Tender Is the Night (32 page)

A
discussion with
Topsy
about the
guignol
—as
to whether the Punch was the same Punch they had seen last year in
Cannes
—having been
settled, the family walked along again between the booths under the open sky.
The women’s bonnets, perching over velvet vests, the bright, spreading skirts
of many cantons, seemed demure against the blue and orange paint of the wagons
and displays. There was the sound of a whining, tinkling
hootchy-kootchy
show.

Nicole
began to run very suddenly, so suddenly that for a moment Dick did not miss
her. Far ahead he saw her yellow dress twisting through the crowd, an ochre
stitch along the edge of reality and unreality, and started after her. Secretly
she ran and secretly he followed. As the hot afternoon went shrill and terrible
with her flight he had forgotten the children; then he wheeled and ran back to
them, drawing them this way and that by their arms, his eyes jumping from booth
to booth.

“Madame,”
he cried to a young woman behind a white lottery wheel, “
Est-ce
que
je
peux
laisser
ces
petits
avec
vous
deux
minutes?
C’est
très
urgent—je
vous
donnerai
dix
francs.”

“
Mais
oui
.”

He
headed the children into the booth.
“
Alors—restez
avec
cette
gentille
dame.”

“
Oui
, Dick.”

He
darted off again but he had lost her; he circled the merry-go- round keeping up
with it till he realized he was running beside it, staring always at the same
horse. He elbowed through the crowd in the
buvette
;
then remembering a predilection of Nicole’s he snatched up an edge of a
fortuneteller’s tent and peered within. A droning voice greeted him: “La
septième
fille
d’une
septième
fille
née
sur
les rives du
Nil—
entrez
, Monsieur—”

Dropping
the flap he ran along toward where the
plaisance
terminated at the lake and a small
ferris
wheel
revolved slowly against the sky. There he found her.

She was
alone in what was momentarily the top boat of the wheel, and as it descended he
saw that she was laughing hilariously; he slunk back in the crowd, a crowd
which, at the wheel’s next revolution, spotted the intensity of Nicole’s
hysteria.

“
Regardez-moi
ça
!”

“
Regarde
donc
cette
Anglaise
!”

Down she
dropped again—this time the wheel and its music were slowing and a dozen people
were around her car, all of them impelled by the quality of her laughter to
smile in sympathetic idiocy. But when Nicole saw Dick her laughter died—she
made a gesture of slipping by and away from him but he caught her arm and held
it as they walked away.

“Why did
you lose control of yourself like that?”

“You
know very well why.”

“No, I
don’t.”

“That’s
just preposterous—let me loose—
that’s
an insult to my
intelligence. Don’t you think I saw that girl look at you—that little dark
girl.
Oh, this is farcical—a child, not more than fifteen.
Don’t you think I saw?”

“Stop
here a minute and quiet down.”

They sat
at a table, her eyes in a profundity of suspicion, her hand moving across her
line of sight as if it were obstructed. “I want a drink—I want a brandy.”

“You can’t
have brandy—you can have a bock if you want it.”

“Why
can’t I have a brandy?”

“We
won’t go into that. Listen to me—this business about a girl is a delusion, do
you understand that word?”

“It’s
always a delusion when I see what you don’t want me to see.”

He had a
sense of guilt as in one of those nightmares where we are accused of a crime
which we recognize as something undeniably experienced, but which upon waking
we realize we have not committed. His eyes wavered from hers.

“I left
the children with a gypsy woman in a booth. We ought to get them.”

“Who do
you think you are?” she demanded.
“
Svengali
?”

Fifteen
minutes ago they had been a family. Now as she was crushed into a corner by his
unwilling shoulder, he saw them all, child and man, as a perilous accident.

“We’re
going home.”

“Home!”
she roared in a voice so abandoned that its louder tones wavered and cracked.
“And sit and think that we’re all rotting and the children’s ashes are rotting
in every box I open?
That filth!”

Almost
with relief he saw that her words sterilized her, and Nicole, sensitized down
to the corium of the skin, saw the withdrawal in his face. Her own face
softened and she begged, “Help me, help me, Dick!”

A wave
of agony went over him. It was awful that such a fine tower should not be
erected, only suspended,
suspended
from him. Up to a
point that was right: men were for that, beam and idea, girder and logarithm;
but somehow Dick and Nicole had become one and equal, not opposite and
complementary; she was Dick too, the drought in the marrow of his bones. He
could not watch her disintegrations without participating in them. His
intuition
rilled
out of him as tenderness and
compassion—he could only take the characteristically modern course, to
interpose—he would get a nurse from
Zurich
,
to take her over to-night.

“You CAN
help me.”

Her
sweet bullying pulled him forward off his feet. “You’ve helped me before—you
can help me now.”

“I can
only help you the same old way.”

“
Some one
can help me.”

“Maybe so.
You can help yourself most. Let’s find the children.”

There
were numerous lottery booths with white wheels—Dick was startled when he
inquired at the first and encountered blank disavowals. Evil-eyed, Nicole stood
apart, denying the children, resenting them as part of a downright world she sought
to make amorphous. Presently Dick found them, surrounded by women who were
examining them with delight like fine goods, and by peasant children staring.

“Merci,
Monsieur, ah Monsieur
est
trop
généreux
.
C’était
un
plaisir
,
M’sieur
, Madame.
Au
revoir
,
mes
petits
.”

They
started back with a hot sorrow streaming down upon them; the car was weighted
with their mutual apprehension and anguish, and the children’s mouths were
grave with disappointment. Grief presented itself in its terrible, dark
unfamiliar color. Somewhere around Zug, Nicole, with a convulsive effort,
reiterated a remark she had made before about a misty yellow house set back
from the road that looked like a painting not yet dry, but it was just an
attempt to catch at a rope that was playing out too swiftly.

Dick
tried to rest—the struggle would come presently at home and he might have to
sit a long time, restating the universe for her. A “
schizophrêne
”
is well named as a split personality—Nicole was alternately a person to whom
nothing need be explained and one to whom nothing COULD be explained. It was
necessary to treat her with active and affirmative insistence, keeping the road
to reality always open, making the road to escape harder going. But the
brilliance, the versatility of madness is akin to the resourcefulness of water
seeping through, over and around a dike. It requires the united front of many
people to work against it. He felt it necessary that this time Nicole cure
herself; he wanted to wait until she remembered the other times, and revolted
from them. In a tired way, he planned that they would again resume the régime
relaxed a year before.

He had
turned up a hill that made a short cut to the clinic, and now as he stepped on
the accelerator for a short straightaway run parallel to the hillside the car
swerved violently left, swerved right, tipped on two wheels and, as Dick, with
Nicole’s voice screaming in his ear, crushed down the mad hand clutching the
steering wheel, righted itself, swerved once more and shot off the road; it tore
through low underbrush, tipped again and settled slowly at an angle of ninety
degrees against a tree.

The
children were screaming and Nicole was screaming and cursing and trying to tear
at Dick’s face. Thinking first of the list of the car and unable to estimate it
Dick bent away Nicole’s arm, climbed over the top side and lifted out the
children; then he saw the car was in a stable position. Before doing anything
else he stood there shaking and panting.

“You—!”
he cried.

She was
laughing hilariously, unashamed, unafraid, unconcerned. No one coming on the
scene would have imagined that she had caused it; she laughed as after some
mild escape of childhood.

“You
were scared, weren’t you?” she accused him. “You wanted to live!”

She
spoke with such force that in his shocked state Dick wondered if he had been
frightened for himself—but the strained faces of the children, looking from
parent to parent, made him want to grind her grinning mask into jelly.

Directly
above them, half a kilometer by the winding road but only a hundred yards
climbing, was an inn; one of its wings showed through the wooded hill.

“Take
Topsy’s
hand,” he said to Lanier, “like that, tight, and
climb up that hill—see the little path? When you get to the inn tell them ‘La
voiture
Divare
est
cassée
.’
Some
one
must come right down.”

Lanier,
not sure what had happened, but suspecting the dark and unprecedented, asked:

“What
will you do, Dick?”

“We’ll
stay here with the car.”

Neither
of them looked at their mother as they started off. “Be careful crossing the
road up there! Look both ways!” Dick shouted after them.

He and
Nicole looked at each other directly, their eyes like blazing windows across a
court of the same house. Then she took out a compact, looked in its mirror, and
smoothed back the temple hair. Dick watched the children climbing for a moment
until they disappeared among the pines half way up; then he walked around the
car to see the damage and plan how to get it back on the road. In the dirt he
could trace the rocking course they had pursued for over a hundred feet; he was
filled with a violent disgust that was not like anger.

In a few
minutes the proprietor of the inn came running down.

“My
God!” he exclaimed. “How did it happen, were you going fast? What luck! Except
for that tree you’d have rolled down hill!”

Taking
advantage of Emile’s reality, the wide black apron, the sweat upon the rolls of
his face, Dick
signalled
to Nicole in a
matter-of-fact way to let him help her from the car; whereupon she jumped over
the lower side, lost her balance on the slope, fell to her knees and got up
again. As she watched the men trying to move the car her expression became
defiant. Welcoming even that mood Dick said:

“Go and
wait with the children, Nicole.”

Only
after she had gone did he remember that she had wanted
cognac,
and that there was cognac available up there—he told Emile never mind about the
car; they would wait for the chauffeur and the big car to pull it up onto the
road. Together they hurried up to the inn.

XVI

“I want
to go away,” he told Franz.
“For a month or so, for as long
as I can.”

“Why not, Dick?
That was our original arrangement—it was you who insisted on staying.
If you and Nicole—”

“I don’t
want to go away with Nicole. I want to go away alone. This last thing knocked
me sideways—if I get two hours’ sleep in twenty-
four,
it’s one of Zwingli’s miracles.”

“You
wish a real leave of abstinence.”

“The
word is ‘absence.’ Look here: if I go to
Berlin
to the Psychiatric Congress could you manage to keep the peace? For three
months she’s been all right and she likes her nurse. My God, you’re the only
human being in this world I can ask this of.”

Franz
grunted, considering whether or not he could be trusted to think always of his
partner’s interest.

In
Zurich
the next week Dick
drove to the airport and took the big plane for
Munich
. Soaring and roaring into the blue he
felt numb, realizing how tired he was. A vast persuasive quiet stole over him,
and he abandoned sickness to the sick, sound to the motors, direction to the
pilot. He had no intention of attending so much as a single session of the
congress—he could imagine it well enough, new pamphlets by
Bleuler
and the elder
Forel
that he could much better digest
at home, the paper by the American who cured dementia
præcox
by pulling out his patient’s teeth or cauterizing their tonsils, the
half-derisive respect with which this idea would be greeted, for no more reason
than that America was such a rich and powerful country. The other delegates
from America—red-headed Schwartz with his saint’s face and his infinite
patience in straddling two worlds, as well as dozens of commercial alienists
with hang-dog faces, who would be present partly to increase their standing,
and hence their reach for the big plums of the criminal practice, partly to master
novel sophistries that they could weave into their stock in trade, to the
infinite confusion of all values. There would be cynical
Latins
,
and some man of Freud’s from
Vienna
.
Articulate among them would be the great Jung, bland, super- vigorous, on his
rounds between the forests of anthropology and the neuroses of school-boys. At
first there would be an American cast to the congress, almost Rotarian in its
forms and ceremonies, then the closer-knit European vitality would fight
through, and finally the Americans would play their trump card, the
announcement of colossal gifts and endowments, of great new plants and training
schools, and in the presence of the figures the Europeans would blanch and walk
timidly. But he would not be there to see.