Tender Is the Night (21 page)

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there
is
or should be. Anyhow I am glad your interest in examinations keeps you busy.

Tout à
vous
,

NICOLE
WARREN.

There
were other letters among whose helpless
cæsuras
lurked darker rhythms.

DEAR
CAPTAIN DIVER:

I write
to you because there is no one else to whom I can turn and it seems to me if
this
farcicle
situation is apparent to one as sick as
me it should be apparent to you. The mental trouble is all over and besides
that I am completely broken and humiliated, if that was what they wanted. My
family have shamefully neglected me, there’s no use asking them for help or
pity. I have had enough and it is simply ruining my health and wasting my time
pretending that what is the matter with my

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head
is
curable.

Here I
am in what appears to be a semi-insane-asylum, all because nobody saw fit to
tell me the truth about anything. If I had only known what was going on like I
know now I could have stood it I guess for I am pretty strong, but those who
should have, did not see fit to enlighten me.

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And now,
when I know and have paid such a price for knowing, they sit there with their
dogs
lives and say I should believe what I did believe.
Especially one does but I know now.

I am
lonesome all the time far away from friends and family across the
Atlantic
I roam all over the place in a half
daze
. If you could get me a position as interpreter (I know
French and German like a native, fair

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Italian
and a little Spanish) or in the Red Cross Ambulance or as a trained nurse,
though I would have to train you would prove a great blessing.

And
again:

Since
you will not accept my explanation of what is the matter you could at least
explain to me what you think, because you have a kind cat’s face, and not that
funny look that seems to be so fashionable here. Dr. Gregory gave me a snapshot
of you, not as handsome as you are in your uniform, but younger looking.

MON
CAPITAINE:

It was
fine to have your postcard. I am so glad you take such interest in
disqualifying nurses—oh, I understood your note very well indeed. Only I
thought from the moment I met you that you were different.

DEAR
CAPITAINE:

I think
one thing today and another tomorrow. That is really all that’s the matter with
me, except a crazy defiance and a lack of proportion. I would gladly welcome
any alienist you might suggest. Here they lie in their bath tubs and sing Play
in Your Own Backyard as if I had my

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backyard
to play in or any hope which I can find by looking either backward or forward.
They tried it again in the candy store again and I almost hit the man with the
weight, but they held me.

I am not
going to write you
any more
. I am too unstable.

And then a month with no letters.
And then suddenly the change.

—I am
slowly coming back to life . . .

—Today
the flowers and the clouds . . .

—The war
is over and I scarcely knew there was a war . . .

—How
kind you have been! You must be very wise behind your face like a white cat,
except you don’t look like that in the picture Dr. Gregory gave me . . .

—Today I
went to
Zurich
,
how strange a feeling to see a city again.

—Today
we went to
Berne
,
it was so nice with the clocks.

—Today
we climbed high enough to find asphodel and edelweiss . . .

After
that the letters were fewer, but he answered them all.
There was one:

I wish
someone were in love with me like boys were ages ago before I was sick. I
suppose it will be years, though, before I could think of anything like that.

But when
Dick’s answer was delayed for any reason, there was a fluttering burst of
worry—like a worry of a lover: “Perhaps I have bored you,” and: “Afraid I have
presumed,” and: “I keep thinking at night you have been sick.”

In
actuality Dick was sick with the flu. When he recovered, all except the formal
part of his correspondence was sacrificed to the consequent fatigue, and
shortly afterward the memory of her became overlaid by the vivid presence of a
Wisconsin
telephone girl at headquarters in Bar-
sur
-Aube. She was red-lipped like a
poster,
and known obscenely in the messes as “The Switchboard.”

Franz
came back into his office feeling self-important. Dick thought he would
probably be a fine clinician, for the sonorous or staccato cadences by which he
disciplined nurse or patient came not from his nervous system but from a
tremendous and harmless vanity. His true emotions were more ordered and kept to
himself.

“Now
about the girl, Dick,” he said. “Of course, I want to find out about you and
tell you about myself, but first about the girl, because I have been waiting to
tell you about it so long.”

He
searched for and found a sheaf of papers in a filing cabinet but after
shuffling through them he found they were in his way and put them on his desk.
Instead he told Dick the story.

III

About a
year and a half before, Doctor
Dohmler
had some vague
correspondence with an American gentleman living in
Lausanne
, a Mr. Devereux Warren, of the
Warren
family of
Chicago
. A meeting was
arranged and one day Mr. Warren arrived at the clinic with his daughter Nicole,
a girl of sixteen. She was obviously not well and the nurse who was with her
took her to walk about the grounds while Mr. Warren had his consultation.

Warren
was a strikingly handsome man looking
less than forty. He was a fine American type in every way, tall, broad,
well-made—“un
homme
très
chic,” as Doctor
Dohmler
described him to Franz. His
large gray eyes were sun-veined from rowing on
Lake Geneva
,
and he had that special air about him of having known the best of this world.
The conversation was in German, for it developed that he had been educated at
Göttingen
. He was nervous and obviously
very
moved by his errand.

“Doctor
Dohmler
, my daughter isn’t right in the head. I’ve had lots
of specialists and nurses for her and she’s taken a couple of rest cures but
the thing has grown too big for me and I’ve been strongly recommended to come
to you.”

“Very
well,” said Doctor
Dohmler
. “Suppose you start at the
beginning and tell me everything.”

“There
isn’t any
beginning,
at least there isn’t any insanity
in the family that I know of, on either side. Nicole’s mother died when she was
eleven and I’ve sort of been father and mother both to her, with the help of
governesses—father and mother both to her.”

He was
very moved as he said this. Doctor
Dohmler
saw that
there were tears in the corners of his eyes and noticed for the first time that
there was whiskey on his breath.

“As a
child she was a darling thing—everybody was crazy about her, everybody that
came in contact with her. She was smart as a whip and happy as the day is long.
She liked to read or draw or dance or play the piano—anything. I used to hear
my wife say she was the only one of our children who never cried at night. I’ve
got an older girl, too, and there was a boy that died, but Nicole was— Nicole
was—Nicole—”

He broke
off and Doctor
Dohmler
helped him.

“She was
a perfectly normal, bright, happy child.”

“Perfectly.”

Doctor
Dohmler
waited. Mr. Warren shook his head, blew a long
sigh, glanced quickly at Doctor
Dohmler
and then at
the floor again.

“About
eight months ago, or maybe it was six months ago or maybe ten—I try to figure
but I can’t remember exactly where we were when she began to do funny
things—crazy things. Her sister was the first one to say anything to me about
it—because Nicole was always the same to me,” he added rather hastily, as if
some one
had accused him of being to blame, “—the same
loving little girl. The first thing was about a valet.”

“Oh,
yes,” said Doctor
Dohmler
, nodding his venerable
head, as if, like Sherlock Holmes, he had expected a valet and only a valet to
be introduced at this point.

“I had a
valet—been with me for years—Swiss, by the way.” He looked up for Doctor
Dohmler’s
patriotic approval. “And she got some crazy idea
about him. She thought he was making up to her—of course, at the time I
believed her and I let him go, but I know now it was all nonsense.”

“What
did she claim he had done?”

“That
was the first thing—the doctors couldn’t pin her down. She just looked at them
as if they ought to know what he’d done. But she certainly meant he’d made some
kind of indecent advances to her—she didn’t leave us in any doubt of that.”

“I see.”

“Of
course, I’ve read about women getting lonesome and thinking there’s a man under
the bed and all that, but why should Nicole get such an idea? She could have
all the young men she wanted. We were in
Lake
Forest
—that’s a summer place near
Chicago
where we have a place—and she was out
all day playing golf or tennis with boys. And some of them
pretty
gone
on her at that.”

All the
time
Warren
was
talking to the dried old package of Doctor
Dohmler
,
one section of the latter’s mind kept thinking intermittently of
Chicago
. Once in his
youth he could have gone to
Chicago
as fellow and docent at the university, and perhaps become rich there and owned
his own clinic instead of being only a minor shareholder in a clinic. But when
he had thought of what he considered his own thin knowledge spread over that
whole area, over all those wheat fields, those endless prairies, he had decided
against it. But he had read about
Chicago
in those days, about the great feudal families of
Armour
,
Palmer, Field, Crane, Warren, Swift, and McCormick and many others, and since
that time not a few patients had come to him from that stratum of
Chicago
and
New York
.

“She got
worse,” continued
Warren
.
“She had a fit or something— the things she said got crazier and crazier. Her
sister wrote some of them down—” He handed a much-folded piece of paper to the
doctor. “Almost always about men going to attack her, men she knew or men on
the street—anybody—”

He told
of their alarm and distress, of the horrors families go through under such
circumstances, of the ineffectual efforts they had made in America, finally of
the faith in a change of scene that had made him run the submarine blockade and
bring his daughter to Switzerland.

“—on a
United States
cruiser,” he specified with a touch of hauteur. “It was possible for me to
arrange that, by a stroke of luck. And, may I add,” he smiled apologetically,
“that as they say: money is no object.”

“Certainly
not,” agreed
Dohmler
dryly.

He was
wondering why and about what the man was
lying
to him.
Or, if he was wrong about that, what was the falsity that pervaded the whole
room, the handsome figure in tweeds sprawling in his chair with a sportsman’s
ease? That was a tragedy out there, in the February day, the young bird with
wings crushed somehow, and inside here it was all too thin, thin and wrong.

“I would
like—to talk to her—a few minutes now,” said Doctor
Dohmler
,
going into English as if it would bring him closer to
Warren
.

Afterward
when
Warren
had
left his daughter and returned to
Lausanne
,
and several days had passed, the doctor and Franz entered upon Nicole’s card:

Diagnostic:
Schizophrénie
. Phase
aiguë
en
décroissance
. La
peur
des
hommes
est
un
symptôme
de la
maladie
,
et
n’est
point
constitutionnelle
.
. . .
Le
pronostic
doit
rester
réservé.*