”
“Oh, I’ll come all right,” she answered, tearing the words from some story spinning itself out inside her, too fast for him to grasp. “Don’t worry about that. I’ll come —”
“Then come.”
She turned from him as he walked beside her but the smile still flickered across her face, derisive and remote. Only when Lanier spoke to her several times did she manage to fix her attention upon an object, a Punch-and-Judy show, and to orient herself by anchoring to it.
Dick tried to think what to do. The dualism in his views of her — that of the husband, that of the psychiatrist — was increasingly paralyzing his faculties. In these six years she had several times carried him over the line with her, disarming him by exciting emotional pity or by a flow of wit, fantastic and disassociated, so that only after the episode did he realize with the consciousness of his own relaxation from tension, that she had succeeded in getting a point against his better judgment.
A discussion with Topsy about the guignol — as to whether the Punch was the same Punch they had seen last year in Cannes — having been settled, the family walked along again between the booths under the open sky. The women’s bonnets, perching over velvet vests, the bright, spreading skirts of many cantons, seemed demure against the blue and orange paint of the wagons and displays. There was the sound of a whining, tinkling hootchy-kootchy show.
Nicole began to run very suddenly, so suddenly that for a moment Dick did not miss her. Far ahead he saw her yellow dress twisting through the crowd, an ochre stitch along the edge of reality and unreality, and started after her. Secretly she ran and secretly he followed. As the hot afternoon went shrill and terrible with her flight he had forgotten the children; then he wheeled and ran back to them, drawing them this way and that by their arms, his eyes jumping from booth to booth.
“Madame,” he cried to a young woman behind a white lottery wheel, “Est-ce que je peux laisser ces petits avec vous deux minutes? C’est très urgent — je vous donnerai dix francs.”
“Mais oui.”
He headed the children into the booth. “Alors — restez avec cette gentille dame.”
“Oui, Dick.”
He darted off again but he had lost her; he circled the merry-go- round keeping up with it till he realized he was running beside it, staring always at the same horse. He elbowed through the crowd in the buvette; then remembering a predilection of Nicole’s he snatched up an edge of a fortuneteller’s tent and peered within. A droning voice greeted him: “La septième fille d’une septième fille née sur les rives du Nil — entrez, Monsieur —”
Dropping the flap he ran along toward where the plaisance terminated at the lake and a small ferris wheel revolved slowly against the sky. There he found her.
She was alone in what was momentarily the top boat of the wheel, and as it descended he saw that she was laughing hilariously; he slunk back in the crowd, a crowd which, at the wheel’s next revolution, spotted the intensity of Nicole’s hysteria.
“Regardez-moi ?a!”
“Regarde donc cette Anglaise!”
Down she dropped again — this time the wheel and its music were slowing and a dozen people were around her car, all of them impelled by the quality of her laughter to smile in sympathetic idiocy. But when Nicole saw Dick her laughter died — she made a gesture of slipping by and away from him but he caught her arm and held it as they walked away.
“Why did you lose control of yourself like that?”
“You know very well why.”
“No, I don’t.”
“That’s just preposterous — let me loose — that’s an insult to my intelligence. Don’t you think I saw that girl look at you — that little dark girl. Oh, this is farcical — a child, not more than fifteen. Don’t you think I saw?”
“Stop here a minute and quiet down.”
They sat at a table, her eyes in a profundity of suspicion, her hand moving across her line of sight as if it were obstructed. “I want a drink — I want a brandy.”
“You can’t have brandy — you can have a bock if you want it.”
“Why can’t I have a brandy?”
“We won’t go into that. Listen to me — this business about a girl is a delusion, do you understand that word?”
“It’s always a delusion when I see what you don’t want me to see.”
He had a sense of guilt as in one of those nightmares where we are accused of a crime which we recognize as something undeniably experienced, but which upon waking we realize we have not committed. His eyes wavered from hers.
“I left the children with a gypsy woman in a booth. We ought to get them.”
“Who do you think you are?” she demanded. “Svengali?”
Fifteen minutes ago they had been a family. Now as she was crushed into a corner by his unwilling shoulder, he saw them all, child and man, as a perilous accident.
“We’re going home.”
“Home!” she roared in a voice so abandoned that its louder tones wavered and cracked. “And sit and think that we’re all rotting and the children’s ashes are rotting in every box I open? That filth!”
Almost with relief he saw that her words sterilized her, and Nicole, sensitized down to the corium of the skin, saw the withdrawal in his face. Her own face softened and she begged, “Help me, help me, Dick!”
A wave of agony went over him. It was awful that such a fine tower should not be erected, only suspended, suspended from him. Up to a point that was right: men were for that, beam and idea, girder and logarithm; but somehow Dick and Nicole had become one and equal, not opposite and complementary; she was Dick too, the drought in the marrow of his bones. He could not watch her disintegrations without participating in them. His intuition rilled out of him as tenderness and compassion — he could only take the characteristically modern course, to interpose — he would get a nurse from Zurich, to take her over to-night.
“You CAN help me.”
Her sweet bullying pulled him forward off his feet. “You’ve helped me before — you can help me now.”
“I can only help you the same old way.”
“Some one can help me.”
“Maybe so. You can help yourself most. Let’s find the children.”
There were numerous lottery booths with white wheels — Dick was startled when he inquired at the first and encountered blank disavowals. Evil-eyed, Nicole stood apart, denying the children, resenting them as part of a downright world she sought to make amorphous. Presently Dick found them, surrounded by women who were examining them with delight like fine goods, and by peasant children staring.
“Merci, Monsieur, ah Monsieur est trop généreux. C’était un plaisir, M’sieur, Madame. Au revoir, mes petits.”
They started back with a hot sorrow streaming down upon them; the car was weighted with their mutual apprehension and anguish, and the children’s mouths were grave with disappointment. Grief presented itself in its terrible, dark unfamiliar color. Somewhere around Zug, Nicole, with a convulsive effort, reiterated a remark she had made before about a misty yellow house set back from the road that looked like a painting not yet dry, but it was just an attempt to catch at a rope that was playing out too swiftly.
Dick tried to rest — the struggle would come presently at home and he might have to sit a long time, restating the universe for her. A “schizophrêne” is well named as a split personality — Nicole was alternately a person to whom nothing need be explained and one to whom nothing COULD be explained. It was necessary to treat her with active and affirmative insistence, keeping the road to reality always open, making the road to escape harder going. But the brilliance, the versatility of madness is akin to the resourcefulness of water seeping through, over and around a dike. It requires the united front of many people to work against it. He felt it necessary that this time Nicole cure herself; he wanted to wait until she remembered the other times, and revolted from them. In a tired way, he planned that they would again resume the régime relaxed a year before.
He had turned up a hill that made a short cut to the clinic, and now as he stepped on the accelerator for a short straightaway run parallel to the hillside the car swerved violently left, swerved right, tipped on two wheels and, as Dick, with Nicole’s voice screaming in his ear, crushed down the mad hand clutching the steering wheel, righted itself, swerved once more and shot off the road; it tore through low underbrush, tipped again and settled slowly at an angle of ninety degrees against a tree.
The children were screaming and Nicole was screaming and cursing and trying to tear at Dick’s face. Thinking first of the list of the car and unable to estimate it Dick bent away Nicole’s arm, climbed over the top side and lifted out the children; then he saw the car was in a stable position. Before doing anything else he stood there shaking and panting.
“You —!” he cried.
She was laughing hilariously, unashamed, unafraid, unconcerned. No one coming on the scene would have imagined that she had caused it; she laughed as after some mild escape of childhood.
“You were scared, weren’t you?” she accused him. “You wanted to live!”
She spoke with such force that in his shocked state Dick wondered if he had been frightened for himself — but the strained faces of the children, looking from parent to parent, made him want to grind her grinning mask into jelly.
Directly above them, half a kilometer by the winding road but only a hundred yards climbing, was an inn; one of its wings showed through the wooded hill.
“Take Topsy’s hand,” he said to Lanier, “like that, tight, and climb up that hill — see the little path? When you get to the inn tell them ‘La voiture Divare est cassée.’ Some one must come right down.”
Lanier, not sure what had happened, but suspecting the dark and unprecedented, asked:
“What will you do, Dick?”
“We’ll stay here with the car.”
Neither of them looked at their mother as they started off. “Be careful crossing the road up there! Look both ways!” Dick shouted after them.
He and Nicole looked at each other directly, their eyes like blazing windows across a court of the same house. Then she took out a compact, looked in its mirror, and smoothed back the temple hair. Dick watched the children climbing for a moment until they disappeared among the pines half way up; then he walked around the car to see the damage and plan how to get it back on the road. In the dirt he could trace the rocking course they had pursued for over a hundred feet; he was filled with a violent disgust that was not like anger.
In a few minutes the proprietor of the inn came running down.
“My God!” he exclaimed. “How did it happen, were you going fast? What luck! Except for that tree you’d have rolled down hill!”
Taking advantage of Emile’s reality, the wide black apron, the sweat upon the rolls of his face, Dick signalled to Nicole in a matter-of-fact way to let him help her from the car; whereupon she jumped over the lower side, lost her balance on the slope, fell to her knees and got up again. As she watched the men trying to move the car her expression became defiant. Welcoming even that mood Dick said:
“Go and wait with the children, Nicole.”
Only after she had gone did he remember that she had wanted cognac, and that there was cognac available up there — he told Emile never mind about the car; they would wait for the chauffeur and the big car to pull it up onto the road. Together they hurried up to the inn.
“I want to go away,” he told Franz. “For a month or so, for as long as I can.”
“Why not, Dick? That was our original arrangement — it was you who insisted on staying. If you and Nicole —”
“I don’t want to go away with Nicole. I want to go away alone. This last thing knocked me sideways — if I get two hours’ sleep in twenty-four, it’s one of Zwingli’s miracles.”
“You wish a real leave of abstinence.”
“The word is ‘absence.’ Look here: if I go to Berlin to the Psychiatric Congress could you manage to keep the peace? For three months she’s been all right and she likes her nurse. My God, you’re the only human being in this world I can ask this of.”
Franz grunted, considering whether or not he could be trusted to think always of his partner’s interest.
In Zurich the next week Dick drove to the airport and took the big plane for Munich. Soaring and roaring into the blue he felt numb, realizing how tired he was. A vast persuasive quiet stole over him, and he abandoned sickness to the sick, sound to the motors, direction to the pilot. He had no intention of attending so much as a single session of the congress — he could imagine it well enough, new pamphlets by Bleuler and the elder Forel that he could much better digest at home, the paper by the American who cured dementia pr?cox by pulling out his patient’s teeth or cauterizing their tonsils, the half-derisive respect with which this idea would be greeted, for no more reason than that America was such a rich and powerful country. The other delegates from America — red-headed Schwartz with his saint’s face and his infinite patience in straddling two worlds, as well as dozens of commercial alienists with hang-dog faces, who would be present partly to increase their standing, and hence their reach for the big plums of the criminal practice, partly to master novel sophistries that they could weave into their stock in trade, to the infinite confusion of all values. There would be cynical Latins, and some man of Freud’s from Vienna. Articulate among them would be the great Jung, bland, super- vigorous, on his rounds between the forests of anthropology and the neuroses of school-boys. At first there would be an American cast to the congress, almost Rotarian in its forms and ceremonies, then the closer-knit European vitality would fight through, and finally the Americans would play their trump card, the announcement of colossal gifts and endowments, of great new plants and training schools, and in the presence of the figures the Europeans would blanch and walk timidly. But he would not be there to see.
They skirted the Vorarlberg Alps, and Dick felt a pastoral delight in watching the villages. There were always four or five in sight, each one gathered around a church. It was simple looking at the earth from far off, simple as playing grim games with dolls and soldiers. This was the way statesmen and commanders and all retired people looked at things. Anyhow, it was a good draft of relief.
An Englishman spoke to him from across the aisle but he found something antipathetic in the English lately. England was like a rich man after a disastrous orgy who makes up to the household by chatting with them individually, when it is obvious to them that he is only trying to get back his self-respect in order to usurp his former power.
Dick had with him what magazines were available on the station quays: The Century, The Motion Picture, L’lllustration, and the Fliegende Bl?tter, but it was more fun to descend in his imagination into the villages and shake hands with the rural characters. He sat in the churches as he sat in his father’s church in Buffalo, amid the starchy must of Sunday clothes. He listened to the wisdom of the Near East, was Crucified, Died, and was Buried in the cheerful church, and once more worried between five or ten cents for the collection plate, because of the girl who sat in the pew behind.
The Englishman suddenly borrowed his magazines with a little small change of conversation, and Dick, glad to see them go, thought of the voyage ahead of him. Wolf-like under his sheep’s clothing of long-staple Australian wool, he considered the world of pleasure — the incorruptible Mediterranean with sweet old dirt caked in the olive trees, the peasant girl near Savona with a face as green and rose as the color of an illuminated missal. He would take her in his hands and snatch her across the border . . .
. . . but there he deserted her — he must press on toward the Isles of Greece, the cloudy waters of unfamiliar ports, the lost girl on shore, the moon of popular songs. A part of Dick’s mind was made up of the tawdry souvenirs of his boyhood. Yet in that somewhat littered Five-and-Ten, he had managed to keep alive the low painful fire of intelligence.
XVII
Tommy Barban was a ruler, Tommy was a hero — Dick happened upon him in the Marienplatz in Munich, in one of those cafés, where small gamblers diced on “tapestry” mats. The air was full of politics, and the slap of cards.
Tommy was at a table laughing his martial laugh: “Um-buh — ha-ha! Um-buh — ha-ha!” As a rule, he drank little; courage was his game and his companions were always a little afraid of him. Recently an eighth of the area of his skull had been removed by a Warsaw surgeon and was knitting under his hair, and the weakest person in the café could have killed him with a flip of a knotted napkin.
“— this is Prince Chillicheff —” A battered, powder-gray Russian of fifty, “— and Mr. McKibben — and Mr. Hannan —” the latter was a lively ball of black eyes and hair, a clown; and he said immediately to Dick:
“The first thing before we shake hands — what do you mean by fooling around with my aunt?”
“Why, I—”
“You heard me. What are you doing here in Munich anyhow?”
“Um-bah — ha-ha!” laughed Tommy.
“Haven’t you got aunts of your own? Why don’t you fool with them?”
Dick laughed, whereupon the man shifted his attack:
“Now let’s not have any more talk about aunts. How do I know you didn’t make up the whole thing? Here you are a complete stranger with an acquaintance of less than half an hour, and you come up to me with a cock-and-bull story about your aunts. How do I know what you have concealed about you?”
Tommy laughed again, then he said good-naturedly, but firmly, “That’s enough, Carly. Sit down, Dick — how’re you? How’s Nicole?”
He did not like any man very much nor feel their presence with much intensity — he was all relaxed for combat; as a fine athlete playing secondary defense in any sport is really resting much of the time, while a lesser man only pretends to rest and is at a continual and self-destroying nervous tension.
Hannan, not entirely suppressed, moved to an adjoining piano, and with recurring resentment on his face whenever he looked at Dick, played chords, from time to time muttering, “Your aunts,” and, in a dying cadence, “I didn’t say aunts anyhow. I said pants.”
“Well, how’re you?” repeated Tommy. “You don’t look so —” he fought for a word, “— so jaunty as you used to, so spruce, you know what I mean.”
The remark sounded too much like one of those irritating accusations of waning vitality and Dick was about to retort by commenting on the extraordinary suits worn by Tommy and Prince Chillicheff, suits of a cut and pattern fantastic enough to have sauntered down Beale Street on a Sunday — when an explanation was forthcoming.
“I see you are regarding our clothes,” said the Prince. “We have just come out of Russia.”
“These were made in Poland by the court tailor,” said Tommy. “That’s a fact — Pilsudski’s own tailor.”
“You’ve been touring?” Dick asked.
They laughed, the Prince inordinately meanwhile clapping Tommy on the back.
“Yes, we have been touring. That’s it, touring. We have made the grand Tour of all the Russias. In state.”
Dick waited for an explanation. It came from Mr. McKibben in two words.
“They escaped.”
“Have you been prisoners in Russia?”
“It was I,” explained Prince Chillicheff, his dead yellow eyes staring at Dick. “Not a prisoner but in hiding.”
“Did you have much trouble getting out?”
“Some trouble. We left three Red Guards dead at the border. Tommy left two —” He held up two fingers like a Frenchman —“I left one.”
“That’s the part I don’t understand,” said Mr. McKibben. “Why they should have objected to your leaving.”
Hannan turned from the piano and said, winking at the others: “Mac thinks a Marxian is somebody who went to St. Mark’s school.”
It was an escape story in the best tradition — an aristocrat hiding nine years with a former servant and working in a government bakery; the eighteen-year-old daughter in Paris who knew Tommy Barban. . . . During the narrative Dick decided that this parched papier maché relic of the past was scarcely worth the lives of three young men. The question arose as to whether Tommy and Chillicheff had been frightened.
“When I was cold,” Tommy said. “I always get scared when I’m cold. During the war I was always frightened when I was cold.”
McKibben stood up.
“I must leave. To-morrow morning I’m going to Innsbruck by car with my wife and children — and the governess.”
“I’m going there to-morrow, too,” said Dick.
“Oh, are you?” exclaimed McKibben. “Why not come with us? It’s a big Packard and there’s only my wife and my children and myself — and the governess —”
“I can’t possibly —”
“Of course she’s not really a governess,” McKibben concluded, looking rather pathetically at Dick. “As a matter of fact my wife knows your sister-in-law, Baby Warren.”
But Dick was not to be drawn in a blind contract.
“I’ve promised to travel with two men.”
“Oh,” McKibben’s face fell. “Well, I’ll say good-by.” He unscrewed two blooded wire-hairs from a nearby table and departed; Dick pictured the jammed Packard pounding toward Innsbruck with the McKibbens and their children and their baggage and yapping dogs — and the governess.
“The paper says they know the man who killed him,” said Tommy. “But his cousins did not want it in the papers, because it happened in a speakeasy. What do you think of that?”
“It’s what’s known as family pride.”
Hannan played a loud chord on the piano to attract attention to himself.
“I don’t believe his first stuff holds up,” he said. “Even barring the Europeans there are a dozen Americans can do what North did.”
It was the first indication Dick had had that they were talking about Abe North.
“The only difference is that Abe did it first,” said Tommy.
“I don’t agree,” persisted Hannan. “He got the reputation for being a good musician because he drank so much that his friends had to explain him away somehow —”
“What’s this about Abe North? What about him? Is he in a jam?”
“Didn’t you read The Herald this morning?”
“No.”
“He’s dead. He was beaten to death in a speakeasy in New York. He just managed to crawl home to the Racquet Club to die —”
“Abe North?”
“Yes, sure, they —”
“Abe North?” Dick stood up. “Are you sure he’s dead?”
Hannan turned around to McKibben: “It wasn’t the Racquet Club he crawled to — it was the Harvard Club. I’m sure he didn’t belong to the Racquet.”
“The paper said so,” McKibben insisted.
“It must have been a mistake. I’m quite sure.”
“Beaten to death in a speakeasy.”
“But I happen to know most of the members of the Racquet Club,” said Hannan. “It MUST have been the Harvard Club.”
Dick got up, Tommy too. Prince Chillicheff started out of a wan study of nothing, perhaps of his chances of ever getting out of Russia, a study that had occupied him so long that it was doubtful if he could give it up immediately, and joined them in leaving.
“Abe North beaten to death.”
On the way to the hotel, a journey of which Dick was scarcely aware, Tommy said:
“We’re waiting for a tailor to finish some suits so we can get to Paris. I’m going into stock-broking and they wouldn’t take me if I showed up like this. Everybody in your country is making millions. Are you really leaving to-morrow? We can’t even have dinner with you. It seems the Prince had an old girl in Munich. He called her up but she’d been dead five years and we’re having dinner with the two daughters.”
The Prince nodded.
“Perhaps I could have arranged for Doctor Diver.”
“No, no,” said Dick hastily.
He slept deep and awoke to a slow mournful march passing his window. It was a long column of men in uniform, wearing the familiar helmet of 1914, thick men in frock coats and silk hats, burghers, aristocrats, plain men. It was a society of veterans going to lay wreaths on the tombs of the dead. The column marched slowly with a sort of swagger for a lost magnificence, a past effort, a forgotten sorrow. The faces were only formally sad but Dick’s lungs burst for a moment with regret for Abe’s death, and his own youth of ten years ago.
He reached Innsbruck at dusk, sent his bags up to a hotel and walked into town. In the sunset the Emperor Maximilian knelt in prayer above his bronze mourners; a quartet of Jesuit novices paced and read in the university garden. The marble souvenirs of old sieges, marriages, anniversaries, faded quickly when the sun was down, and he had erbsen-suppe with würstchen cut up in it, drank four helles of Pilsener and refused a formidable dessert known as “kaiser-schmarren.”
Despite the overhanging mountains Switzerland was far away, Nicole was far away. Walking in the garden later when it was quite dark he thought about her with detachment, loving her for her best self. He remembered once when the grass was damp and she came to him on hurried feet, her thin slippers drenched with dew. She stood upon his shoes nestling close and held up her face, showing it as a book open at a page.
“Think how you love me,” she whispered. “I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night.”
But Dick had come away for his soul’s sake, and he began thinking about that. He had lost himself — he could not tell the hour when, or the day or the week, the month or the year. Once he had cut through things, solving the most complicated equations as the simplest problems of his simplest patients. Between the time he found Nicole flowering under a stone on the Zurichsee and the moment of his meeting with Rosemary the spear had been blunted.
Watching his father’s struggles in poor parishes had wedded a desire for money to an essentially unacquisitive nature. It was not a healthy necessity for security — he had never felt more sure of himself, more thoroughly his own man, than at the time of his marriage to Nicole. Yet he had been swallowed up like a gigolo, and somehow permitted his arsenal to be locked up in the Warren safety-deposit vaults.
“There should have been a settlement in the Continental style; but it isn’t over yet. I’ve wasted eight years teaching the rich the ABC’s of human decency, but I’m not done. I’ve got too many unplayed trumps in my hand.”
He loitered among the fallow rose bushes and the beds of damp sweet indistinguishable fern. It was warm for October but cool enough to wear a heavy tweed coat buttoned by a little elastic tape at the neck. A figure detached itself from the black shape of a tree and he knew it was the woman whom he had passed in the lobby coming out. He was in love with every pretty woman he saw now, their forms at a distance, their shadows on a wall.
Her back was toward him as she faced the lights of the town. He scratched a match that she must have heard, but she remained motionless.
— Was it an invitation? Or an indication of obliviousness? He had long been outside of the world of simple desires and their fulfillments, and he was inept and uncertain. For all he knew there might be some code among the wanderers of obscure spas by which they found each other quickly.
— Perhaps the next gesture was his. Strange children should smile at each other and say, “Let’s play.”
He moved closer, the shadow moved sideways. Possibly he would be snubbed like the scapegrace drummers he had heard of in youth. His heart beat loud in contact with the unprobed, undissected, unanalyzed, unaccounted for. Suddenly he turned away, and, as he did, the girl, too, broke the black frieze she made with the foliage, rounded a bench at a moderate but determined pace and took the path back to the hotel.
With a guide and two other men, Dick started up the Birkkarspitze next morning. It was a fine feeling once they were above the cowbells of the highest pastures — Dick looked forward to the night in the shack, enjoying his own fatigue, enjoying the captaincy of the guide, feeling a delight in his own anonymity. But at mid-day the weather changed to black sleet and hail and mountain thunder. Dick and one of the other climbers wanted to go on but the guide refused. Regretfully they struggled back to Innsbruck to start again to-morrow.
After dinner and a bottle of heavy local wine in the deserted dining-room, he felt excited, without knowing why, until he began thinking of the garden. He had passed the girl in the lobby before supper and this time she had looked at him and approved of him, but it kept worrying him: Why? When I could have had a good share of the pretty women of my time for the asking, why start that now? With a wraith, with a fragment of my desire? Why?
His imagination pushed ahead — the old asceticism, the actual unfamiliarity, triumphed: God, I might as well go back to the Riviera and sleep with Janice Caricamento or the Wilburhazy girl. To belittle all these years with something cheap and easy?
He was still excited, though, and he turned from the veranda and went up to his room to think. Being alone in body and spirit begets loneliness, and loneliness begets more loneliness.
Upstairs he walked around thinking of the matter and laying out his climbing clothes advantageously on the faint heater; he again encountered Nicole’s telegram, still unopened, with which diurnally she accompanied his itinerary. He had delayed opening it before supper — perhaps because of the garden. It was a cablegram from Buffalo, forwarded through Zurich.
“Your father died peacefully tonight. HOLMES.”
He felt a sharp wince at the shock, a gathering of the forces of resistance; then it rolled up through his loins and stomach and throat.
He read the message again. He sat down on the bed, breathing and staring; thinking first the old selfish child’s thought that comes with the death of a parent, how will it affect me now that this earliest and strongest of protections is gone?
The atavism passed and he walked the room still, stopping from time to time to look at the telegram. Holmes was formally his father’s curate but actually, and for a decade, rector of the church. How did he die? Of old age — he was seventy-five. He had lived a long time.
Dick felt sad that he had died alone — he had survived his wife, and his brothers and sisters; there were cousins in Virginia but they were poor and not able to come North, and Holmes had had to sign the telegram. Dick loved his father — again and again he referred judgments to what his father would probably have thought or done. Dick was born several months after the death of two young sisters and his father, guessing what would be the effect on Dick’s mother, had saved him from a spoiling by becoming his moral guide. He was of tired stock yet he raised himself to that effort.
In the summer father and son walked downtown together to have their shoes shined — Dick in his starched duck sailor suit, his father always in beautifully cut clerical clothes — and the father was very proud of his handsome little boy. He told Dick all he knew about life, not much but most of it true, simple things, matters of behavior that came within his clergyman’s range. “Once in a strange town when I was first ordained, I went into a crowded room and was confused as to who was my hostess. Several people I knew came toward me, but I disregarded them because I had seen a gray- haired woman sitting by a window far across the room. I went over to her and introduced myself. After that I made many friends in that town.”
His father had done that from a good heart — his father had been sure of what he was, with a deep pride of the two proud widows who had raised him to believe that nothing could be superior to “good instincts,” honor, courtesy, and courage.
The father always considered that his wife’s small fortune belonged to his son, and in college and in medical school sent him a check for all of it four times a year. He was one of those about whom it was said with smug finality in the gilded age: “very much the gentleman, but not much get-up-and-go about him.”
. . . Dick sent down for a newspaper. Still pacing to and from the telegram open on his bureau, he chose a ship to go to America. Then he put in a call for Nicole in Zurich, remembering so many things as he waited, and wishing he had always been as good as he had intended to be.
For an hour, tied up with his profound reaction to his father’s death, the magnificent fa?ade of the homeland, the harbor of New York, seemed all sad and glorious to Dick, but once ashore the feeling vanished, nor did he find it again in the streets or the hotels or the trains that bore him first to Buffalo, and then south to Virginia with his father’s body. Only as the local train shambled into the low-forested clayland of Westmoreland County, did he feel once more identified with his surroundings; at the station he saw a star he knew, and a cold moon bright over Chesapeake Bay; he heard the rasping wheels of buckboards turning, the lovely fatuous voices, the sound of sluggish primeval rivers flowing softly under soft Indian names.
Next day at the churchyard his father was laid among a hundred Divers, Dorseys, and Hunters. It was very friendly leaving him there with all his relations around him. Flowers were scattered on the brown unsettled earth. Dick had no more ties here now and did not believe he would come back. He knelt on the hard soil. These dead, he knew them all, their weather-beaten faces with blue flashing eyes, the spare violent bodies, the souls made of new earth in the forest-heavy darkness of the seventeenth century.
“Good-by, my father — good-by, all my fathers.”
On the long-roofed steamship piers one is in a country that is no longer here and not yet there. The hazy yellow vault is full of echoing shouts. There are the rumble of trucks and the clump of trunks, the strident chatter of cranes, the first salt smell of the sea. One hurries through, even though there’s time; the past, the continent, is behind; the future is the glowing mouth in the side of the ship; the dim, turbulent alley is too confusedly the present.
Up the gangplank and the vision of the world adjusts itself, narrows. One is a citizen of a commonwealth smaller than Andorra, no longer sure of anything. The men at the purser’s desk are as oddly shaped as the cabins; disdainful are the eyes of voyagers and their friends. Next the loud mournful whistles, the portentous vibration and the boat, the human idea — is in motion. The pier and its faces slide by and for a moment the boat is a piece accidentally split off from them; the faces become remote, voiceless, the pier is one of many blurs along the water front. The harbor flows swiftly toward the sea.
With it flowed Albert McKisco, labelled by the newspapers as its most precious cargo. McKisco was having a vogue. His novels were pastiches of the work of the best people of his time, a feat not to be disparaged, and in addition he possessed a gift for softening and debasing what he borrowed, so that many readers were charmed by the ease with which they could follow him. Success had improved him and humbled him. He was no fool about his capacities — he realized that he possessed more vitality than many men of superior talent, and he was resolved to enjoy the success he had earned. “I’ve done nothing yet,” he would say. “I don’t think I’ve got any real genius. But if I keep trying I may write a good book.” Fine dives have been made from flimsier spring-boards. The innumerable snubs of the past were forgotten. Indeed, his success was founded psychologically upon his duel with Tommy Barban, upon the basis of which, as it withered in his memory, he had created, afresh, a new self-respect.
Spotting Dick Diver the second day out, he eyed him tentatively, then introduced himself in a friendly way and sat down. Dick laid aside his reading and, after the few minutes that it took to realize the change in McKisco, the disappearance of the man’s annoying sense of inferiority, found himself pleased to talk to him. McKisco was “well-informed” on a range of subjects wider than Goethe’s — it was interesting to listen to the innumerable facile combinations that he referred to as his opinions. They struck up an acquaintance, and Dick had several meals with them. The McKiscos had been invited to sit at the captain’s table but with nascent snobbery they told Dick that they “couldn’t stand that bunch.”
Violet was very grand now, decked out by the grand couturières, charmed about the little discoveries that well-bred girls make in their teens. She could, indeed, have learned them from her mother in Boise but her soul was born dismally in the small movie houses of Idaho, and she had had no time for her mother. Now she “belonged”— together with several million other people — and she was happy, though her husband still shushed her when she grew violently na?ve.
The McKiscos got off at Gibraltar. Next evening in Naples Dick picked up a lost and miserable family of two girls and their mother in the bus from the hotel to the station. He had seen them on the ship. An overwhelming desire to help, or to be admired, came over him: he showed them fragments of gaiety; tentatively he bought them wine, with pleasure saw them begin to regain their proper egotism. He pretended they were this and that, and falling in with his own plot, and drinking too much to sustain the illusion, and all this time the women, thought only that this was a windfall from heaven. He withdrew from them as the night waned and the train rocked and snorted at Cassino and Frosinone. After weird American partings in the station at Rome, Dick went to the Hotel Quirinal, somewhat exhausted.
At the desk he suddenly stared and upped his head. As if a drink were acting on him, warming the lining of his stomach, throwing a flush up into his brain, he saw the person he had come to see, the person for whom he had made the Mediterranean crossing.
Simultaneously Rosemary saw him, acknowledging him before placing him; she looked back startled, and, leaving the girl she was with, she hurried over. Holding himself erect, holding his breath, Dick turned to her. As she came across the lobby, her beauty all groomed, like a young horse dosed with Black-seed oil, and hoops varnished, shocked him awake; but it all came too quick for him to do anything except conceal his fatigue as best he could. To meet her starry-eyed confidence he mustered an insincere pantomime implying, “You WOULD turn up here — of all the people in the world.”
Her gloved hands closed over his on the desk; “Dick — we’re making The Grandeur that was Rome — at least we think we are; we may quit any day.”
He looked at her hard, trying to make her a little self-conscious, so that she would observe less closely his unshaven face, his crumpled and slept-in collar. Fortunately, she was in a hurry.
“We begin early because the mists rise at eleven — phone me at two.”
In his room Dick collected his faculties. He left a call for noon, stripped off his clothes and dove literally into a heavy sleep.
He slept over the phone call but awoke at two, refreshed. Unpacking his bag, he sent out suits and laundry. He shaved, lay for half an hour in a warm bath and had breakfast. The sun had dipped into the Via Nazionale and he let it through the portières with a jingling of old brass rings. Waiting for a suit to be pressed, he discovered from the Corriere della Sera that “una novella di Sinclair Lewis ‘Wall Street’ nella quale autore analizza la vita sociale di una piccola citta Americana.” Then he tried to think about Rosemary.
At first he thought nothing. She was young and magnetic, but so was Topsy. He guessed that she had had lovers and had loved them in the last four years. Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people’s lives. Yet from this fog his affection emerged — the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation. The past drifted back and he wanted to hold her eloquent giving-of-herself in its precious shell, till he enclosed it, till it no longer existed outside him. He tried to collect all that might attract her — it was less than it had been four years ago. Eighteen might look at thirty-four through a rising mist of adolescence; but twenty-two would see thirty-eight with discerning clarity. Moreover, Dick had been at an emotional peak at the time of the previous encounter; since then there had been a lesion of enthusiasm.
When the valet returned he put on a white shirt and collar and a black tie with a pearl; the cords of his reading-glasses passed through another pearl of the same size that swung a casual inch below. After sleep, his face had resumed the ruddy brown of many Riviera summers, and to limber himself up he stood on his hands on a chair until his fountain pen and coins fell out. At three he called Rosemary and was bidden to come up. Momentarily dizzy from his acrobatics, he stopped in the bar for a gin-and-tonic.
“Hi, Doctor Diver!”
Only because of Rosemary’s presence in the hotel did Dick place the man immediately as Collis Clay. He had his old confidence and an air of prosperity and big sudden jowls.
“Do you know Rosemary’s here?” Collis asked.
“I ran into her.”
“I was in Florence and I heard she was here so I came down last week. You’d never know Mama’s little girl.” He modified the remark, “I mean she was so carefully brought up and now she’s a woman of the world — if you know what I mean. Believe me, has she got some of these Roman boys tied up in bags! And how!”
“You studying in Florence?”
“Me? Sure, I’m studying architecture there. I go back Sunday — I’m staying for the races.”
With difficulty Dick restrained him from adding the drink to the account he carried in the bar, like a stock-market report.
When Dick got out of the elevator he followed a tortuous corridor and turned at length toward a distant voice outside a lighted door. Rosemary was in black pajamas; a luncheon table was still in the room; she was having coffee.
“You’re still beautiful,” he said. “A little more beautiful than ever.”
“Do you want coffee, youngster?”
“I’m sorry I was so unpresentable this morning.”
“You didn’t look well — you all right now? Want coffee?”
“No, thanks.”
“You’re fine again, I was scared this morning. Mother’s coming over next month, if the company stays. She always asks me if I’ve seen you over here, as if she thought we were living next door. Mother always liked you — she always felt you were some one I ought to know.”
“Well, I’m glad she still thinks of me.”
“Oh, she does,” Rosemary reassured him. “A very great deal.”
“I’ve seen you here and there in pictures,” said Dick. “Once I had Daddy’s Girl run off just for myself!”
“I have a good part in this one if it isn’t cut.”
She crossed behind him, touching his shoulder as she passed. She phoned for the table to be taken away and settled in a big chair.
“I was just a little girl when I met you, Dick. Now I’m a woman.”
“I want to hear everything about you.”
“How is Nicole — and Lanier and Topsy?”
“They’re fine. They often speak of you —”
The phone rang. While she answered it Dick examined two novels — one by Edna Ferber, one by Albert McKisco. The waiter came for the table; bereft of its presence Rosemary seemed more alone in her black pajamas.
“ . . . I have a caller. . . . No, not very well. I’ve got to go to the costumer’s for a long fitting. . . . No, not now . . .”
As though with the disappearance of the table she felt released, Rosemary smiled at Dick — that smile as if they two together had managed to get rid of all the trouble in the world and were now at peace in their own heaven . . .
“That’s done,” she said. “Do you realize I’ve spent the last hour getting ready for you?”
But again the phone called her. Dick got up to change his hat from the bed to the luggage stand, and in alarm Rosemary put her hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. “You’re not going!”
“No.”
When the communication was over he tried to drag the afternoon together saying: “I expect some nourishment from people now.”
“Me too,” Rosemary agreed. “The man that just phoned me once knew a second cousin of mine. Imagine calling anybody up for a reason like that!”
Now she lowered the lights for love. Why else should she want to shut off his view of her? He sent his words to her like letters, as though they left him some time before they reached her.
“Hard to sit here and be close to you, and not kiss you.” Then they kissed passionately in the centre of the floor. She pressed against him, and went back to her chair.
It could not go on being merely pleasant in the room. Forward or backward; when the phone rang once more he strolled into the bedchamber and lay down on her bed, opening Albert McKisco’s novel. Presently Rosemary came in and sat beside him.
“You have the longest eyelashes,” she remarked.
“We are now back at the Junior Prom. Among those present are Miss Rosemary Hoyt, the eyelash fancier —”
She kissed him and he pulled her down so that they lay side by side, and then they kissed till they were both breathless. Her breathing was young and eager and exciting. Her lips were faintly chapped but soft in the corners.
When they were still limbs and feet and clothes, struggles of his arms and back, and her throat and breasts, she whispered, “No, not now — those things are rhythmic.”
Disciplined he crushed his passion into a corner of his mind, but bearing up her fragility on his arms until she was poised half a foot above him, he said lightly:
“Darling — that doesn’t matter.”
Her face had changed with his looking up at it; there was the eternal moonlight in it.
“That would be poetic justice if it should be you,” she said. She twisted away from him, walked to the mirror, and boxed her disarranged hair with her hands. Presently she drew a chair close to the bed and stroked his cheek.
“Tell me the truth about you,” he demanded.
“I always have.”
“In a way — but nothing hangs together.”
They both laughed but he pursued.
“Are you actually a virgin?”
“No-o-o!” she sang. “I’ve slept with six hundred and forty men — if that’s the answer you want.”
“It’s none of my business.”
“Do you want me for a case in psychology?”
“Looking at you as a perfectly normal girl of twenty-two, living in the year nineteen twenty-eight, I guess you’ve taken a few shots at love.”
“It’s all been — abortive,” she said.
Dick couldn’t believe her. He could not decide whether she was deliberately building a barrier between them or whether this was intended to make an eventual surrender more significant.
“Let’s go walk in the Pincio,” he suggested.
He shook himself straight in his clothes and smoothed his hair. A moment had come and somehow passed. For three years Dick had been the ideal by which Rosemary measured other men and inevitably his stature had increased to heroic size. She did not want him to be like other men, yet here were the same exigent demands, as if he wanted to take some of herself away, carry it off in his pocket.
Walking on the greensward between cherubs and philosophers, fauns and falling water, she took his arm snugly, settling into it with a series of little readjustments, as if she wanted it to be right because it was going to be there forever. She plucked a twig and broke it, but she found no spring in it. Suddenly seeing what she wanted in Dick’s face she took his gloved hand and kissed it. Then she cavorted childishly for him until he smiled and she laughed and they began having a good time.
“I can’t go out with you to-night, darling, because I promised some people a long time ago. But if you’ll get up early I’ll take you out to the set to-morrow.”
He dined alone at the hotel, went to bed early, and met Rosemary in the lobby at half-past six. Beside him in the car she glowed away fresh and new in the morning sunshine. They went out through the Porta San Sebastiano and along the Appian Way until they came to the huge set of the forum, larger than the forum itself. Rosemary turned him over to a man who led him about the great props; the arches and tiers of seats and the sanded arena. She was working on a stage which represented a guard-room for Christian prisoners, and presently they went there and watched Nicotera, one of many hopeful Valentinos, strut and pose before a dozen female “captives,” their eyes melancholy and startling with mascara.
Rosemary appeared in a knee-length tunic.
“Watch this,” she whispered to Dick. “I want your opinion. Everybody that’s seen the rushes says —”
“What are the rushes?”
“When they run off what they took the day before. They say it’s the first thing I’ve had sex appeal in.”
“I don’t notice it.”
“You wouldn’t! But I have.”
Nicotera in his leopard skin talked attentively to Rosemary while the electrician discussed something with the director, meanwhile leaning on him. Finally the director pushed his hand off roughly and wiped a sweating forehead, and Dick’s guide remarked: “He’s on the hop again, and how!”
“Who?” asked Dick, but before the man could answer the director walked swiftly over to them.
“Who’s on the hop — you’re on the hop yourself.” He spoke vehemently to Dick, as if to a jury. “When he’s on the hop he always thinks everybody else is, and how!” He glared at the guide a moment longer, then he clapped his hands: “All right — everybody on the set.”
It was like visiting a great turbulent family. An actress approached Dick and talked to him for five minutes under the impression that he was an actor recently arrived from London. Discovering her mistake she scuttled away in panic. The majority of the company felt either sharply superior or sharply inferior to the world outside, but the former feeling prevailed. They were people of bravery and industry; they were risen to a position of prominence in a nation that for a decade had wanted only to be entertained.
The session ended as the light grew misty — a fine light for painters, but, for the camera, not to be compared with the clear California air. Nicotera followed Rosemary to the car and whispered something to her — she looked at him without smiling as she said good-by.
Dick and Rosemary had luncheon at the Castelli dei C?sari, a splendid restaurant in a high-terraced villa overlooking the ruined forum of an undetermined period of the decadence. Rosemary took a cocktail and a little wine, and Dick took enough so that his feeling of dissatisfaction left him. Afterward they drove back to the hotel, all flushed and happy, in a sort of exalted quiet. She wanted to be taken and she was, and what had begun with a childish infatuation on a beach was accomplished at last.
Rosemary had another dinner date, a birthday party for a member of the company. Dick ran into Collis Clay in the lobby, but he wanted to dine alone, and pretended an engagement at the Excelsior. He drank a cocktail with Collis and his vague dissatisfaction crystallized as impatience — he no longer had an excuse for playing truant to the clinic. This was less an infatuation than a romantic memory. Nicole was his girl — too often he was sick at heart about her, yet she was his girl. Time with Rosemary was self-indulgence — time with Collis was nothing plus nothing.
In the doorway of the Excelsior he ran into Baby Warren. Her large beautiful eyes, looking precisely like marbles, stared at him with surprise and curiosity. “I thought you were in America, Dick! Is Nicole with you?”
“I came back by way of Naples.”
The black band on his arm reminded her to say: “I’m so sorry to hear of your trouble.”
Inevitably they dined together.
“Tell me about everything,” she demanded.
Dick gave her a version of the facts, and Baby frowned. She found it necessary to blame some one for the catastrophe in her sister’s life.
“Do you think Doctor Dohmler took the right course with her from the first?”
“There’s not much variety in treatment any more — of course you try to find the right personality to handle a particular case.”
“Dick, I don’t pretend to advise you or to know much about it but don’t you think a change might be good for her — to get out of that atmosphere of sickness and live in the world like other people?”
“But you were keen for the clinic,” he reminded her. “You told me you’d never feel really safe about her —”
“That was when you were leading that hermit’s life on the Riviera, up on a hill way off from anybody. I didn’t mean to go back to that life. I meant, for instance, London. The English are the best-balanced race in the world.”
“They are not,” he disagreed.
“They are. I know them, you see. I meant it might be nice for you to take a house in London for the spring season — I know a dove of a house in Talbot Square you could get, furnished. I mean, living with sane, well-balanced English people.”
She would have gone on to tell him all the old propaganda stories of 1914 if he had not laughed and said:
“I’ve been reading a book by Michael Arlen and if that’s —”
She ruined Michael Arlen with a wave of her salad spoon.
“He only writes about degenerates. I mean the worthwhile English.”
As she thus dismissed her friends they were replaced in Dick’s mind only by a picture of the alien, unresponsive faces that peopled the small hotels of Europe.
“Of course it’s none of my business,” Baby repeated, as a preliminary to a further plunge, “but to leave her alone in an atmosphere like that —”
“I went to America because my father died.”
“I understand that, I told you how sorry I was.” She fiddled with the glass grapes on her necklace. “But there’s so MUCH money now. Plenty for everything, and it ought to be used to get Nicole well.”
“For one thing I can’t see myself in London.”
“Why not? I should think you could work there as well as anywhere else.”
He sat back and looked at her. If she had ever suspected the rotted old truth, the real reason for Nicole’s illness, she had certainly determined to deny it to herself, shoving it back in a dusty closet like one of the paintings she bought by mistake.
They continued the conversation in the Ulpia, where Collis Clay came over to their table and sat down, and a gifted guitar player thrummed and rumbled “Suona Fanfara Mia” in the cellar piled with wine casks.
“It’s possible that I was the wrong person for Nicole,” Dick said. “Still she would probably have married some one of my type, some one she thought she could rely on — indefinitely.”
“You think she’d be happier with somebody else?” Baby thought aloud suddenly. “Of course it could be arranged.”
Only as she saw Dick bend forward with helpless laughter did she realize the preposterousness of her remark.
“Oh, you understand,” she assured him. “Don’t think for a moment that we’re not grateful for all you’ve done. And we know you’ve had a hard time —”
“For God’s sake,” he protested. “If I didn’t love Nicole it might be different.”
“But you do love Nicole?” she demanded in alarm.
Collis was catching up with the conversation now and Dick switched it quickly: “Suppose we talk about something else — about you, for instance. Why don’t you get married? We heard you were engaged to Lord Paley, the cousin of the —”
“Oh, no.” She became coy and elusive. “That was last year.”
“Why don’t you marry?” Dick insisted stubbornly.
“I don’t know. One of the men I loved was killed in the war, and the other one threw me over.”
“Tell me about it. Tell me about your private life, Baby, and your opinions. You never do — we always talk about Nicole.”
“Both of them were Englishmen. I don’t think there’s any higher type in the world than a first-rate Englishman, do you? If there is I haven’t met him. This man — oh, it’s a long story. I hate long stories, don’t you?”
“And how!” said Collis.
“Why, no — I like them if they’re good.”
“That’s something you do so well, Dick. You can keep a party moving by just a little sentence or a saying here and there. I think that’s a wonderful talent.”
“It’s a trick,” he said gently. That made three of her opinions he disagreed with.
“Of course I like formality — I like things to be just so, and on the grand scale. I know you probably don’t but you must admit it’s a sign of solidity in me.”
Dick did not even bother to dissent from this.
“Of course I know people say, Baby Warren is racing around over Europe, chasing one novelty after another, and missing the best things in life, but I think on the contrary that I’m one of the few people who really go after the best things. I’ve known the most interesting people of my time.” Her voice blurred with the tinny drumming of another guitar number, but she called over it, “I’ve made very few big mistakes —”
“— Only the very big ones, Baby.”
She had caught something facetious in his eye and she changed the subject. It seemed impossible for them to hold anything in common. But he admired something in her, and he deposited her at the Excelsior with a series of compliments that left her shimmering.
Rosemary insisted on treating Dick to lunch next day. They went to a little trattoria kept by an Italian who had worked in America, and ate ham and eggs and waffles. Afterward, they went to the hotel. Dick’s discovery that he was not in love with her, nor she with him, had added to rather than diminished his passion for her. Now that he knew he would not enter further into her life, she became the strange woman for him. He supposed many men meant no more than that when they said they were in love — not a wild submergence of soul, a dipping of all colors into an obscuring dye, such as his love for Nicole had been. Certain thoughts about Nicole, that she should die, sink into mental darkness, love another man, made him physically sick.
Nicotera was in Rosemary’s sitting-room, chattering about a professional matter. When Rosemary gave him his cue to go, he left with humorous protests and a rather insolent wink at Dick. As usual the phone clamored and Rosemary was engaged at it for ten minutes, to Dick’s increasing impatience.
“Let’s go up to my room,” he suggested, and she agreed.
She lay across his knees on a big sofa; he ran his fingers through the lovely forelocks of her hair.
“Let me be curious about you again?” he asked.
“What do you want to know?”
“About men. I’m curious, not to say prurient.”
“You mean how long after I met you?”
“Or before.”
“Oh, no.” She was shocked. “There was nothing before. You were the first man I cared about. You’re still the only man I really care about.” She considered. “It was about a year, I think.”
“Who was it?”
“Oh, a man.”
He closed in on her evasion.
“I’ll bet I can tell you about it: the first affair was unsatisfactory and after that there was a long gap. The second was better, but you hadn’t been in love with the man in the first place. The third was all right —”
Torturing himself he ran on. “Then you had one real affair that fell of its own weight, and by that time you were getting afraid that you wouldn’t have anything to give to the man you finally loved.” He felt increasingly Victorian. “Afterwards there were half a dozen just episodic affairs, right up to the present. Is that close?”
She laughed between amusement and tears.
“It’s about as wrong as it could be,” she said, to Dick’s relief. “But some day I’m going to find somebody and love him and love him and never let him go.”
Now his phone rang and Dick recognized Nicotera’s voice, asking for Rosemary. He put his palm over the transmitter.
“Do you want to talk to him?”
She went to the phone and jabbered in a rapid Italian Dick could not understand.
“This telephoning takes time,” he said. “It’s after four and I have an engagement at five. You better go play with Signor Nicotera.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Then I think that while I’m here you ought to count him out.”
“It’s difficult.” She was suddenly crying. “Dick, I do love you, never anybody like you. But what have you got for me?”
“What has Nicotera got for anybody?”
“That’s different.”
— Because youth called to youth.
“He’s a spic!” he said. He was frantic with jealousy, he didn’t want to be hurt again.
“He’s only a baby,” she said, sniffling. “You know I’m yours first.”
In reaction he put his arms about her but she relaxed wearily backward; he held her like that for a moment as in the end of an adagio, her eyes closed, her hair falling straight back like that of a girl drowned.
“Dick, let me go. I never felt so mixed up in my life.”
He was a gruff red bird and instinctively she drew away from him as his unjustified jealousy began to snow over the qualities of consideration and understanding with which she felt at home.
“I want to know the truth,” he said.
“Yes, then. We’re a lot together, he wants to marry me, but I don’t want to. What of it? What do you expect me to do? You never asked me to marry you. Do you want me to play around forever with half-wits like Collis Clay?”
“You were with Nicotera last night?”
“That’s none of your business,” she sobbed. “Excuse me, Dick, it is your business. You and Mother are the only two people in the world I care about.”
“How about Nicotera?”
“How do I know?”
She had achieved the elusiveness that gives hidden significance to the least significant remarks.
“Is it like you felt toward me in Paris?”
“I feel comfortable and happy when I’m with you. In Paris it was different. But you never know how you once felt. Do you?”
He got up and began collecting his evening clothes — if he had to bring all the bitterness and hatred of the world into his heart, he was not going to be in love with her again.
“I don’t care about Nicotera!” she declared. “But I’ve got to go to Livorno with the company to-morrow. Oh, why did this have to happen?” There was a new flood of tears. “It’s such a shame. Why did you come here? Why couldn’t we just have the memory anyhow? I feel as if I’d quarrelled with Mother.”
As he began to dress, she got up and went to the door.
“I won’t go to the party to-night.” It was her last effort. “I’ll stay with you. I don’t want to go anyhow.”
The tide began to flow again, but he retreated from it.
“I’ll be in my room,” she said. “Good-by, Dick.”
“Good-by.”
“Oh, such a shame, such a shame. Oh, such a shame. What’s it all about anyhow?”
“I’ve wondered for a long time.”
“But why bring it to me?”
“I guess I’m the Black Death,” he said slowly. “I don’t seem to bring people happiness any more.”