Tender Is the Night (33 page)

They skirted
the Vorarlberg Alps, and Dick felt a pastoral delight in watching the villages.
There were always four or five in sight, each one gathered around a church. It
was simple looking at the earth from far off, simple as playing grim games with
dolls and soldiers. This was the way statesmen and commanders and all retired
people looked at things. Anyhow, it was a good draft of relief.

An
Englishman spoke to him from across the aisle but he found something
antipathetic in the English lately. England was like a rich man after a
disastrous orgy who makes up to the household by chatting with them
individually, when it is obvious to them that he is only trying to get back his
self-respect in order to usurp his former power.

Dick had
with him what magazines were available on the station quays: The Century, The
Motion Picture,
L’lllustration
, and the
Fliegende
Blätter
, but it was
more fun to descend in his imagination into the villages and shake hands with
the rural characters. He sat in the churches as he sat in his father’s church
in
Buffalo
,
amid the starchy must of Sunday clothes. He listened to the wisdom of the Near
East, was Crucified, Died, and was Buried in the cheerful church, and once more
worried between five or ten cents for the collection plate, because of the girl
who sat in the pew behind.

The
Englishman suddenly borrowed his magazines with a little small change of
conversation, and Dick, glad to see them go, thought of the voyage ahead of
him. Wolf-like under his sheep’s clothing of long-staple Australian wool, he
considered the world of pleasure— the incorruptible Mediterranean with sweet
old dirt caked in the olive trees, the peasant girl near Savona with a face as
green and rose as the color of an illuminated missal. He would take her in his
hands and snatch her across the border . . .

. . .
but there he deserted her—he must press on toward the Isles of Greece, the
cloudy waters of unfamiliar ports, the lost girl on shore, the moon of popular
songs. A part of Dick’s mind was made up of the tawdry souvenirs of his
boyhood. Yet in that somewhat littered Five-and-Ten, he had managed to keep
alive the low painful fire of intelligence.

XVII

Tommy
Barban
was a ruler, Tommy was a hero—Dick happened upon him
in the
Marienplatz
in
Munich
, in one of those cafés, where small
gamblers diced on “tapestry” mats. The air was full of politics, and the slap
of cards.

Tommy
was at a table laughing his martial laugh: “Um-
buh
—ha-ha!
Um-
buh
—ha-ha!”
As a rule, he
drank little; courage was his game and his companions were always a little
afraid of him. Recently an eighth of the area of his skull had been removed by
a
Warsaw
surgeon and was knitting under his hair, and the weakest person in the café
could have killed him with a flip of a knotted napkin.

“—this
is Prince
Chillicheff
—” A battered, powder-gray
Russian of fifty, “—and Mr.
McKibben
—and Mr.
Hannan
—” the latter was a lively ball of black eyes and
hair, a clown; and he said immediately to Dick:

“The
first thing before we shake hands—what do you mean by fooling around with my
aunt?”

“Why,
I—”

“You
heard me. What are you doing here in
Munich
anyhow?”

“Um-bah—ha-ha!”
laughed Tommy.

“Haven’t
you got aunts of your own? Why don’t you fool with them?”

Dick
laughed, whereupon the man shifted his attack:

“Now
let’s not have any more talk about aunts. How do I know you didn’t make up the
whole thing? Here you are a complete stranger with an acquaintance of less than
half an
hour,
and you come up to me with a
cock-and-bull story about your aunts. How do I know what you have concealed
about you?”

Tommy
laughed again,
then
he said good-naturedly, but
firmly, “That’s enough,
Carly
. Sit down, Dick—how’re
you? How’s Nicole?”

He did
not like any man very much nor feel their presence with much intensity—he was
all relaxed for combat; as a fine athlete playing secondary defense in any
sport is really resting much of the time, while a lesser man only pretends to
rest and is at a continual and self-destroying nervous tension.

Hannan
,
not entirely suppressed, moved to an adjoining piano, and with recurring
resentment on his face whenever he looked at Dick, played chords, from time to
time muttering, “Your aunts,” and, in a dying cadence, “I didn’t say aunts
anyhow. I said pants.”

“Well,
how’re you?” repeated Tommy. “You don’t look so—” he fought for a word, “—
so
jaunty as you used to, so spruce, you know what I mean.”

The
remark sounded too much like one of those irritating accusations of waning
vitality and Dick was about to retort by commenting on the extraordinary suits
worn by Tommy and Prince
Chillicheff
, suits of a cut
and pattern fantastic enough to have sauntered down Beale Street on a
Sunday—when an explanation was forthcoming.

“I see
you are regarding our clothes,” said the Prince. “We have just come out of
Russia
.”

“These
were made in
Poland
by the court tailor,” said Tommy. “That’s a fact—Pilsudski’s own tailor.”

“You’ve
been touring?” Dick asked.

They
laughed, the Prince inordinately meanwhile clapping Tommy on the back.

“Yes, we
have been touring. That’s it, touring. We have made the grand Tour of all the
Russias
.
In state.”

Dick
waited for an explanation. It came from Mr.
McKibben
in two words.

“They
escaped.”

“Have
you been prisoners in
Russia
?”

“It was
I,” explained Prince
Chillicheff
, his dead yellow
eyes staring at Dick.
“Not a prisoner but in hiding.”

“Did you
have much trouble getting out?”

“Some
trouble. We left three Red Guards dead at the border. Tommy left two—” He held
up two fingers like a Frenchman—“I left one.”

“That’s
the part I don’t understand,” said Mr.
McKibben
. “Why
they should have objected to your leaving.”

Hannan
turned from the piano and said, winking at the others: “Mac thinks a Marxian is
somebody who went to St. Mark’s school.”

It was
an escape story in the best tradition—an aristocrat hiding nine years with a former
servant and working in a government bakery; the eighteen-year-old daughter in
Paris who knew Tommy
Barban
. . . . During the
narrative Dick decided that this parched
papier
mâché
relic of the past was scarcely worth the lives of
three young men. The question arose as to whether Tommy and
Chillicheff
had been frightened.

“When I
was cold,” Tommy said. “I always get scared when I’m cold. During the war I was
always frightened when I was cold.”

McKibben
stood up.

“I must
leave. To-morrow morning I’m going to
Innsbruck
by car with my wife and children—and the governess.”

“I’m
going there to-morrow, too,” said Dick.

“Oh, are
you?” exclaimed
McKibben
. “Why not come with us? It’s
a big Packard and there’s only my wife and my children and myself— and the
governess—”

“I can’t
possibly—”

“Of
course she’s not really a governess,”
McKibben
concluded, looking rather pathetically at Dick. “As a matter of fact my wife
knows your sister-in-law, Baby Warren.”

But Dick
was not to be drawn in a blind contract.

“I’ve
promised to travel with two men.”

“Oh,”
McKibben’s
face fell. “Well, I’ll say good-by.” He
unscrewed two blooded wire-hairs from a nearby table and departed; Dick
pictured the jammed Packard pounding toward
Innsbruck
with the
McKibbens
and their children and their baggage and yapping dogs— and the governess.

“The
paper says they know the man who killed him,” said Tommy. “But his cousins did
not want it in the papers, because it happened in a speakeasy. What do you
think of that?”

“It’s
what’s known as family pride.”

Hannan
played a loud chord on the piano to attract attention to
himself
.

“I don’t
believe his first stuff holds up,” he said. “Even barring the Europeans there
are a dozen Americans can do what North
did.
”

It was
the first indication Dick had had that they were talking about Abe North.

“The
only difference is that Abe did it first,” said Tommy.

“I don’t
agree,”
persisted
Hannan
.
“He got the reputation for being a good musician because he drank so much that
his friends had to explain him away somehow—”

“What’s
this about Abe North? What about him? Is he in a jam?”

“Didn’t
you read The Herald this morning?”

“No.”

“He’s
dead. He was beaten to death in a speakeasy in
New York
. He just managed to crawl home to
the Racquet Club to die—”

“Abe
North?”

“Yes,
sure, they—”

“Abe
North?” Dick stood up. “Are you sure he’s dead?”

Hannan
turned around to
McKibben
: “It wasn’t the Racquet
Club he crawled to—it was the Harvard Club. I’m sure he didn’t belong to the
Racquet.”

“The
paper said so,”
McKibben
insisted.

“It must
have been a mistake. I’m quite sure.”

“Beaten to death in a speakeasy.”

“But I
happen to know most of the members of the Racquet Club,” said
Hannan
. “It MUST have been the Harvard Club.”

Dick got
up, Tommy too. Prince
Chillicheff
started out of a
wan study of nothing, perhaps of his chances of ever getting out of
Russia
, a study
that had occupied him so long that it was doubtful if he could give it up
immediately, and joined them in leaving.

“Abe North beaten to death.”

On the
way to the hotel, a journey of which Dick was scarcely aware, Tommy said:

“We’re
waiting for a tailor to finish some suits so we can get to
Paris
. I’m going into stock-broking and they
wouldn’t take me if I showed up like this. Everybody in your country is making
millions. Are you really leaving to-morrow? We can’t even have dinner with you.
It seems the Prince had an old girl in
Munich
.
He called her up but she’d been dead five years and we’re having dinner with
the two daughters.”

The
Prince nodded.

“Perhaps
I could have arranged for Doctor Diver.”

“No,
no,” said Dick hastily.

He slept
deep and awoke to a slow mournful march passing his window. It was a long
column of men in uniform, wearing the familiar helmet of 1914, thick men in
frock coats and silk hats, burghers, aristocrats, plain men. It was a society
of veterans going to lay wreaths on the tombs of the dead. The column marched
slowly with a sort of swagger for a lost magnificence, a past effort, a
forgotten sorrow. The faces were only formally sad but Dick’s lungs burst for a
moment with regret for Abe’s death, and his own youth of ten years ago.

XVIII

He
reached
Innsbruck
at dusk, sent his bags up to a hotel and walked into town. In the sunset the
Emperor Maximilian knelt in prayer above his bronze mourners; a quartet of
Jesuit novices paced and read in the university garden. The marble souvenirs of
old sieges, marriages, anniversaries, faded quickly when the sun was down, and
he had
erbsen-suppe
with
würstchen
cut up in it, drank four
helles
of
Pilsener
and refused a formidable dessert known as “
kaiser-schmarren
.”

Despite
the overhanging mountains
Switzerland
was far away, Nicole was far away. Walking in the garden later when it was
quite dark he thought about her with detachment, loving her for her best self.
He remembered once when the grass was damp and she came to him on hurried feet,
her thin slippers drenched with dew. She stood upon his shoes nestling close
and held up her face, showing it as a book open at a page.