At four o’clock next afternoon a station taxi stopped at the gate and Dick got out. Suddenly off balance, Nicole ran from the terrace to meet him, breathless with her effort at self-control.
“Where’s the car?” she asked.
“I left it in Arles. I didn’t feel like driving any more.”
“I thought from your note that you’d be several days.”
“I ran into a mistral and some rain.”
“Did you have fun?”
“Just as much fun as anybody has running away from things. I drove Rosemary as far as Avignon and put her on her train there.” They walked toward the terrace together, where he deposited his bag. “I didn’t tell you in the note because I thought you’d imagine a lot of things.”
“That was very considerate of you.” Nicole felt surer of herself now.
“I wanted to find out if she had anything to offer — the only way was to see her alone.”
“Did she have — anything to offer?”
“Rosemary didn’t grow up,” he answered. “It’s probably better that way. What have you been doing?”
She felt her face quiver like a rabbit’s.
“I went dancing last night — with Tommy Barban. We went —”
He winced, interrupting her.
“Don’t tell me about it. It doesn’t matter what you do, only I don’t want to know anything definitely.”
“There isn’t anything to know.”
“All right, all right.” Then as if he had been away a week: “How are the children?”
The phone rang in the house.
“If it’s for me I’m not home,” said Dick turning away quickly. “I’ve got some things to do over in the work-room.”
Nicole waited till he was out of sight behind the well; then she went into the house and took up the phone.
“Nicole, comment vas-tu?”
“Dick’s home.”
He groaned.
“Meet me here in Cannes,” he suggested. “I’ve got to talk to you.”
“I can’t.”
“Tell me you love me.” Without speaking she nodded at the receiver; he repeated, “Tell me you love me.”
“Oh, I do,” she assured him. “But there’s nothing to be done right now.”
“Of course there is,” he said impatiently. “Dick sees it’s over between you two — it’s obvious he has quit. What does he expect you to do?”
“I don’t know. I’ll have to —” She stopped herself from saying “— to wait until I can ask Dick,” and instead finished with: “I’ll write and I’ll phone you to-morrow.”
She wandered about the house rather contentedly, resting on her achievement. She was a mischief, and that was a satisfaction; no longer was she a huntress of corralled game. Yesterday came back to her now in innumerable detail — detail that began to overlay her memory of similar moments when her love for Dick was fresh and intact. She began to slight that love, so that it seemed to have been tinged with sentimental habit from the first. With the opportunistic memory of women she scarcely recalled how she had felt when she and Dick had possessed each other in secret places around the corners of the world, during the month before they were married. Just so had she lied to Tommy last night, swearing to him that never before had she so entirely, so completely, so utterly . . . .
. . . then remorse for this moment of betrayal, which so cavalierly belittled a decade of her life, turned her walk toward Dick’s sanctuary.
Approaching noiselessly she saw him behind his cottage, sitting in a steamer chair by the cliff wall, and for a moment she regarded him silently. He was thinking, he was living a world completely his own and in the small motions of his face, the brow raised or lowered, the eyes narrowed or widened, the lips set and reset, the play of his hands, she saw him progress from phase to phase of his own story spinning out inside him, his own, not hers. Once he clenched his fists and leaned forward, once it brought into his face an expression of torment and despair — when this passed its stamp lingered in his eyes. For almost the first time in her life she was sorry for him — it is hard for those who have once been mentally afflicted to be sorry for those who are well, and though Nicole often paid lip service to the fact that he had led her back to the world she had forfeited, she had thought of him really as an inexhaustible energy, incapable of fatigue — she forgot the troubles she caused him at the moment when she forgot the troubles of her own that had prompted her. That he no longer controlled her — did he know that? Had he willed it all? — she felt as sorry for him as she had sometimes felt for Abe North and his ignoble destiny, sorry as for the helplessness of infants and the old.
She went up putting her arm around his shoulder and touching their heads together said:
“Don’t be sad.”
He looked at her coldly.
“Don’t touch me!” he said.
Confused she moved a few feet away.
“Excuse me,” he continued abstractedly. “I was just thinking what I thought of you —”
“Why not add the new classification to your book?”
“I have thought of it —‘Furthermore and beyond the psychoses and the neuroses —’”
“I didn’t come over here to be disagreeable.”
“Then why DID you come, Nicole? I can’t do anything for you any more. I’m trying to save myself.”
“From my contamination?”
“Profession throws me in contact with questionable company sometimes.”
She wept with anger at the abuse.
“You’re a coward! You’ve made a failure of your life, and you want to blame it on me.”
While he did not answer she began to feel the old hypnotism of his intelligence, sometimes exercised without power but always with substrata of truth under truth which she could not break or even crack. Again she struggled with it, fighting him with her small, fine eyes, with the plush arrogance of a top dog, with her nascent transference to another man, with the accumulated resentment of years; she fought him with her money and her faith that her sister disliked him and was behind her now; with the thought of the new enemies he was making with his bitterness, with her quick guile against his wine-ing and dine-ing slowness, her health and beauty against his physical deterioration, her unscrupulousness against his moralities — for this inner battle she used even her weaknesses — fighting bravely and courageously with the old cans and crockery and bottles, empty receptacles of her expiated sins, outrages, mistakes. And suddenly, in the space of two minutes she achieved her victory and justified herself to herself without lie or subterfuge, cut the cord forever. Then she walked, weak in the legs, and sobbing coolly, toward the household that was hers at last.
Dick waited until she was out of sight. Then he leaned his head forward on the parapet. The case was finished. Doctor Diver was at liberty.
At two o’clock that night the phone woke Nicole and she heard Dick answer it from what they called the restless bed, in the next room.
“Oui, oui . . . mais à qui est-ce-que je parle? . . . Oui . . .” His voice woke up with surprise. “But can I speak to one of the ladies, Sir the Officer? They are both ladies of the very highest prominence, ladies of connections that might cause political complications of the most serious. . . . It is a fact, I swear to you. . . . Very well, you will see.”
He got up and, as he absorbed the situation, his self-knowledge assured him that he would undertake to deal with it — the old fatal pleasingness, the old forceful charm, swept back with its cry of “Use me!” He would have to go fix this thing that he didn’t care a damn about, because it had early become a habit to be loved, perhaps from the moment when he had realized that he was the last hope of a decaying clan. On an almost parallel occasion, back in Dohmler’s clinic on the Zurichsee, realizing this power, he had made his choice, chosen Ophelia, chosen the sweet poison and drunk it. Wanting above all to be brave and kind, he had wanted, even more than that, to be loved. So it had been. So it would ever be, he saw, simultaneously with the slow archaic tinkle from the phone box as he rang off.
There was a long pause. Nicole called, “What is it? Who is it?”
Dick had begun to dress even as he hung up the phone.
“It’s the poste de police in Antibes — they’re holding Mary North and that Sibley-Biers. It’s something serious — the agent wouldn’t tell me; he kept saying ‘pas de mortes — pas d’automobiles’ but he implied it was just about everything else.”
“Why on earth did they call on YOU? It sounds very peculiar to me.”
“They’ve got to get out on bail to save their faces; and only some property owner in the Alpes Maritimes can give bail.”
“They had their nerve.”
“I don’t mind. However I’ll pick up Gausse at the hotel —”
Nicole stayed awake after he had departed wondering what offense they could have committed; then she slept. A little after three when Dick came in she sat up stark awake saying, “What?” as if to a character in her dream.
“It was an extraordinary story —” Dick said. He sat on the foot of her bed, telling her how he had roused old Gausse from an Alsatian coma, told him to clean out his cash drawer, and driven with him to the police station.
“I don’t like to do something for that Anglaise,” Gausse grumbled.
Mary North and Lady Caroline, dressed in the costume of French sailors, lounged on a bench outside the two dingy cells. The latter had the outraged air of a Briton who momentarily expected the Mediterranean fleet to steam up to her assistance. Mary Minghetti was in a condition of panic and collapse — she literally flung herself at Dick’s stomach as though that were the point of greatest association, imploring him to do something. Meanwhile the chief of police explained the matter to Gausse who listened to each word with reluctance, divided between being properly appreciative of the officer’s narrative gift and showing that, as the perfect servant, the story had no shocking effect on him. “It was merely a lark,” said Lady Caroline with scorn. “We were pretending to be sailors on leave, and we picked up two silly girls. They got the wind up and made a rotten scene in a lodging house.”
Dick nodded gravely, looking at the stone floor, like a priest in the confessional — he was torn between a tendency to ironic laughter and another tendency to order fifty stripes of the cat and a fortnight of bread and water. The lack, in Lady Caroline’s face, of any sense of evil, except the evil wrought by cowardly Proven?al girls and stupid police, confounded him; yet he had long concluded that certain classes of English people lived upon a concentrated essence of the anti-social that, in comparison, reduced the gorgings of New York to something like a child contracting indigestion from ice cream.
“I’ve got to get out before Hosain hears about this,” Mary pleaded. “Dick, you can always arrange things — you always could. Tell ’em we’ll go right home, tell ’em we’ll pay anything.”
“I shall not,” said Lady Caroline disdainfully. “Not a shilling. But I shall jolly well find out what the Consulate in Cannes has to say about this.”
“No, no!” insisted Mary. “We’ve got to get out to-night.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” said Dick, and added, “but money will certainly have to change hands.” Looking at them as though they were the innocents that he knew they were not, he shook his head: “Of all the crazy stunts!”
Lady Caroline smiled complacently.
“You’re an insanity doctor, aren’t you? You ought to be able to help us — and Gausse has GOT to!”
At this point Dick went aside with Gausse and talked over the old man’s findings. The affair was more serious than had been indicated — one of the girls whom they had picked up was of a respectable family. The family were furious, or pretended to be; a settlement would have to be made with them. The other one, a girl of the port, could be more easily dealt with. There were French statutes that would make conviction punishable by imprisonment or, at the very least, public expulsion from the country. In addition to the difficulties, there was a growing difference in tolerance between such townspeople as benefited by the foreign colony and the ones who were annoyed by the consequent rise of prices. Gausse, having summarized the situation, turned it over to Dick. Dick called the chief of police into conference.
“Now you know that the French government wants to encourage American touring — so much so that in Paris this summer there’s an order that Americans can’t be arrested except for the most serious offenses.”
“This is serious enough, my God.”
“But look now — you have their Cartes d’Identité?”
“They had none. They had nothing — two hundred francs and some rings. Not even shoe-laces that they could have hung themselves with!”
Relieved that there had been no Cartes d’Identité Dick continued.
“The Italian Countess is still an American citizen. She is the grand-daughter —” he told a string of lies slowly and portentously, “of John D. Rockefeller Mellon. You have heard of him?”
“Yes, oh heavens, yes. You mistake me for a nobody?”
“In addition she is the niece of Lord Henry Ford and so connected with the Renault and Citro?n companies —” He thought he had better stop here. However the sincerity of his voice had begun to affect the officer, so he continued: “To arrest her is just as if you arrested a great royalty of England. It might mean — War!”
“But how about the Englishwoman?”
“I’m coming to that. She is affianced to the brother of the Prince of Wales — the Duke of Buckingham.”
“She will be an exquisite bride for him.”
“Now we are prepared to give —” Dick calculated quickly, “one thousand francs to each of the girls — and an additional thousand to the father of the ‘serious’ one. Also two thousand in addition, for you to distribute as you think best —” he shrugged his shoulders, “— among the men who made the arrest, the lodging-house keeper and so forth. I shall hand you the five thousand and expect you to do the negotiating immediately. Then they can be released on bail on some charge like disturbing the peace, and whatever fine there is will be paid before the magistrate tomorrow — by messenger.”
Before the officer spoke Dick saw by his expression that it would be all right. The man said hesitantly, “I have made no entry because they have no Cartes d’Identité. I must see — give me the money.”
An hour later Dick and M. Gausse dropped the women by the Majestic Hotel, where Lady Caroline’s chauffeur slept in her landaulet.
“Remember,” said Dick, “you owe Monsieur Gausse a hundred dollars a piece.”
“All right,” Mary agreed, “I’ll give him a check to-morrow — and something more.”
“Not I!” Startled, they all turned to Lady Caroline, who, now entirely recovered, was swollen with righteousness. “The whole thing was an outrage. By no means did I authorize you to give a hundred dollars to those people.”
Little Gausse stood beside the car, his eyes blazing suddenly.
“You won’t pay me?”
“Of course she will,” said Dick.
Suddenly the abuse that Gausse had once endured as a bus boy in London flamed up and he walked through the moonlight up to Lady Caroline.
He whipped a string of condemnatory words about her, and as she turned away with a frozen laugh, he took a step after her and swiftly planted his little foot in the most celebrated of targets. Lady Caroline, taken by surprise, flung up her hands like a person shot as her sailor-clad form sprawled forward on the sidewalk.
Dick’s voice cut across her raging: “Mary, you quiet her down! or you’ll both be in leg-irons in ten minutes!”
On the way back to the hotel old Gausse said not a word, until they passed the Juan-les-Pins Casino, still sobbing and coughing with jazz; then he sighed forth:
“I have never seen women like this sort of women. I have known many of the great courtesans of the world, and for them I have much respect often, but women like these women I have never seen before.”
Dick and Nicole were accustomed to go together to the barber, and have haircuts and shampoos in adjoining rooms. From Dick’s side Nicole could hear the snip of shears, the count of changes, the Voilàs and Pardons. The day after his return they went down to be shorn and washed in the perfumed breeze of the fans.
In front of the Carleton Hotel, its windows as stubbornly blank to the summer as so many cellar doors, a car passed them and Tommy Barban was in it. Nicole’s momentary glimpse of his expression, taciturn and thoughtful and, in the second of seeing her, wide-eyed and alert, disturbed her. She wanted to be going where he was going. The hour with the hair-dresser seemed one of the wasteful intervals that composed her life, another little prison. The coiffeuse in her white uniform, faintly sweating lip-rouge and cologne reminded her of many nurses.
In the next room Dick dozed under an apron and a lather of soap. The mirror in front of Nicole reflected the passage between the men’s side and the women’s, and Nicole started up at the sight of Tommy entering and wheeling sharply into the men’s shop. She knew with a flush of joy that there was going to be some sort of showdown.
She heard fragments of its beginning.
“Hello, I want to see you.”
“ . . . serious.”
“ . . . serious.”
“ . . . perfectly agreeable.”
In a minute Dick came into Nicole’s booth, his expression emerging annoyed from behind the towel of his hastily rinsed face.
“Your friend has worked himself up into a state. He wants to see us together, so I agreed to have it over with. Come along!”
“But my hair — it’s half cut.”
“Nevermind — come along!”
Resentfully she had the staring coiffeuse remove the towels.
Feeling messy and unadorned she followed Dick from the hotel. Outside Tommy bent over her hand.
“We’ll go to the Café des Alliées,” said Dick.
“Wherever we can be alone,” Tommy agreed.
Under the arching trees, central in summer, Dick asked: “Will you take anything, Nicole?”
“A citron pressé.”
“For me a demi,” said Tommy.
“The Blackenwite with siphon,” said Dick.
“Il n’y a plus de Blackenwite. Nous n’avons que le Johnny Walkair.”
“Ca va.”
“She’s — not — wired for sound
but on the quiet
you ought to try it —”
“Your wife does not love you,” said Tommy suddenly. “She loves me.”
The two men regarded each other with a curious impotence of expression. There can be little communication between men in that position, for their relation is indirect, and consists of how much each of them has possessed or will possess of the woman in question, so that their emotions pass through her divided self as through a bad telephone connection.
“Wait a minute,” Dick said. “Donnez moi du gin et du siphon.”
“Bien, Monsieur.”
“All right, go on, Tommy.”
“It’s very plain to me that your marriage to Nicole has run its course. She is through. I’ve waited five years for that to be so.”
“What does Nicole say?”
They both looked at her.
“I’ve gotten very fond of Tommy, Dick.”
He nodded.
“You don’t care for me any more,” she continued. “It’s all just habit. Things were never the same after Rosemary.”
Unattracted to this angle, Tommy broke in sharply with:
“You don’t understand Nicole. You treat her always like a patient because she was once sick.”
They were suddenly interrupted by an insistent American, of sinister aspect, vending copies of The Herald and of The Times fresh from New York.
“Got everything here, Buddies,” he announced. “Been here long?”
“Cessez cela! Allez Ouste!” Tommy cried and then to Dick, “Now no woman would stand such —”
“Buddies,” interrupted the American again. “You think I’m wasting my time — but lots of others don’t.” He brought a gray clipping from his purse — and Dick recognized it as he saw it. It cartooned millions of Americans pouring from liners with bags of gold. “You think I’m not going to get part of that? Well, I am. I’m just over from Nice for the Tour de France.”
As Tommy got him off with a fierce “allez-vous-en,” Dick identified him as the man who had once hailed him in the Rue de Saints Anges, five years before.
“When does the Tour de France get here?” he called after him.
“Any minute now, Buddy.”
He departed at last with a cheery wave and Tommy returned to Dick.
“Elle doit avoir plus avec moi qu’avec vous.”
“Speak English! What do you mean ‘doit avoir’?”
“‘Doit avoir?’ Would have more happiness with me.”
“You’d be new to each other. But Nicole and I have had much happiness together, Tommy.”
“L’amour de famille,” Tommy said, scoffing.
“If you and Nicole married won’t that be ‘l’amour de famille’?” The increasing commotion made him break off; presently it came to a serpentine head on the promenade and a group, presently a crowd, of people sprung from hidden siestas, lined the curbstone.
Boys sprinted past on bicycles, automobiles jammed with elaborate betasselled sportsmen slid up the street, high horns tooted to announce the approach of the race, and unsuspected cooks in undershirts appeared at restaurant doors as around a bend a procession came into sight. First was a lone cyclist in a red jersey, toiling intent and confident out of the westering sun, passing to the melody of a high chattering cheer. Then three together in a harlequinade of faded color, legs caked yellow with dust and sweat, faces expressionless, eyes heavy and endlessly tired.
Tommy faced Dick, saying: “I think Nicole wants a divorce — I suppose you’ll make no obstacles?”
A troupe of fifty more swarmed after the first bicycle racers, strung out over two hundred yards; a few were smiling and self- conscious, a few obviously exhausted, most of them indifferent and weary. A retinue of small boys passed, a few defiant stragglers, a light truck carried the dupes of accident and defeat. They were back at the table. Nicole wanted Dick to take the initiative, but he seemed content to sit with his face half-shaved matching her hair half-washed.
“Isn’t it true you’re not happy with me any more?” Nicole continued. “Without me you could get to your work again — you could work better if you didn’t worry about me.”
Tommy moved impatiently.
“That is so useless. Nicole and I love each other, that’s all there is to it.”
“Well, then,” said the Doctor, “since it’s all settled, suppose we go back to the barber shop.”
Tommy wanted a row: “There are several points —”
“Nicole and I will talk things over,” said Dick equitably. “Don’t worry — I agree in principal, and Nicole and I understand each other. There’s less chance of unpleasantness if we avoid a three- cornered discussion.”
Unwillingly acknowledging Dick’s logic, Tommy was moved by an irresistible racial tendency to chisel for an advantage.
“Let it be understood that from this moment,” he said, “I stand in the position of Nicole’s protector until details can be arranged. And I shall hold you strictly accountable for any abuse of the fact that you continue to inhabit the same house.”
“I never did go in for making love to dry loins,” said Dick.
He nodded, and walked off toward the hotel with Nicole’s whitest eyes following him.
“He was fair enough,” Tommy conceded. “Darling, will we be together to-night?”
“I suppose so.”
So it had happened — and with a minimum of drama; Nicole felt outguessed, realizing that from the episode of the camphor-rub, Dick had anticipated everything. But also she felt happy and excited, and the odd little wish that she could tell Dick all about it faded quickly. But her eyes followed his figure until it became a dot and mingled with the other dots in the summer crowd.
The day before Doctor Diver left the Riviera he spent all his time with his children. He was not young any more with a lot of nice thoughts and dreams to have about himself, so he wanted to remember them well. The children had been told that this winter they would be with their aunt in London and that soon they were going to come and see him in America. Fr?ulein was not to be discharged without his consent.
He was glad he had given so much to the little girl — about the boy he was more uncertain — always he had been uneasy about what he had to give to the ever-climbing, ever-clinging, breast-searching young. But, when he said good-by to them, he wanted to lift their beautiful heads off their necks and hold them close for hours.
He embraced the old gardener who had made the first garden at Villa Diana six years ago; he kissed the Proven?al girl who helped with the children. She had been with them for almost a decade and she fell on her knees and cried until Dick jerked her to her feet and gave her three hundred francs. Nicole was sleeping late, as had been agreed upon — he left a note for her, and one for Baby Warren who was just back from Sardinia and staying at the house. Dick took a big drink from a bottle of brandy three feet high, holding ten quarts, that some one had presented them with.
Then he decided to leave his bags by the station in Cannes and take a last look at Gausse’s Beach.
The beach was peopled with only an advance guard of children when Nicole and her sister arrived that morning. A white sun, chivied of outline by a white sky, boomed over a windless day. Waiters were putting extra ice into the bar; an American photographer from the A. and P. worked with his equipment in a precarious shade and looked up quickly at every footfall descending the stone steps. At the hotel his prospective subjects slept late in darkened rooms upon their recent opiate of dawn.
When Nicole started out on the beach she saw Dick, not dressed for swimming, sitting on a rock above. She shrank back in the shadow of her dressing-tent. In a minute Baby joined her, saying:
“Dick’s still there.”
“I saw him.”
“I think he might have the delicacy to go.”
“This is his place — in a way, he discovered it. Old Gausse always says he owes everything to Dick.”
Baby looked calmly at her sister.
“We should have let him confine himself to his bicycle excursions,” she remarked. “When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they put up.”
“Dick was a good husband to me for six years,” Nicole said. “All that time I never suffered a minute’s pain because of him, and he always did his best never to let anything hurt me.”
Baby’s lower jaw projected slightly as she said:
“That’s what he was educated for.”
The sisters sat in silence; Nicole wondering in a tired way about things; Baby considering whether or not to marry the latest candidate for her hand and money, an authenticated Hapsburg. She was not quite THINKING about it. Her affairs had long shared such a sameness, that, as she dried out, they were more important for their conversational value than for themselves. Her emotions had their truest existence in the telling of them.
“Is he gone?” Nicole asked after a while. “I think his train leaves at noon.”
Baby looked.
“No. He’s moved up higher on the terrace and he’s talking to some women. Anyhow there are so many people now that he doesn’t HAVE to see us.”
He had seen them though, as they left their pavilion, and he followed them with his eyes until they disappeared again. He sat with Mary Minghetti, drinking anisette.
“You were like you used to be the night you helped us,” she was saying, “except at the end, when you were horrid about Caroline. Why aren’t you nice like that always? You can be.”
It seemed fantastic to Dick to be in a position where Mary North could tell him about things.
“Your friends still like you, Dick. But you say awful things to people when you’ve been drinking. I’ve spent most of my time defending you this summer.”
“That remark is one of Doctor Eliot’s classics.”
“It’s true. Nobody cares whether you drink or not —” She hesitated, “even when Abe drank hardest, he never offended people like you do.”
“You’re all so dull,” he said.
“But we’re all there is!” cried Mary. “If you don’t like nice people, try the ones who aren’t nice, and see how you like that! All people want is to have a good time and if you make them unhappy you cut yourself off from nourishment.”
“Have I been nourished?” he asked.
Mary was having a good time, though she did not know it, as she had sat down with him only out of fear. Again she refused a drink and said: “Self-indulgence is back of it. Of course, after Abe you can imagine how I feel about it — since I watched the progress of a good man toward alcoholism —”
Down the steps tripped Lady Caroline Sibly-Biers with blithe theatricality.
Dick felt fine — he was already well in advance of the day; arrived at where a man should be at the end of a good dinner, yet he showed only a fine, considered, restrained interest in Mary. His eyes, for the moment clear as a child’s, asked her sympathy and stealing over him he felt the old necessity of convincing her that he was the last man in the world and she was the last woman.
. . . Then he would not have to look at those two other figures, a man and a woman, black and white and metallic against the sky . . . .
“You once liked me, didn’t you?” he asked.
“LIKED you — I LOVED you. Everybody loved you. You could’ve had anybody you wanted for the asking —”
“There has always been something between you and me.”
She bit eagerly. “Has there, Dick?”
“Always — I knew your troubles and how brave you were about them.” But the old interior laughter had begun inside him and he knew he couldn’t keep it up much longer.
“I always thought you knew a lot,” Mary said enthusiastically. “More about me than any one has ever known. Perhaps that’s why I was so afraid of you when we didn’t get along so well.”
His glance fell soft and kind upon hers, suggesting an emotion underneath; their glances married suddenly, bedded, strained together. Then, as the laughter inside of him became so loud that it seemed as if Mary must hear it, Dick switched off the light and they were back in the Riviera sun.
“I must go,” he said. As he stood up he swayed a little; he did not feel well any more — his blood raced slow. He raised his right hand and with a papal cross he blessed the beach from the high terrace. Faces turned upward from several umbrellas.
“I’m going to him.” Nicole got to her knees.
“No, you’re not,” said Tommy, pulling her down firmly. “Let well enough alone.”
Nicole kept in touch with Dick after her new marriage; there were letters on business matters, and about the children. When she said, as she often did, “I loved Dick and I’ll never forget him,” Tommy answered, “Of course not — why should you?”
Dick opened an office in Buffalo, but evidently without success. Nicole did not find what the trouble was, but she heard a few months later that he was in a little town named Batavia, N.Y., practising general medicine, and later that he was in Lockport, doing the same thing. By accident she heard more about his life there than anywhere: that he bicycled a lot, was much admired by the ladies, and always had a big stack of papers on his desk that were known to be an important treatise on some medical subject, almost in process of completion. He was considered to have fine manners and once made a good speech at a public health meeting on the subject of drugs; but he became entangled with a girl who worked in a grocery store, and he was also involved in a lawsuit about some medical question; so he left Lockport.
After that he didn’t ask for the children to be sent to America and didn’t answer when Nicole wrote asking him if he needed money. In the last letter she had from him he told her that he was practising in Geneva, New York, and she got the impression that he had settled down with some one to keep house for him. She looked up Geneva in an atlas and found it was in the heart of the Finger Lakes Section and considered a pleasant place. Perhaps, so she liked to think, his career was biding its time, again like Grant’s in Galena; his latest note was post-marked from Hornell, New York, which is some distance from Geneva and a very small town; in any case he is almost certainly in that section of the country, in one town or another.