Tender Is the Night (20 page)

Dick got
up to Zurich on less Achilles’ heels than would be required to equip a
centipede, but with plenty—the illusions of eternal strength and health, and of
the essential goodness of people; illusions of a nation, the lies of
generations of frontier mothers who had to croon falsely, that there were no
wolves outside the cabin door. After he took his degree, he received his orders
to join a neurological unit forming in Bar-
sur
-Aube.

In
France
, to his
disgust, the work was executive rather than practical. In compensation he found
time to complete the short textbook and assemble the material for his next
venture. He returned to
Zurich
in the spring of 1919 discharged.

The
foregoing has the ring of a biography, without the satisfaction of knowing that
the hero, like Grant, lolling in his general store in
Galena
, is ready to be called to an intricate
destiny. Moreover it is confusing to come across a youthful photograph of
some one
known in a rounded maturity and gaze with a shock
upon a fiery, wiry, eagle-eyed stranger. Best to be reassuring—Dick Diver’s
moment now began.

It was a
damp April day, with long diagonal clouds over the
Albishorn
and water inert in the low places.
Zurich
is not unlike an American city. Missing something ever since his arrival two
days before, Dick perceived that it was the sense he had had in finite French
lanes that there was nothing more. In Zurich there was a lot besides Zurich—the
roofs
upled
the eyes to tinkling cow pastures, which
in turn modified hilltops further up—so life was a perpendicular starting off
to a postcard heaven. The Alpine lands, home of the toy and the funicular, the
merry-go-round and the thin chime, were not a being HERE, as in
France
with
French vines growing over one’s feet on the ground.

In Salzburg
once Dick had felt the superimposed quality of a bought and borrowed century of
music; once in the laboratories of the university in Zurich, delicately poking
at the cervical of a brain, he had felt like a toy-maker rather than like the
tornado who had hurried through the old red buildings of Hopkins, two years
before,
unstayed
by the irony of the gigantic Christ
in the entrance hall.

Yet he
had decided to remain another two years in
Zurich
, for he did not underestimate the
value of toy-making, in infinite precision, of infinite patience.

To-day
he went out to see Franz
Gregorovius
at
Dohmler’s
clinic on the
Zurichsee
.
Franz, resident pathologist at the clinic, a
Vaudois
by birth, a few years older than Dick, met him at the tram stop. He had a dark
and magnificent aspect of Cagliostro about him, contrasted with holy eyes; he
was the third of the
Gregoroviuses
—his grandfather
had instructed
Krapaelin
when psychiatry was just
emerging from the darkness of all time. In personality he was proud, fiery, and
sheeplike
—he fancied himself as a hypnotist. If the
original genius of the family had grown a little tired, Franz would without
doubt become a fine clinician.

On the
way to the clinic he said: “Tell me of your experiences in the war. Are you
changed like the rest? You have the same stupid and
unaging
American face, except I know you’re not stupid, Dick.”

“I
didn’t see any of the war—you must have gathered that from my letters, Franz.”

“That
doesn’t matter—we have some shell-shocks who merely heard an air raid from a
distance. We have a few who merely read newspapers.”

“It
sounds like nonsense to me.”

“Maybe
it is, Dick. But, we’re a rich person’s clinic—we don’t use the word nonsense.
Frankly, did you come down to see me or to see that girl?”

They
looked sideways at each other; Franz smiled enigmatically.

“Naturally
I saw all the first letters,” he said in his official basso. “When the change
began, delicacy prevented me from opening any more. Really it had become your
case.”

“Then
she’s well?” Dick demanded.

“Perfectly
well, I have charge of
her,
in fact I have charge of
the majority of the English and American patients. They call me Doctor
Gregory.”

“Let me
explain about that girl,” Dick said. “I only saw her one time, that’s a fact.
When I came out to say good-by to you just before I went over to
France
.
It was the first time I put on my uniform and I felt very bogus in it—went
around saluting private soldiers and all that.”

“Why
didn’t you wear it to-day?”

“Hey!
I’ve been discharged three weeks. Here’s the way I happened to see that girl.
When I left you I walked down toward that building of yours on the lake to get
my bicycle.”

“—toward the ‘Cedars’?”

“—a
wonderful night, you know—moon over that mountain—”

“The
Krenzegg
.”

“—I
caught up with a nurse and a young girl. I didn’t think the girl was a patient;
I asked the nurse about tram times and we walked along. The girl was about the
prettiest thing I ever saw.”

“She
still is.”

“She’d
never seen an American uniform and we talked, and I didn’t think anything about
it.” He broke off, recognizing a familiar perspective, and then resumed:
“—except, Franz, I’m not as hard- boiled as you are yet; when I see a beautiful
shell like that I can’t help feeling a regret about what’s inside it. That was
absolutely all—till the letters began to come.”

“It was
the best thing that could have happened to her,” said Franz dramatically, “
a transference
of the most fortuitous kind. That’s why I
came down to meet you on a very busy day. I want you to come into my office and
talk a long time before you see her. In fact, I sent her into
Zurich
to do errands.” His voice was tense
with enthusiasm. “In fact, I sent her without a nurse, with a less stable
patient. I’m intensely proud of this case, which I handled, with your
accidental assistance.”

The car
had followed the shore of the
Zurichsee
into a
fertile region of pasture farms and low hills,
steepled
with
châlets
. The sun swam out into a blue sea of sky
and suddenly it was a Swiss valley at its best—pleasant sounds and murmurs and
a good fresh smell of health and cheer.

Professor
Dohmler’s
plant consisted of three old buildings and
a pair of new ones, between a slight eminence and the shore of the lake. At its
founding, ten years before, it had been the first modern clinic for mental illness;
at a casual glance no layman would recognize it as a refuge for the broken, the
incomplete, the menacing, of this world, though two buildings were surrounded
with vine-softened walls of a deceptive height. Some men raked straw in the
sunshine; here and there, as they rode into the grounds, the car passed the
white flag of a nurse waving beside a patient on a path.

After
conducting Dick to his office, Franz excused himself for half an hour. Left
alone Dick wandered about the room and tried to reconstruct Franz from the
litter of his desk, from his books and the books of and by his father and
grandfather; from the Swiss piety of a huge claret-colored photo of the former
on the wall. There was smoke in the room; pushing open a French window, Dick
let in a cone of sunshine. Suddenly his thoughts swung to the patient, the
girl.

He had
received about fifty letters from her written over a period of eight months.
The first one was apologetic, explaining that she had heard from
America
how
girls wrote to soldiers whom they did not know. She had obtained the name and
address from Doctor Gregory and she hoped he would not mind if she sometimes
sent word to wish him well, etc., etc.

So far
it was easy to recognize the tone—from “Daddy-Long-Legs” and “Molly-Make-Believe,”
sprightly and sentimental epistolary collections enjoying a vogue in the
States. But there the resemblance ended.

The
letters were divided into two classes, of which the first class, up to about
the time of the armistice, was of marked pathological turn, and of which the
second class, running from thence up to the present, was entirely normal, and
displayed a richly maturing nature. For these latter letters Dick had come to
wait eagerly in the last dull months at Bar-
sur
-Aube—yet
even from the first letters he had pieced together more than Franz would have
guessed of the story.

MON
CAPITAINE:

I
thought when I saw you in your uniform you were so handsome. Then I thought Je
m’en
fiche French too and German. You thought I was pretty
too but I’ve had that before and a long time I’ve stood it. If you come here
again with that attitude base and criminal and not even faintly what I had been
taught to associate with the role of gentleman then heaven help you. However
you seem quieter than the others,

(2)

all
soft
like a big cat. I have only gotten to like boys who are rather sissies. Are you
a sissy? There were some somewhere.

Excuse
all this, it is the third letter I have written you and will send immediately
or will never send. I’ve thought a lot about moonlight
too,
and there are many witnesses I could find if I could only be out of here.

(3)

They
said you were a doctor, but so long as you are a cat it is different. My head
aches so, so excuse this walking there like an ordinary with a white cat will
explain, I think. I can speak three languages, four with English, and am sure I
could be useful interpreting if you arrange such thing in France I’m sure I
could control everything with the belts all bound around everybody like it was
Wednesday. It is now Saturday and

(4)

you
are
far away, perhaps killed.

Come
back to me some day, for I will be here always on this green hill.
Unless they will let me write my father, whom I loved dearly.
Excuse this. I am not myself today. I will write when I feel better.

Cherio

NICOLE
WARREN.

Excuse
all this.

CAPTAIN
DIVER:

I know
introspection is not good for a highly nervous state like mine, but I would
like you to know where I stand. Last year or whenever it was in
Chicago
when I got so I
couldn’t speak to servants or walk in the street I kept waiting for
some one
to tell me. It was the duty of
some
one
who understood. The blind must be led. Only no one would tell me
everything—they would just tell me half and I was already too muddled to put
two and two together. One man was nice—he was a French officer and he
understood. He gave me a flower and said it was “plus petite et

(2)

moins
entendue
.”
We were friends. Then he took it away. I grew sicker and there was no one to
explain to me. They had a song about Joan of Arc that they used to sing at me
but that was just mean—it would just make me cry, for there was nothing the
matter with my head then. They kept making reference to sports, too, but I
didn’t care by that time. So there was that day I went walking on

(3)

in
.
Finally they pulled me in and there were nurses. After that time I began to
realize it all, because I could feel what was happening in others. So you see
how I stand. And what good can it be for me to stay here with the doctors
harping constantly in the things I was here to get over. So today I have
written my father to come and take me away. I am glad

(4)

you
are
so interested in examining people and sending them back. It must be so much
fun.

And
again, from another letter:

You
might pass up your next examination and write me a letter. They just sent me
some phonograph records in case I should forget my lesson and I broke them all
so the nurse won’t speak to me. They were in English, so that the nurses would
not understand. One doctor in
Chicago
said I was bluffing, but what he really meant was that I was a twin six and he
had never seen one before. But I was very busy being mad then, so I didn’t care
what he said, when I am very busy being mad I don’t usually care what they say,
not if I were a million girls.

You told
me that night you’d teach me to play. Well, I think love is all