Tender Is the Night (26 page)

The
orchestra was playing “Poor Butterfly”; young Marmora was dancing with his
mother. It was a tune new enough to them all. Listening, and watching Nicole’s
shoulders as she chattered to the elder Marmora, whose hair was dashed with
white like a piano keyboard, Dick thought of the shoulders of a violin, and
then he thought of the dishonor, the secret. Oh, butterfly—the moments pass
into hours—

“Actually
I
have a plan,” Baby continued with apologetic hardness. “It may seem
absolutely impractical to you but they say Nicole will need to be looked after
for a few years. I don’t know whether you know
Chicago
or not—”

“I
don’t.”

“Well,
there’s a North Side and a South Side and they’re very much separated. The
North Side is chic and all that, and we’ve always lived over there, at least
for many years, but lots of old families, old
Chicago
families, if you know what I mean,
still live on the South Side. The University is there. I mean it’s stuffy to
some people, but anyhow it’s different from the North Side. I don’t know
whether you understand.”

He
nodded. With some concentration he had been able to follow her.

“Now of
course we have lots of connections there—Father controls certain chairs and
fellowships and so forth at the University, and I thought if we took Nicole
home and threw her with that crowd—you see she’s quite musical and speaks all
these languages—what could be better in her condition than if she fell in love
with some good doctor—”

A burst
of hilarity surged up in Dick, the
Warrens
were going to buy Nicole a doctor—
You
got a nice
doctor you can let us use? There was no use worrying about Nicole when they
were in the position of being able to buy her a nice young doctor, the paint
scarcely dry on him.

“But how
about the doctor?” he said automatically.

“There
must be many who’d jump at the chance.”

The
dancers were back, but Baby whispered quickly:

“This is
the sort of thing I mean. Now where is Nicole—she’s gone off
somewhere.
Is she upstairs in her room? What am
I
supposed to do? I never know
whether it’s something innocent or whether I ought to go find her.”

“Perhaps
she just wants to be by herself—people living alone get used to loneliness.”
Seeing that Miss Warren was not listening he stopped. “I’ll take a look
around.”

For a
moment all the outdoors shut in with mist was like spring with the curtains
drawn. Life was gathered near the hotel. Dick passed some cellar windows where
bus boys sat on bunks and played cards over a
litre
of Spanish wine. As he approached the promenade, the stars began to come
through the white crests of the high
Alps
. On
the horseshoe walk overlooking the
lake
Nicole
was the figure
motionless between two lamp stands, and he approached silently across the
grass. She turned to him with an expression of: “Here YOU are,” and for a
moment he was sorry he had come.

“Your
sister wondered.”

“Oh!”
She was accustomed to being watched. With an effort she explained herself:
“Sometimes I get a little—it gets a little too much. I’ve lived so quietly.
To-night that music was too much.
It made me want to cry—”

“I
understand.”

“This
has been an awfully exciting day.”

“I
know.”

“I don’t
want to do anything anti-social—I’ve caused everybody enough trouble. But
to-night I wanted to get away.”

It
occurred to Dick suddenly, as it might occur to a dying man that he had
forgotten to tell where his will was, that Nicole had been “re-educated” by
Dohmler
and the ghostly generations behind him; it occurred
to him also that there would be so much she would have to be told. But having
recorded this wisdom within himself, he yielded to the insistent face-value of
the situation and said:

“You’re
a nice person—just keep using your own judgment about yourself.”

“You
like me?”

“Of course.”

“Would
you—” They were strolling along toward the dim end of the horseshoe, two
hundred yards ahead. “If I hadn’t been sick would you—I mean, would I have been
the sort of girl you might have—oh, slush, you know what I mean.”

He was
in for it now, possessed by a vast irrationality. She was so near that he felt
his breathing change but again his training came to his aid in a boy’s laugh
and a trite remark.

“You’re
teasing yourself, my dear. Once I knew a man who fell in love with his nurse—”
The anecdote rambled on, punctuated by their footsteps. Suddenly Nicole
interrupted in succinct
Chicagoese
: “Bull!”

“That’s
a very vulgar expression.”

“What
about it?” she flared up. “You don’t think I’ve got any common sense—before I
was sick I didn’t have any, but I have now. And if I don’t know you’re the most
attractive man I ever met you must think I’m still crazy. It’s my hard luck,
all right—but don’t pretend I don’t KNOW—I know everything about you and me.”

Dick was
at an additional disadvantage. He remembered the statement of the elder Miss
Warren as to the young doctors that could be purchased in the intellectual
stockyards of the South Side of Chicago, and he hardened for a moment. “You’re
a fetching kid, but I couldn’t fall in love.”

“You
won’t give me a chance.”

“WHAT!”

The
impertinence, the right to invade implied, astounded him. Short of anarchy he
could not think of any chance that Nicole Warren deserved.

“Give me
a chance now.”

The
voice fell low, sank into her breast and stretched the tight bodice over her
heart as she came up close. He felt the young lips, her body sighing in relief
against the arm growing stronger to hold her. There were now no more plans than
if Dick had arbitrarily made some indissoluble mixture, with atoms joined and
inseparable; you could throw it all out but never again could they fit back
into atomic scale. As he held her and tasted her, and as she curved in further
and further toward him, with her own lips, new to herself, drowned and engulfed
in love, yet solaced and triumphant, he was thankful to have an existence at
all, if only as a reflection in her wet eyes.

“My
God,” he gasped, “you’re fun to kiss.”

That was
talk, but Nicole had a better hold on him now and she held it; she turned
coquette and walked away, leaving him as suspended as in the funicular of the
afternoon. She felt: There, that’ll show him, how conceited; how he could do
with me; oh, wasn’t it wonderful! I’ve got him, he’s mine. Now in the sequence
came flight, but it was all so sweet and new that she dawdled, wanting to draw
all of it in.

She
shivered suddenly. Two thousand feet below she saw the necklace and bracelet of
lights that were
Montreux
and
Vevey
,
beyond them a dim pendant of
Lausanne
.
From down there somewhere ascended a faint sound of dance music. Nicole was up
in her head now, cool as cool, trying to collate the sentimentalities of her
childhood, as deliberate as a man getting drunk after battle. But she was still
afraid of Dick, who stood near her, leaning, characteristically, against the
iron fence that rimmed the horseshoe; and this prompted her to say: “I can
remember how I stood waiting for you in the garden—holding all
my self
in my arms like a basket of flowers. It was that to
me anyhow—I thought I was sweet—waiting to hand that basket to you.”

He
breathed over her shoulder and turned her insistently about; she kissed him
several times, her face getting big every time she came close, her hands
holding him by the shoulders.

“It’s
raining hard.”

Suddenly
there was a booming from the wine slopes across the lake; cannons were shooting
at hail-bearing clouds in order to break them. The lights of the promenade went
off, went on again. Then the storm came swiftly, first falling from the
heavens, then doubly falling in torrents from the mountains and washing loud
down the roads and stone ditches; with it came a dark, frightening sky and
savage filaments of lightning and world-splitting thunder, while ragged,
destroying clouds fled along past the hotel. Mountains and lake disappeared—the
hotel crouched amid tumult, chaos and darkness.

By this
time Dick and Nicole had reached the vestibule, where Baby Warren and the three
Marmoras
were anxiously awaiting them. It was exciting
coming out of the wet fog—with the doors banging, to stand and laugh and quiver
with emotion, wind in their ears and rain on their clothes. Now in the ballroom
the orchestra was playing a Strauss waltz, high and confusing.

. . .
For Doctor Diver to marry a mental patient?
How did it
happen? Where did it begin?

“Won’t
you come back after you’ve changed?” Baby
Warren
asked after a close scrutiny.

“I
haven’t got any change, except some shorts.”

As he
trudged up to his hotel in a borrowed raincoat he kept laughing derisively in
his throat.

“BIG
chance—oh, yes. My God!—they decided to buy a doctor? Well, they better stick
to whoever they’ve got in
Chicago
.”
Revolted by his harshness he made amends to Nicole, remembering that nothing
had ever felt so young as her lips, remembering rain like tears shed for him
that lay upon her softly shining porcelain cheeks . . . the silence of the
storm ceasing woke him about three o’clock and he went to the window. Her
beauty climbed the rolling
slope,
it came into the
room, rustling ghostlike through the curtains. . . .

. . . He
climbed two thousand meters to
Rochers
de
Naye
the following morning, amused by the fact that his
conductor of the day before was using his day off to climb also.

Then
Dick descended all the way to
Montreux
for a swim,
got back to his hotel in time for dinner. Two notes awaited him.

“I’m not
ashamed about last night—it was the nicest thing that ever happened to me and
even if I never saw you again, Mon
Capitaine
, I would
be glad it happened.”

That was
disarming enough—the heavy shade of
Dohmler
retreated
as Dick opened the second envelope:

DEAR
DOCTOR DIVER: I phoned but you were out. I wonder if I may ask you a great big
favor. Unforeseen circumstances call me back to
Paris
, and I find I can make better time by
way of
Lausanne
.
Can you let Nicole ride as far as
Zurich
with you, since you are going back Monday?
and
drop
her at the sanitarium? Is this too much to ask?

Sincerely,

BETH
EVAN WARREN.

Dick was
furious—Miss Warren had known he had a bicycle with him; yet she had so phrased
her note that it was impossible to refuse.
Throw us together! Sweet propinquity and the Warren money!

He was
wrong; Baby Warren had no such intentions. She had looked Dick over with
worldly eyes, she had measured him with the warped rule of an Anglophile and
found him wanting—in spite of the fact that she found him toothsome. But for
her he was too “intellectual” and she pigeonholed him with a shabby-snobby
crowd she had once known in
London
—he
put himself out too much to be really of the correct stuff. She could not see
how he could be made into her idea of an aristocrat.

In
addition to that he was stubborn—she had seen him leave her conversation and
get down behind his eyes in that odd way that people did, half a dozen times. She
had not liked Nicole’s free and easy manner as a child and now she was sensibly
habituated to thinking of her as a “gone coon”; and anyhow Doctor Diver was not
the sort of medical man she could envisage in the family.

She only
wanted to use him innocently as a convenience.

But her
request had the effect that Dick assumed she desired. A ride in a train can be
a terrible, heavy-hearted or comic thing; it can be a trial flight; it can be a
prefiguration
of another journey just as a given day
with a friend can be long, from the taste of hurry in the morning up to the
realization of both being hungry and taking food together.
Then
comes the afternoon with the journey fading and dying, but quickening again at
the end.
Dick was sad to see Nicole’s
meagre
joy; yet it was a relief for her, going back to the only home she knew. They
made no love that day, but when he left her outside the sad door on the
Zurichsee
and she turned and looked at him he knew her
problem was one they had together for good now.

In
Zurich
in September
Doctor Diver had tea with Baby Warren.