Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (123 page)

“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-Münster. 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 ægis 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.

V

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.

“To stay?”

“At least till July.”

“I’m leaving in June.”

“June is a lovely month here,” the Señora commented. “You should stay for June and then leave in July when it gets really too hot.”

“You’re going where?” Dick asked Nicole.

“Somewhere with my sister--somewhere exciting, I hope, because I’ve lost so much time. But perhaps they’ll think I ought to go to a quiet place at first--perhaps Como. Why don’t you come to Como?”

“Ah, Como--” began the Señora.

Within the building a trio broke into Suppe’s “Light Cavalry.” Nicole took advantage of this to stand up and the impression of her youth and beauty grew on Dick until it welled up inside him in a compact paroxysm of emotion. She smiled, a moving childish smile that was like all the lost youth in the world.

“The music’s too loud to talk against--suppose we walk around. Buenas noches, Señora.”

“G’t night--g’t night.”

They went down two steps to the path--where in a moment a shadow cut across it. She took his arm.

“I have some phonograph records my sister sent me from America,” she said. “Next time you come here I’ll play them for you--I know a place to put the phonograph where no one can hear.”

“That’ll be nice.”

“Do you know ‘Hindustan’?” she asked wistfully. “I’d never heard it before, but I like it. And I’ve got ‘Why Do They Call Them Babies?’ and ‘I’m Glad I Can Make You Cry.’ I suppose you’ve danced to all those tunes in Paris?”

“I haven’t been to Paris.”

Her cream-colored dress, alternately blue or gray as they walked, and her very blonde hair, dazzled Dick--whenever he turned toward her she was smiling a little, her face lighting up like an angel’s when they came into the range of a roadside arc. She thanked him for everything, rather as if he had taken her to some party, and as Dick became less and less certain of his relation to her, her confidence increased--there was that excitement about her that seemed to reflect all the excitement of the world.

“I’m not under any restraint at all,” she said. “I’ll play you two good tunes called ‘Wait Till the Cows Come Home’ and ‘Good-by, Alexander.’“

He was late the next time, a week later, and Nicole was waiting for him at a point in the path which he would pass walking from Franz’s house. Her hair drawn back of her ears brushed her shoulders in such a way that the face seemed to have just emerged from it, as if this were the exact moment when she was coming from a wood into clear moonlight. The unknown yielded her up; Dick wished she had no background, that she was just a girl lost with no address save the night from which she had come. They went to the cache where she had left the phonograph, turned a corner by the workshop, climbed a rock, and sat down behind a low wall, facing miles and miles of rolling night.

They were in America now, even Franz with his conception of Dick as an irresistible Lothario would never have guessed that they had gone so far away. They were so sorry, dear; they went down to meet each other in a taxi, honey; they had preferences in smiles and had met in Hindustan, and shortly afterward they must have quarrelled, for nobody knew and nobody seemed to care--yet finally one of them had gone and left the other crying, only to feel blue, to feel sad.

The thin tunes, holding lost times and future hopes in liaison, twisted upon the Valais night. In the lulls of the phonograph a cricket held the scene together with a single note. By and by Nicole stopped playing the machine and sang to him.

“Lay a silver dollar
On the ground
And watch it roll
Because it’s round--”

On the pure parting of her lips no breath hovered. Dick stood up suddenly.

“What’s the matter, you don’t like it?”

“Of course I do.”

“Our cook at home taught it to me:

“A woman never knows
What a good man she’s got
Till after she turns him down . . .”

“You like it?”

She smiled at him, making sure that the smile gathered up everything inside her and directed it toward him, making him a profound promise of herself for so little, for the beat of a response, the assurance of a complimentary vibration in him. Minute by minute the sweetness drained down into her out of the willow trees, out of the dark world.

She stood up too, and stumbling over the phonograph, was momentarily against him, leaning into the hollow of his rounded shoulder.

“I’ve got one more record,” she said. “--Have you heard ‘So Long, Letty’? I suppose you have.”

“Honestly, you don’t understand--I haven’t heard a thing.”

Nor known, nor smelt, nor tasted, he might have added; only hot-cheeked girls in hot secret rooms. The young maidens he had known at New Haven in 1914 kissed men, saying “There!”, hands at the man’s chest to push him away. Now there was this scarcely saved waif of disaster bringing him the essence of a continent. . . .

VI

It was May when he next found her. The luncheon in Zurich was a council of caution; obviously the logic of his life tended away from the girl; yet when a stranger stared at her from a nearby table, eyes burning disturbingly like an uncharted light, he turned to the man with an urbane version of intimidation and broke the regard.

“He was just a peeper,” he explained cheerfully. “He was just looking at your clothes. Why do you have so many different clothes?”

“Sister says we’re very rich,” she offered humbly. “Since Grandmother is dead.”

“I forgive you.”

He was enough older than Nicole to take pleasure in her youthful vanities and delights, the way she paused fractionally in front of the hall mirror on leaving the restaurant, so that the incorruptible quicksilver could give her back to herself. He delighted in her stretching out her hands to new octaves now that she found herself beautiful and rich. He tried honestly to divorce her from any obsession that he had stitched her together--glad to see her build up happiness and confidence apart from him; the difficulty was that, eventually, Nicole brought everything to his feet, gifts of sacrificial ambrosia, of worshipping myrtle.