Tender is the Night (34 page)

“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 and 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. Mc-Kibben. “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 stood ready to depart; 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.

H
E
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 Erbsensuppe with Würstchen cut up in it, drank four Pilsener and refused a formidable dessert known as “Kaiserschmarren.”

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.

“Think how you love me,” she whispered. “I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there'll always be the person I am to-night.”

But Dick had come away for his soul's sake, and he began thinking about that. He had lost himself—he could not tell the hour when, or the day or the week, the month or the year. Once he had cut through things, solving the most complicated equations as the simplest problems of his simplest patients. Between the time he found Nicole flowering under a stone on the Zürichsee and the moment of his meeting with Rosemary the spear had been blunted.

Watching his father's struggles in poor parishes had wedded a desire for money to an essentially unacquisitive nature. It was not a healthy necessity for security—he had never felt more sure of himself, more thoroughly his own man, than at the time of his marriage to Nicole. Yet he had been swallowed up like a gigolo, and somehow permitted his arsenal to be locked up in the Warren safety-deposit vaults.

“There should have been a settlement in the Continental style; but it isn't over yet. I've wasted eight years teaching the rich the ABC's of human decency, but I'm not done. I've got too many unplayed trumps in my hand.”

He loitered among the fallow rose bushes and the beds of damp sweet indistinguishable fern. It was warm for October but cool enough to wear a heavy tweed coat buttoned by a little elastic tape at the neck. A figure detached itself from the black shape of a tree and he knew it was the woman whom he had passed in the lobby coming out. He was in love with every pretty woman he saw now, their forms at a distance, their shadows on a wall.

Her back was toward him as she faced the lights of the town. He scratched a match that she must have heard, but she remained motionless.

—Was it an invitation? Or an indication of obliviousness? He had long been outside of the world of simple desires and their fulfillments, and he was inept and uncertain. For all he knew there might be some code among the wanderers of obscure spas by which they found each other quickly.

—Perhaps the next gesture was his. Strange children should smile at each other and say, “Let's play.”

He moved closer, the shadow moved sideways. Possibly he would be snubbed like the scapegrace drummers he had heard of in youth. His heart beat loud in contact with the unprobed, undissected, unanalyzed, unaccounted for. Suddenly he turned away, and, as he did, the girl, too, broke the black frieze she made with the foliage, rounded a bench at a moderate but determined pace and took the path back to the hotel.

With a guide and two other men, Dick started up the Birkkarspitze next morning. It was a fine feeling once they were above the cowbells of the highest pastures—Dick looked forward to the night in the shack, enjoying his own fatigue, enjoying the captaincy of the guide, feeling a delight in his own anonymity. But at mid-day the weather changed to black sleet and hail and mountain thunder. Dick and one of the other climbers wanted to go on but the guide refused. Regretfully they struggled back to Innsbruck to start again to-morrow.

After dinner and a bottle of heavy local wine in the deserted dining-room, he felt excited, without knowing why, until he began thinking of the garden. He had passed the girl in the lobby before supper and this time she had looked at him and approved of him, but it kept worrying him: Why? When I could have had a good share of the pretty women of my time for the asking, why start that now? With a wraith, with a fragment of my desire? Why?

His imagination pushed ahead—the old asceticism, the actual unfamiliarity, triumphed: God, I might as well go back to the Riviera and sleep with Janice Caricamento or the Wilburhazy girl. To belittle all these years with something cheap and easy?

He was still excited, though, and he turned from the veranda and went up to his room to think. Being alone in body and spirit begets loneliness, and loneliness begets more loneliness.

Upstairs he walked around thinking of the matter and laying out his climbing clothes advantageously on the faint heater; he again encountered Nicole's telegram, still unopened, with which diurnally she accompanied his itinerary. He had delayed opening it before supper—perhaps because of the garden. It was a cablegram from Buffalo, forwarded through Zurich.

“Your father died peacefully tonight       
HOLMES”

He felt a sharp wince at the shock, a gathering of the forces of resistance; then it rolled up through his loins and stomach and throat.

He read the message again. He sat down on the bed, breathing and staring; thinking first the old selfish child's thought that comes with the death of a parent, how will it affect me now that this earliest and strongest of protections is gone?

The atavism passed and he walked the room still, stopping from time to time to look at the telegram. Holmes was formally his father's curate but actually, and for a decade, rector of the church. How did he die? Of old age—he was seventy-five. He had lived a long time.

Dick felt sad that he had died alone—he had survived his wife, and his brothers and sisters; there were cousins in Virginia but they were poor and not able to come North, and Holmes had had to sign the telegram. Dick loved his father—again and again he referred judgments to what his father would probably have thought or done. Dick was born several months after the death of two young sisters and his father, guessing what would be the effect on Dick's mother, had saved him from a spoiling by becoming his moral guide. He was of tired stock yet he raised himself to that effort.

In the summer father and son walked downtown together to have their shoes shined—Dick in his starched duck sailor
suit, his father always in beautifully cut clerical clothes—and the father was very proud of his handsome little boy. He told Dick all he knew about life, not much but most of it true, simple things, matters of behavior that came within his clergyman's range. “Once in a strange town when I was first ordained, I went into a crowded room and was confused as to who was my hostess. Several people I knew came toward me, but I disregarded them because I had seen a gray-haired woman sitting by a window far across the room. I went over to her and introduced myself. After that I made many friends in that town.”

His father had done that from a good heart—his father had been sure of what he was, with a deep pride of the two proud widows who had raised him to believe that nothing could be superior to “good instincts,” honor, courtesy, and courage.

The father always considered that his wife's small fortune belonged to his son, and in college and in medical school sent him a check for all of it four times a year. He was one of those about whom it was said with smug finality in the gilded age: “very much the gentleman, but not much get-up-and-go about him.”

… Dick sent down for a newspaper. Still pacing to and from the telegram open on his bureau, he chose a ship to go to America. Then he put in a call for Nicole in Zurich, remembering so many things as he waited, and wishing he had always been as good as he had intended to be.

F
OR
an hour, tied up with his profound reaction to his father's death, the magnificent façade of the homeland, the harbor of New York, seemed all sad and glorious to Dick, but once ashore the feeling vanished, nor did he find it again in the streets or the hotels or the trains that bore him first to Buffalo, and then south to Virginia with his father's body. Only as the local train shambled into the low-forested
clayland of Westmoreland County did he feel once more identified with his surroundings; at the station he saw a star he knew, and a cold moon bright over Chesapeake Bay; he heard the rasping wheels of buckboards turning, the lovely fatuous voices, the sound of sluggish primeval rivers flowing softly under soft Indian names.