Tender Is the Night (39 page)

But he
was of the Eastern seaboard and too hard for her. Shaking his head patiently at
her failure to understand his position he drew the Persian robe closer about
him and came down a few steps.

“Write
down the address of the Consulate for this lady,” he said to the porter, “and
look up Doctor
Colazzo’s
address and telephone number
and write that down too.” He turned to Baby, with the expression of an
exasperated Christ. “My dear lady, the diplomatic corps represents the
Government of the
United
States
to the Government of Italy. It has
nothing to do with the protection of citizens, except under specific
instructions from the State Department. Your brother-in-law has broken the laws
of this country and been put in jail, just as an Italian might be put in jail
in
New York
.
The only people who can let him go are the Italian courts and if your
brother-in-law has a case you can get aid and advice from the Consulate, which
protects the rights of American citizens. The consulate does not open until
nine o’clock
. Even if it were my
brother I couldn’t do anything—”

“Can you
phone the Consulate?” she broke in.

“We can’t
interfere with the Consulate. When the Consul gets there at nine—”

“Can you
give me his home address?”

After a
fractional pause the man shook his head. He took the memorandum from the porter
and gave it to her.

“Now
I’ll ask you to excuse me.”

He had
manoeuvred
her to the door: for an instant the violet dawn
fell shrilly upon his pink mask and upon the linen sack that supported his
mustache; then Baby was standing on the front steps alone. She had been in the
embassy ten minutes.

The
piazza whereon it faced was empty save for an old man gathering cigarette butts
with a spiked stick. Baby caught a taxi presently and went to the Consulate but
there was no one there save a trio of wretched women scrubbing the stairs. She
could not make them understand that she wanted the Consul’s home address—in a
sudden resurgence of anxiety she rushed out and told the chauffeur to take her
to the jail. He did not know where it was, but by the use of the words
semper
dritte
,
dextra
and
sinestra
she
manoeuvred
him to its approximate locality, where she
dismounted and explored a labyrinth of familiar alleys. But the buildings and
the alleys all looked alike. Emerging from one trail into the
Piazzo
d’Espagna
she saw the
American Express Company and her heart lifted at the word “American” on the
sign. There was a light in the window and hurrying across the square she tried
the door, but it was locked, and inside the clock stood at seven. Then she
thought of Collis Clay.

She
remembered the name of his hotel, a stuffy villa sealed in red plush across
from the Excelsior. The woman on duty at the office was not disposed to help
her—she had no authority to disturb Mr. Clay, and refused to let Miss Warren go
up to his room alone; convinced finally that this was not an affair of passion
she accompanied her.

Collis
lay naked upon his bed. He had come in tight and, awakening, it took him some
moments to realize his nudity. He atoned for it by an excess of modesty. Taking
his clothes into the bathroom he dressed in haste, muttering to himself “Gosh.
She certainly
musta
got a good look at me.” After
some telephoning, he and Baby found the jail and went to it.

The cell
door was open and Dick was slumped on a chair in the guard-room. The
carabinieri
had washed some of the blood from his face, brushed
him and set his hat
concealingly
upon his head.

Baby
stood in the doorway trembling.

“Mr.
Clay will stay with you,” she said. “I want to get the Consul and a doctor.”

“All right.”

“Just
stay quiet.”

“All right.”

“I’ll be
back.”

She
drove to the Consulate; it was after eight now, and she was permitted to sit in
the ante-room. Toward nine the Consul came in and Baby, hysterical with
impotence and exhaustion, repeated her story. The Consul was disturbed. He
warned her against getting into brawls in strange cities, but he was chiefly
concerned that she should wait outside—with despair she read in his elderly eye
that he wanted to be mixed up as little as possible in this catastrophe.
Waiting on his action, she passed the minutes by phoning a doctor to go to
Dick. There were other people in the ante-room and several were admitted to the
Consul’s office. After half an hour she chose the moment of some one’s coming
out and pushed past the secretary into the room.

“This is
outrageous! An American has been beaten half to death and thrown into prison
and you make no move to help.”

“Just a
minute,
Mrs
—”

“I’ve
waited long enough. You come right down to the jail and get him out!”

“
Mrs
—”

“We’re
people of considerable standing in
America
—” Her mouth hardened as she
continued. “If it wasn’t for the scandal we can—I shall see that your
indifference to this matter is reported in the proper quarter. If my
brother-in-law were a British citizen he’d have been free hours ago, but you’re
more concerned with what the police will think than about what
you’re
here for.”

“Mrs.—”

“You put
on your hat and come with me right away.”

The
mention of his hat alarmed the Consul who began to clean his spectacles
hurriedly and to ruffle his papers. This proved of no avail: the American Woman,
aroused, stood over him; the clean- sweeping irrational temper that had broken
the moral back of a race and made a nursery out of a continent, was too much
for him. He rang for the vice-consul—Baby had won.

Dick sat
in the sunshine that fell profusely through the guard-room window. Collis was
with him and two
carabinieri
,
and they were waiting for something to happen. With the
narrowed vision of his one eye Dick could see the
carabinieri
;
they were Tuscan peasants with short upper lips and he found it difficult to
associate them with the brutality of last night. He sent one of them to fetch
him a glass of beer.

The beer
made him light-headed and the episode was momentarily illumined by a ray of
sardonic humor. Collis was under the impression that the English girl had
something to do with the catastrophe, but Dick was sure she had disappeared
long before it happened. Collis was still absorbed by the fact that Miss Warren
had found him naked on his bed.

Dick’s
rage had retreated into him a little and he felt a vast criminal
irresponsibility. What had happened to him was so awful that nothing could make
any difference unless he could choke it to death, and, as this was unlikely, he
was hopeless. He would be a different person henceforward, and in his raw state
he had bizarre feelings of what the new self would be. The matter had about it
the impersonal quality of an act of God. No mature Aryan is able to profit by a
humiliation; when he forgives it has become part of his life, he has identified
himself with the thing which has humiliated him—an upshot that in this case was
impossible.

When
Collis spoke of retribution, Dick shook his head and was silent. A lieutenant
of
carabinieri
, pressed, burnished, vital, came into
the room like three men and the guards jumped to attention. He seized the empty
beer bottle and directed a stream of scolding at his men. The new spirit was in
him, and the first thing was to get the beer bottle out of the guard-room. Dick
looked at Collis and laughed.

The
vice-consul, an over-worked young man named Swanson, arrived, and they started
to the court; Collis and Swanson on
either side of Dick and
the two
carabinieri
close behind. It was a yellow,
hazy morning; the squares and arcades were crowded and Dick, pulling his hat
low over his head, walked fast, setting the pace, until one of the short-legged
carabinieri
ran alongside and protested. Swanson
arranged matters.

“I’ve
disgraced you, haven’t I?” said Dick jovially.

“You’re
liable to get killed fighting Italians,” replied Swanson sheepishly. “They’ll
probably let you go this time but if you were an Italian you’d get a couple of
months in prison.
And how!”

“Have
you ever been in prison?”

Swanson
laughed.

“I like
him,” announced Dick to Clay. “He’s a very likeable young man and he gives people
excellent advice, but I’ll bet he’s been to jail himself.
Probably
spent weeks at a time in jail.”

Swanson
laughed.

“I mean
you want to be careful. You don’t know how these people are.”

“Oh, I
know how they are,” broke out Dick, irritably. “They’re god damn stinkers.” He
turned around to the
carabinieri
: “Did you get that?”

“I’m
leaving you here,” Swanson said quickly. “I told your sister- in-law I
would—our lawyer will meet you upstairs in the courtroom. You want to be
careful.”

“Good-by.”
Dick shook hands politely. “Thank you very much. I feel you have a future—”

With
another smile Swanson hurried away, resuming his official expression of
disapproval.

Now they
came into a courtyard on all four sides of which outer stairways mounted to the
chambers above. As they crossed the flags a groaning, hissing, booing sound
went up from the loiterers in the courtyard, voices full of fury and scorn.
Dick stared about.

“What’s
that?” he demanded, aghast.

One of
the
carabinieri
spoke to a group of men and the sound
died away.

They
came into the court-room. A shabby Italian lawyer from the Consulate spoke at
length to the judge while Dick and Collis waited aside.
Some
one
who knew English turned from the window that gave on the yard and
explained the sound that had accompanied their passage through. A native of
Frascati
had raped and slain a five- year-old child and was
to be brought in that morning—the crowd had assumed it was Dick.

In a few
minutes the lawyer told Dick that he was freed—the court considered him punished
enough.

“Enough!”
Dick cried. “Punished for what?”

“Come
along,” said Collis. “You can’t do anything now.”

“But
what did I do, except get into a fight with some taxi-men?”

“They
claim you went up to a detective as if you were going to shake hands with him
and hit him—”

“That’s
not true! I told him I was going to hit him—I didn’t know he was a detective.”

“You
better go along,” urged the lawyer.

“Come
along.” Collis took his arm and they descended the steps.

“I want
to make a speech,” Dick cried. “I want to explain to these people how I raped a
five-year-old girl. Maybe I did—”

“Come
along.”

Baby was
waiting with a doctor in a taxi-cab. Dick did not want to look at her and he
disliked the doctor, whose stern manner revealed him as one of that least
palpable of European types, the Latin moralist. Dick summed up his conception
of the disaster, but no one had much to say. In his room in the
Quirinal
the doctor washed off the rest of the blood and
the oily sweat, set his nose, his fractured ribs and fingers, disinfected the
smaller wounds and put a hopeful dressing on the eye. Dick asked for a quarter
of a grain of morphine, for he was still wide awake and full of nervous energy.
With the morphine he fell asleep; the doctor and Collis left and Baby waited
with him until a woman could arrive from the English nursing home. It had been
a hard night but she had the satisfaction of feeling that, whatever Dick’s
previous record was
,
they now possessed a moral
superiority over him for as long as he proved of any use.

BOOK 3

Frau
Kaethe
Gregorovius
overtook her
husband on the path of their villa.

“How was
Nicole?” she asked mildly; but she spoke out of breath, giving away the fact
that she had held the question in her mind during her run.

Franz
looked at her in surprise.

“Nicole’s
not sick. What makes you ask, dearest one?”

“You see
her so much—I thought she must be sick.”

“We will
talk of this in the house.”

Kaethe
agreed meekly. His study was over in the administration building and the
children were with their tutor in the living-room; they went up to the bedroom.