Tender Is the Night (22 page)

*
Diagnosis: Divided Personality.
Acute and down-hill phase of
the illness.
The fear of men is a symptom of the illness and is not at
all constitutional. . . . The prognosis must be reserved.

And then
they waited with increasing interest as the days passed for Mr. Warren’s
promised second visit.

It was
slow in coming. After a fortnight Doctor
Dohmler
wrote. Confronted with further silence he committed what was for those days “
une
folie
,” and telephoned to the
Grand Hotel at
Vevey
. He learned from Mr. Warren’s
valet that he was at the moment packing to sail for
America
. But reminded that the
forty francs Swiss for the call would show up on the clinic books, the blood of
the
Tuileries
Guard rose to Doctor
Dohmler’s
aid and Mr. Warren was got to the phone.

“It
is—absolutely necessary—that you come. Your daughter’s health—all depends. I
can take no responsibility.”

“But
look here, Doctor, that’s just what you’re for. I have a hurry call to go
home!”

Doctor
Dohmler
had never yet spoken to any one so far away but he
dispatched his ultimatum so firmly into the phone that the agonized American at
the other end yielded. Half an hour after this second arrival on the
Zurichsee
, Warren had broken down, his fine shoulders
shaking with awful sobs inside his easy fitting coat, his eyes redder than the
very sun on Lake Geneva, and they had the awful story.

“It just
happened,” he said hoarsely. “I don’t know—I don’t know.

“After
her mother died when she was little she used to come into my bed every morning,
sometimes she’d sleep in my bed. I was sorry for the little thing. Oh, after
that, whenever we went places in an automobile or a train we used to hold
hands. She used to sing to me. We used to say, ‘Now let’s not pay any attention
to anybody else this afternoon—let’s just have each other—for this morning
you’re mine.’” A broken sarcasm came into his voice. “People used to say what a
wonderful father and daughter we were—they used to wipe their eyes. We were
just like lovers—and then all at once we were lovers—and ten minutes after it
happened I could have shot myself—except I guess I’m such a Goddamned degenerate
I didn’t have the nerve to do it.”

“Then
what?” said Doctor
Dohmler
, thinking again of Chicago
and of a mild pale gentleman with a pince-nez who had looked him over in Zurich
thirty years before. “Did this thing go on?”

“Oh, no!
She almost—she seemed to freeze up right away. She’d just say, ‘Never mind,
never mind, Daddy. It doesn’t matter.
Never mind.’”

“There
were no consequences?”

“No.” He
gave one short convulsive sob and blew his nose several times. “Except now
there’re plenty of consequences.”

As the
story concluded
Dohmler
sat back in the focal
armchair of the middle class and said to himself sharply, “Peasant!”—it was one
of the few absolute worldly judgments that he had permitted himself for twenty
years. Then he said:

“I would
like for you to go to a hotel in
Zurich
and spend the night and come see me in the morning.”

“And
then what?”

Doctor
Dohmler
spread his hands wide enough to carry a young pig.

“
Chicago
,” he suggested.

“Then we
knew where we stood,” said Franz. “
Dohmler
told
Warren
we would take the
case if he would agree to keep away from his daughter indefinitely, with an
absolute minimum of five years. After
Warren
’s
first collapse, he seemed chiefly concerned as to whether the story would ever
leak back to
America
.”

“We
mapped out a routine for her and waited. The prognosis was bad—as you know, the
percentage of cures, even so-called social cures, is very low at that age.”

“Those
first letters looked bad,” agreed Dick.

“Very bad—very typical.
I hesitated about letting the first one get out of
the clinic. Then I thought it will be good for Dick to know we’re carrying on
here. It was generous of you to answer them.”

Dick
sighed. “She was such a pretty thing—she enclosed a lot of snapshots of
herself. And for a month there I didn’t have anything to do. All I said in my
letters was ‘Be a good girl and mind the doctors.’”

“That
was enough—it gave her somebody to think of outside. For a while she didn’t
have anybody—only one sister that she doesn’t seem very close to. Besides,
reading her letters helped us here— they were a measure of her condition.”

“I’m
glad.”

“You see
now what happened? She felt complicity—that’s neither here nor there, except as
we want to revalue her ultimate stability and strength of character. First
came
this shock. Then she went off to a boarding-school and
heard the girls talking—so from sheer self-protection she developed the idea
that she had had no complicity—and from there it was easy to slide into a
phantom world where all men, the more you liked them and trusted them, the more
evil—”

“Did she
ever go into the—horror directly?”

“No, and
as a matter of fact when she began to seem normal, about October, we were in a
predicament. If she had been thirty years old we would have let her make her
own adjustment, but she was so young we were afraid she might harden with it
all twisted inside her. So Doctor
Dohmler
said to her
frankly, ‘Your duty now is to yourself. This doesn’t by any account mean the
end of anything for you—your life is just at its beginning,’ and so forth and
so forth. She really has an excellent mind, so he gave her a little Freud to
read, not too much, and she was very interested. In fact, we’ve made rather a
pet of her around here. But she is reticent,” he added; he hesitated: “We have
wondered if in her recent letters to you which she mailed herself from Zurich,
she has said anything that would be illuminating about her state of mind and
her plans for the future.”

Dick
considered.

“Yes and
no—I’ll bring the letters out here if you want. She seems hopeful and normally
hungry for life—even rather romantic. Sometimes she speaks of ‘the past’ as
people speak who have been in prison. But you never know whether they refer to
the crime or the imprisonment or the whole experience. After all I’m only a
sort of stuffed figure in her life.”

“Of
course, I understand your position exactly, and I express our gratitude once
again. That was why I wanted to see you before you see her.”

Dick
laughed.

“You
think she’s going to make a flying leap at my person?”

“No, not that.
But I want to ask you to go very gently. You are attractive to women,
Dick.”

“Then
God help me! Well, I’ll be gentle and repulsive—I’ll chew garlic whenever I’m
going to see her and wear a stubble beard. I’ll drive her to cover.”

“Not
garlic!” said Franz, taking him seriously. “You don’t want to compromise your
career. But you’re partly joking.”

“—and I
can limp a little. And there’s no real bathtub where I’m living, anyhow.”

“You’re
entirely joking,” Franz relaxed—or rather assumed the posture of one relaxed.
“Now tell me about yourself and your plans?”

“I’ve
only got one, Franz, and that’s to be a good psychologist— maybe to be the
greatest one that ever lived.”

Franz
laughed pleasantly, but he saw that this time Dick wasn’t joking.

“That’s
very good—and very American,” he said. “It’s more difficult for us.” He got up
and went to the French window. “I stand here and I see
Zurich
—there is the steeple of the Gross- M
ь
nster
. In its vault my grandfather is
buried. Across the bridge from it lies my ancestor
Lavater
,
who would not be buried in any church. Nearby is the statue of another
ancestor, Heinrich Pestalozzi, and one of Doctor Alfred Escher. And over
everything there is always Zwingli—I am continually confronted with a pantheon
of heroes.”

“Yes, I
see.” Dick got up. “I was only talking big. Everything’s just starting over.
Most of the Americans in
France
are frantic to get home, but not me—I draw military pay all the rest of the
year if I only attend lectures at the university. How’s that for a government
on the grand scale that knows its future great men? Then I’m going home for a
month and see my father. Then I’m coming back—I’ve been offered a job.”

“Where?”

“Your rivals—
Gisler’s
Clinic on
Interlacken
.”

“Don’t
touch it,” Franz advised him. “They’ve had a dozen young men there in a year.
Gisler’s
a manic-depressive himself, his wife and her lover
run the clinic—of course, you understand that’s confidential.”

“How about
your old scheme for
America
?”
asked Dick
lightly.
“We were going to
New York
and start an
up-to-date establishment for billionaires.”

“That
was students’ talk.”

Dick
dined with Franz and his bride and a small dog with a smell of burning rubber,
in their cottage on the edge of the grounds, He felt vaguely oppressed, not by
the atmosphere of modest retrenchment, nor by Frau
Gregorovius
,
who might have been prophesied, but by the sudden contracting of horizons to
which Franz seemed so reconciled. For him the boundaries of asceticism were
differently marked—he could see it as a means to an end, even as a carrying on
with a glory it would itself supply, but it was hard to think of deliberately
cutting life down to the scale of an inherited suit. The domestic gestures of
Franz and his wife as they turned in a cramped space lacked grace and
adventure. The post-war months in
France
, and the lavish liquidations
taking place under the
ж
gis
of American splendor, had affected
Dick’s outlook. Also, men and women had made much of him, and perhaps what had
brought him back to the centre of the great Swiss watch, was an intuition that
this was not too good for a serious man.

He made
Kaethe
Gregorovius
feel charming,
meanwhile becoming increasingly restless at the all-pervading cauliflower—
simultaneously hating himself too for this incipience of he knew not what
superficiality.

“God, am
I like the rest after all?”—So he used to think starting awake at night—“Am I
like the rest?”

This was
poor material for a socialist but good material for those who do much of the
world’s rarest work. The truth was that for some months he had been going
through that partitioning of the things of youth wherein it is decided whether
or not to die for what one no longer believes. In the dead white hours in
Zurich
staring into a
stranger’s pantry across the
upshine
of a street-
lamp, he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he
wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be
loved, too, if he could fit it in.

The
veranda of the central building was illuminated from open French windows, save
where the black shadows of stripling walls and the fantastic shadows of iron
chairs slithered down into a gladiola bed. From the figures that shuffled between
the rooms Miss Warren emerged first in glimpses and then sharply when she saw
him; as she crossed the threshold her face caught the room’s last light and
brought it outside with her. She walked to a rhythm—all that week there had
been singing in her ears, summer songs of ardent skies and wild shade, and with
his arrival the singing had become so loud she could have joined in with it.

“How do
you do, Captain,” she said, unfastening her eyes from his with difficulty, as
though they had become entangled. “Shall we sit out here?” She stood still, her
glance moving about for a moment. “It’s summer practically.”

A woman
had followed her out, a dumpy woman in a shawl, and Nicole presented Dick: “
Señora
—”

Franz
excused himself and Dick grouped three chairs together.

“The
lovely night,” the
Señora
said.

“
Muy
bella
,” agreed Nicole; then
to Dick, “Are you here for a long time?”

“I’m in
Zurich
for a long time,
if that’s what you mean.”

“This is
really the first night of real spring,” the
Señora
suggested.