Tender is the Night (25 page)

“I'm not under any restraint at all,” she said. “I'll play you two good tunes called ‘Wait Till the Cows Come Home' and ‘Good-by, Alexander.'”

He was late the next time, a week later, and Nicole was waiting for him at a point in the path which he would pass walking from Franz's house. Her hair drawn back of her ears brushed her shoulders in such a way that the face seemed to have just emerged from it, as if this were the exact moment when she was coming from a wood into clear moonlight. The unknown yielded her up; Dick wished she had no background, that she was just a girl lost with no address save the night from which she had come. They went to the cache where she had left the phonograph, turned a corner by the workshop, climbed a rock, and sat down behind a low wall, facing miles and miles of rolling night.

They were in America now, even Franz with his conception of Dick as an irresistible Lothario would never have guessed that they had gone so far away. They were so sorry, dear; they went down to meet each other in a taxi, honey; they had preferences in smiles and had met in Hindustan, and shortly afterward they must have quarrelled, for nobody knew and nobody seemed to care—yet finally one of them had gone and left the other crying, only to feel blue, to feel sad.

The thin tunes, holding lost times and future hopes in liaison, twisted upon the Swiss night. In the lulls of the phonograph a cricket held the scene together with a single note. By and by Nicole stopped playing the machine and sang to him:

“Lay a silver dollar

     On the ground

 And watch it roll

     Because it's round—”

On the pure parting of her lips no breath hovered. Dick stood up suddenly.

“What's the matter, you don't like it?”

“Of course I do.”

“Our cook at home taught it to me:

‘A woman never knows

    What a good man she's got

 Till after she turns him down….'

“You like it?”

She smiled at him, making sure that the smile gathered up everything inside her and directed it toward him, making him a profound promise of herself for so little, for the beat of a response, the assurance of a complementary vibration in him. Minute by minute the sweetness drained down into her out of the willow trees, out of the dark world.

She stood up too, and stumbling over the phonograph, was momentarily against him, leaning into the hollow of his rounded shoulder.

“I've got one more record,” she said. “Have you heard ‘So Long, Letty'? I suppose you have.”

“Honestly, you don't understand—I haven't heard a thing.”

Nor known, nor smelt, nor tasted, he might have added; only hot-cheeked girls in hot secret rooms. The young maidens he had known at New Haven in 1914 kissed men, saying “There!,” hands at the man's chest to push him away. Now there was this scarcely saved waif of disaster bringing him the essence of a continent….

I
T
was May when he next found her. The luncheon in Zurich was a council of caution; obviously the logic of his life tended away from the girl; yet when a stranger stared at her from a nearby table, eyes burning disturbingly like an uncharted light, he turned to the man with an urbane version of intimidation and broke the regard.

“He was just a peeper,” he explained cheerfully. “He was
just looking at your clothes. Why do you have so many different clothes?”

“Sister says we're very rich,” she offered humbly. “Since Grandmother is dead.”

“I forgive you.”

He was enough older than Nicole to take pleasure in her youthful vanities and delights, the way she paused fractionally in front of the hall mirror on leaving the restaurant, so that the incorruptible quicksilver could give her back to herself. He delighted in her stretching out her hands to new octaves now that she found herself beautiful and rich. He tried honestly to divorce her from any obsession that he had stitched her together—glad to see her build up happiness and confidence apart from him; the difficulty was that, eventually, Nicole brought everything to his feet, gifts of sacrificial ambrosia, of worshipping myrtle.

The first week of summer found Dick re-established in Zurich. He had arranged his pamphlets and what work he had done in the service into a pattern from which he intended to make his revise of
A Psychology for Psychiatrists.
He thought he had a publisher; he had established contact with a poor student who would iron out his errors in German. Franz considered it a rash business, but Dick pointed out the disarming modesty of the theme.

“This is stuff I'll never know so well again,” he insisted. “I have a hunch it's a thing that only fails to be basic because it's never had material recognition. The weakness of this profession is its attraction for the man a little crippled and broken. Within the walls of the profession he compensates by tending toward the clinical, the ‘practical'—he has won his battle without a struggle.

“On the contrary, you are a good man, Franz, because fate selected you for your profession before you were born. You better thank God you had no ‘bent'—I got to be a psychiatrist because there was a girl at St. Hilda's in Oxford that went to the same lectures. Maybe I'm getting trite but I don't want to let my current ideas slide away with a few dozen glasses of beer.”

“All right,” Franz answered. “You are an American.
You can do this without professional harm. I do not like these generalities. Soon you will be writing little books called ‘Deep Thoughts for the Layman,' so simplified that they are positively guaranteed not to cause thinking. If my father were alive he would look at you and grunt, Dick. He would take his napkin and fold it so, and hold his napkin ring, this very one”—he held it up, a boar's head was carved in the brown wood—“and he would say, ‘Well my impression is—' then he would look at you and think suddenly, ‘What is the use?' then he would stop and grunt again; then we would be at the end of dinner.”

“I am alone to-day,” said Dick testily. “But I may not be alone to-morrow. After that I'll fold up my napkin like your father and grunt.”

Franz waited a moment.

“How about our patient?” he asked.

“I don't know.”

“Well, you should know about her by now.”

“I like her. She's attractive. What do you want me to do—take her up in the edelweiss?”

“No, I thought since you go in for scientific books you might have an idea.”

“—devote my life to her?”

Franz called his wife in the kitchen: “Du lieber Gott! Bitte, bringe Dick noch ein Glas Bier.”

“I don't want any more if I've got to see Dohmler.”

“We think it's best to have a program. Four weeks have passed away—apparently the girl is in love with you. That's not our business if we were in the world, but here in the clinic we have a stake in the matter.”

“I'll do whatever Doctor Dohmler says,” Dick agreed.

But he had little faith that Dohmler would throw much light on the matter; he himself was the incalculable element involved. By no conscious volition of his own, the thing had drifted into his hands. It reminded him of a scene in his childhood when everyone in the house was looking for the lost key to the silver closet, Dick knowing he had hid it under the handkerchiefs in his mother's top drawer; at that time
he had experienced a philosophical detachment, and this was repeated now when he and Franz went together to Professor Dohmler's office.

The professor, his face beautiful under straight whiskers, like a vine-overgrown veranda of some fine old house, disarmed him. Dick knew some individuals with more talent, but no person of a class qualitatively superior to Dohmler.

—Six months later he thought the same way when he saw Dohmler dead, the light out on the veranda, the vines of his whiskers tickling his stiff white collar, the many battles that had swayed before the chink-like eyes stilled forever under the frail delicate lids——

“… Good morning, sir.” He stood formally, thrown back to the army.

Professor Dohmler interlaced his tranquil fingers. Franz spoke in terms half of liaison officer, half of secretary, till his senior cut through him in mid-sentence.

“We have gone a certain way,” he said mildly. “It's you, Doctor Diver, who can best help us now.”

Routed out, Dick confessed: “I'm not so straight on it myself.”

“I have nothing to do with your personal reactions,” said Dohmler. “But I have much to do with the fact that this so-called ‘transference,'” he darted a short ironic look at Franz which the latter returned in kind, “must be terminated. Miss Nicole does well indeed, but she is in no condition to survive what she might interpret as a tragedy.”

Again Franz began to speak, but Doctor Dohmler motioned him silent.

“I realize that your position has been difficult.”

“Yes, it has.”

Now the professor sat back and laughed, saying on the last syllable of his laughter, with his sharp little gray eyes shining through: “Perhaps you have got sentimentally involved yourself.”

Aware that he was being drawn on, Dick, too, laughed.

“She's a pretty girl—anybody responds to that to a certain extent. I have no intention——”

Again Franz tried to speak—again Dohmler stopped him with a question directed pointedly at Dick. “Have you thought of going away?”

“I can't go away.”

Doctor Dohmler turned to Franz: “Then we can send Miss Warren away.”

“As you think best, Professor Dohmler,” Dick conceded. “It's certainly a situation.”

Professor Dohmler raised himself like a legless man mounting a pair of crutches.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Tch! Tch!” uttered Franz.

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

“What do you think?” Dohmler asked Dick.

“Of course Franz is right.”

I
T
was late afternoon when they wound up the discussion as to what Dick should do, he must be most kind and yet eliminate himself. When the doctors stood up at last, Dick's eyes fell outside the window to where a light rain was falling—Nicole was waiting, expectant, somewhere in that rain. When, presently, he went out buttoning his oil-skin at the throat, pulling down the brim of his hat, he came upon her immediately under the roof of the main entrance.

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

“You'll be leaving soon.”

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

“The older sister?”

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

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

“What are you looking at?”

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

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

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

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

“That's fine.”

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