Tender Is the Night (30 page)

“What is
it?” she said innocently.

“This
young
Privat-dozent
thinks that he and I ought to
launch into big business and try to attract nervous breakdowns from
America
.”

Worried,
Franz stared at Baby as Dick continued:

“But who
are we, Franz? You bear a big name and I’ve written two textbooks. Is that
enough to attract anybody? And I haven’t got that much money—I haven’t got a
tenth of it.” Franz smiled cynically. “Honestly I haven’t. Nicole and Baby are
rich as Croesus but I haven’t managed to get my hands on any of it yet.”

They
were all listening now—Dick wondered if the girl at the table behind was
listening too. The idea attracted him. He decided to let Baby speak for him, as
one often lets women raise their voices over issues that are not in their
hands. Baby became suddenly her grandfather, cool and experimental.

“I think
it’s a suggestion you ought to consider, Dick. I don’t know what Doctor Gregory
was saying—but it seems to me—”

Behind
him the girl had leaned forward into a smoke ring and was picking up something
from the floor. Nicole’s face, fitted
into his own
across the table—her beauty, tentatively nesting and posing, flowed into his
love, ever braced to protect it.

“Consider
it, Dick,” Franz urged excitedly. “When one writes on psychiatry, one should
have actual clinical contacts. Jung writes,
Bleuler
writes, Freud writes,
Forel
writes, Adler writes—also
they are in constant contact with mental disorder.”

“Dick
has me,” laughed Nicole. “I should think that’d be enough mental disorder for
one man.”

“That’s
different,” said Franz cautiously.

Baby was
thinking that if Nicole lived beside a clinic she would always feel quite safe
about her.

“We must
think it over carefully,” she said.

Though
amused at her insolence, Dick did not encourage it.

“The
decision concerns me, Baby,” he said gently. “It’s nice of you to want to buy
me a clinic.”

Realizing
she had meddled, Baby withdrew hurriedly:

“Of
course, it’s entirely your affair.”

“A thing
as important as this will take weeks to decide. I wonder how I like the picture
of Nicole and
me
anchored to
Zurich
—” He turned to Franz, anticipating:
“—I know.
Zurich
has a gashouse and running water and electric light—I lived there three years.”

“I will
leave you to think it over,” said Franz. “I am confident—”

One
hundred pair of five-pound boots had begun to clump toward the door, and they
joined the press. Outside in the crisp moonlight, Dick saw the girl tying her
sled to one of the sleighs ahead. They piled into their own sleigh and at the
crisp-cracking whips the horses strained, breasting the dark air. Past
them
figures ran and scrambled, the younger ones shoving
each other from sleds and runners, landing in the soft snow, then panting after
the horses to drop exhausted on a sled or wail that they were abandoned. On
either side the fields were beneficently tranquil; the space through which the
cavalcade moved was high and limitless. In the country there was less noise as
though they were all listening atavistically for wolves in the wide snow.

In
Saanen
, they poured into the municipal dance, crowded with
cow herders, hotel servants, shop-keepers, ski teachers, guides, tourists,
peasants
. To come into the warm enclosed place after the
pantheistic animal feeling without, was to reassume some absurd and impressive
knightly name, as thunderous as spurred boots in war, as football cleats on the
cement of a locker-room floor. There was conventional
yodelling
,
and the familiar rhythm of it separated Dick from what he had first found
romantic in the scene. At first he thought it was because he had hounded the
girl out of his consciousness; then it came to him under the form of what Baby
had said: “We must think it over carefully—” and the unsaid lines back of that:
“We own you, and you’ll admit it sooner or later. It is absurd to keep up the
pretense of independence.”

It had
been years since Dick had bottled up malice against a creature—since freshman
year at New Haven when he had come upon a popular essay about “mental hygiene.”
Now he lost his temper at Baby and simultaneously tried to coop it up within
him, resenting her cold rich insolence. It would be hundreds of years before
any emergent Amazons would ever grasp the fact that a man is vulnerable only in
his pride, but delicate as Humpty-Dumpty once that is meddled with—though some
of them paid the fact a cautious lip- service. Doctor Diver’s profession of
sorting the broken shells of another sort of egg had given him a dread of breakage.
But:

“There’s
too
much
good manners,” he said on the way back to
Gstaad
in the smooth sleigh.

“Well, I
think that’s nice,” said Baby.

“No, it
isn’t,” he insisted to the anonymous bundle of fur. “Good manners are an
admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves.
Now, human respect—you don’t call a man a coward or a liar lightly, but if you
spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so
you can’t distinguish what SHOULD be respected in them.”

“I think
Americans take their manners rather seriously,” said the elder Englishman.

“I guess
so,” said Dick. “My father had the kind of manners he inherited from the days
when you shot first and apologized afterward. Men armed—why, you Europeans haven’t
carried arms in civil life since the beginning of the eighteenth century—”

“Not
actually, perhaps—”

“Not
ACT-
ually
. Not really.”

“Dick,
you’ve always had such beautiful manners,” said Baby
conciliatingly
.

The
women were regarding him across the zoo of robes with some alarm. The younger
Englishman did not understand—he was one of the kind who were always jumping
around cornices and balconies, as if they thought they were in the rigging of a
ship—and filled the ride to the hotel with a preposterous story about a boxing
match with his best friend in which they loved and bruised each other for an
hour, always with great reserve. Dick became facetious.

“So
every time he hit you
you
considered him an even
better friend?”

“I
respected him more.”

“It’s
the premise I don’t understand. You and your best friend scrap about a trivial
matter—”

“If you
don’t understand, I can’t explain it to you,” said the young Englishman coldly.

—This is
what I’ll get if I begin saying what I think, Dick said to himself.

He was
ashamed at baiting the man, realizing that the absurdity of the story rested in
the immaturity of the attitude combined with the sophisticated method of its
narration.

The
carnival spirit was strong and they went with the crowd into the grill, where a
Tunisian barman manipulated the illumination in a counterpoint, whose other
melody was the moon off the ice rink staring in the big windows. In that light,
Dick found the girl devitalized, and uninteresting—he turned from her to enjoy
the darkness, the cigarette points going green and silver when the lights shone
red, the band of white that fell across the dancers as the door to the bar was
opened and closed.

“Now
tell me, Franz,” he demanded, “do you think after sitting up all night drinking
beer, you can go back and convince your patients that you have any character?
Don’t you think they’ll see you’re a
gastropath
?”

“I’m
going to bed,” Nicole announced. Dick accompanied her to the door of the
elevator.

“I’d
come with you but I must show Franz that I’m not intended for a clinician.”

Nicole
walked into the elevator.

“Baby
has lots of common sense,” she said meditatively.

“Baby is
one of—”

The door
slashed shut—facing a mechanical hum, Dick finished the sentence in his mind,
“—Baby is a trivial, selfish woman.”

But two
days later, sleighing to the station with Franz, Dick admitted that he thought
favorably upon the matter.

“We’re
beginning to turn in a circle,” he admitted. “Living on this scale, there’s an
unavoidable series of strains, and Nicole doesn’t survive them. The pastoral
quality down on the summer
Riviera
is all changing anyhow—next year they’ll have a Season.”

They
passed the crisp green rinks where Wiener waltzes blared and the colors of many
mountain schools flashed against the pale-blue skies.

“—I hope
we’ll be able to do it, Franz. There’s nobody I’d rather try it with than you—”

Good-by,
Gstaad
! Good-by,
fresh faces, cold
sweet flowers, flakes
in the darkness. Good-by,
Gstaad
,
good-by!

XIV

Dick
awoke at five after a long dream of war, walked to the window and stared out it
at the
Zugersee
. His dream had begun in
sombre
majesty; navy blue uniforms crossed a dark plaza
behind bands playing the second movement of
Prokofieff’s
“Love of Three Oranges.” Presently there were fire engines, symbols of
disaster, and a ghastly uprising of the mutilated in a dressing station. He
turned on his bed-lamp light and made a thorough note of it ending with the
half-ironic phrase: “Non-combatant’s shell-shock.”

As he
sat on the side of his bed, he felt the room, the house and the night as empty.
In the next room Nicole muttered something desolate and he felt sorry for
whatever loneliness she was feeling in her sleep. For him time stood still and
then every few years accelerated in a rush, like the quick re-wind of a film,
but for Nicole the years slipped away by clock and calendar and birthday, with
the added
poignance
of her perishable beauty.

Even
this past year and a half on the
Zugersee
seemed
wasted time for her, the seasons marked only by the workmen on the road turning
pink in May, brown in July, black in September, white again in
Spring
. She had come out of her first illness alive with new
hopes, expecting so much, yet deprived of any subsistence except Dick, bringing
up children she could only pretend gently to love, guided orphans. The people
she
liked,
rebels mostly, disturbed her and were bad
for her—she sought in them the vitality that had made them independent or
creative or rugged, sought in vain—for their secrets were buried deep in
childhood struggles they had forgotten. They were more interested in Nicole’s
exterior harmony and charm, the other face of her illness. She led a lonely
life owning Dick who did not want to be owned.

Many
times he had tried unsuccessfully to let go his hold on her. They had many fine
times together, fine talks between the loves of the white nights, but always
when he turned away from her into himself he left her holding Nothing in her
hands and staring at it, calling it many names, but knowing it was only the
hope that he would come back soon.

He
scrunched his pillow hard,
lay
down, and put the back
of his neck against it as a Japanese does to slow the circulation, and slept
again for a time. Later, while he shaved, Nicole awoke and marched around,
giving abrupt, succinct orders to children and servants. Lanier came in to
watch his father shave—living beside a psychiatric clinic he had developed an
extraordinary confidence in and admiration for his father, together with an
exaggerated indifference toward most other adults; the patients appeared to him
either in their odd aspects, or else as devitalized, over-correct creatures
without personality. He was a handsome, promising boy and Dick devoted much
time to him, in the relationship of a sympathetic but exacting officer and
respectful enlisted man.

“Why,”
Lanier asked, “do you always leave a little lather on the top of your hair when
you shave?”

Cautiously
Dick parted soapy lips: “I have never been able to find out. I’ve often
wondered. I think it’s because I get the first finger soapy when I make the
line of my side-burn, but how it gets up on top of my head I don’t know.”

“I’m
going to watch it all to-morrow.”

“That’s
your only question before breakfast?”

“I don’t
really call it a question.”

“That’s
one on you.”

Half an
hour later Dick started up to the administration building. He was
thirty-eight—still declining a beard he yet had a more medical aura about him
than he had worn upon the
Riviera
.
For eighteen months now he had lived at the clinic—certainly one of the
best-appointed in
Europe
. Like
Dohmler’s
it was of the modern type—no longer a single dark
and sinister building but a small, scattered, yet deceitfully integrated
village—Dick and Nicole had added much in the domain of taste, so that the
plant was a thing of beauty, visited by every psychologist passing through
Zurich. With the addition of a caddy house it might very well have been a
country club. The Eglantine and the Beeches, houses for those sunk into eternal
darkness, were screened by little copses from the main building,
camouflaged
strong-points. Behind was a large truck farm,
worked partly by the patients. The workshops for ergo- therapy were three,
placed under a single roof and there Doctor Diver began his morning’s
inspection. The carpentry shop, full of sunlight, exuded the sweetness of
sawdust, of a lost age of wood; always half a dozen men were there, hammering,
planing
, buzzing— silent men, who lifted solemn eyes from
their work as he passed through. Himself a good carpenter, he discussed with
them the efficiency of some tools for a moment in a quiet, personal, interested
voice. Adjoining was the book-bindery, adapted to the most mobile of patients
who were not always, however, those who had the greatest chance for recovery.
The last chamber was devoted to beadwork, weaving and work in brass. The faces
of the patients here wore the expression of one who had just sighed profoundly,
dismissing something insoluble—but their sighs only marked the beginning of
another ceaseless round of ratiocination, not in a line as with normal people
but in the same circle.
Round, round, and round.
Around forever.
But the bright colors of the stuffs they
worked with gave strangers a momentary illusion that all was well, as in a
kindergarten. These patients brightened as Doctor Diver came in. Most of them
liked him better than they liked Doctor
Gregorovius
.
Those who had once lived in the great world invariably liked him better. There
were a few who thought he neglected them, or that he was not simple, or that he
posed. Their responses were not dissimilar to those that Dick evoked in non-
professional life, but here they were warped and distorted.