Tender Is the Night (29 page)

“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.

XIII

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?”