Tender Is the Night (31 page)

One
Englishwoman spoke to him always about a subject which she considered her own.

“Have we
got music to-night?”

“I don’t
know,” he answered. “I haven’t seen Doctor
Ladislau
.
How did you enjoy the music that Mrs. Sachs and Mr. Longstreet gave us last
night?”

“It was
so-so.”

“I
thought it was fine—especially the Chopin.”

“I
thought it was so-so.”

“When
are you going to play for us yourself?”

She
shrugged her shoulders, as pleased at this question as she had been for several
years.

“Some time.
But I only play so-so.”

They
knew that she did not play at all—she had had two sisters who were brilliant
musicians, but she had never been able to learn the notes when they had been
young together.

From the
workshop Dick went to visit the Eglantine and the Beeches. Exteriorly these
houses were as cheerful as the others; Nicole had designed the decoration and
the furniture on a necessary base of concealed grills and bars and immovable
furniture. She had worked with so much imagination—the inventive quality, which
she lacked, being supplied by the problem itself—that no instructed visitor
would have dreamed that the light, graceful
filagree
work at a window was a strong, unyielding end of a tether, that the pieces
reflecting modern tubular tendencies were
stancher
than the massive creations of the Edwardians—even the flowers lay in iron
fingers and every casual ornament and fixture was as necessary as a girder in a
skyscraper. Her tireless eyes had made each room yield up its greatest
usefulness. Complimented, she referred to herself brusquely as a master
plumber.

For
those whose compasses were not depolarized there seemed many odd things in
these houses. Doctor Diver was often amused in the Eglantine, the men’s
building—here there was a strange little exhibitionist who thought that if he
could walk unclothed and unmolested from the
Êtoile
to the Place de la Concorde he would solve many things—and, perhaps, Dick
thought, he was quite right.

His most
interesting case was in the main building. The patient was a woman of thirty
who had been in the clinic six months; she was an American painter who had
lived long in
Paris
.
They had no very satisfactory history of her. A cousin had happened upon her
all mad and gone and after an unsatisfactory interlude at one of
the whoopee
cures that fringed the city, dedicated largely
to tourist victims of drug and drink, he had managed to get her to
Switzerland
. On
her admittance she had been exceptionally pretty— now she was a living
agonizing sore. All blood tests had failed to give a positive reaction and the
trouble was unsatisfactorily catalogued as nervous eczema. For two months she
had lain under it, as imprisoned as in the Iron Maiden. She was coherent, even
brilliant, within the limits of her special hallucinations.

She was
particularly his patient. During spells of overexcitement he was the only
doctor who could “do anything with her.” Several weeks ago, on one of many
nights that she had passed in sleepless torture Franz had succeeded in
hypnotizing her into a few hours of needed rest, but he had never again
succeeded. Hypnosis was a tool that Dick had distrusted and seldom used, for he
knew that he could not always summon up the mood in himself—he had once tried
it on Nicole and she had scornfully laughed at him.

The
woman in room twenty could not see him when he came in—the area about her eyes
was too tightly swollen. She spoke in a strong, rich, deep, thrilling voice.

“How
long will this last? Is it going to be forever?”

“It’s
not going to be very long now. Doctor
Ladislau
tells
me there are whole areas cleared up.”

“If I
knew what I had done to deserve this I could accept it with equanimity.”

“It
isn’t wise to be mystical about it—we recognize it as a nervous phenomenon.
It’s related to the blush—when you were a girl, did you blush easily?”

She lay
with her face turned to the ceiling.

“I have
found nothing to blush for since I cut my wisdom teeth.”

“Haven’t
you committed your share of petty sins and mistakes?”

“I have
nothing to reproach myself with.”

“You’re
very fortunate.”

The
woman thought a moment; her voice came up through her bandaged face afflicted
with subterranean melodies:

“I’m
sharing the fate of the women of my time who challenged men to battle.”

“To your
vast surprise it was just like all battles,” he answered, adopting her formal
diction.

“Just
like all battles.” She thought this over. “You pick a set- up, or else win a
Pyrrhic victory, or you’re wrecked and ruined— you’re a ghostly echo from a
broken wall.”

“You are
neither wrecked nor ruined,” he told her. “Are you quite sure you’ve been in a
real battle?”

“Look at
me!” she cried furiously.

“You’ve
suffered, but many women suffered before they mistook themselves for men.” It
was becoming an argument and he retreated. “In any case you mustn’t confuse a
single failure with a final defeat.”

She
sneered. “Beautiful
words,”
and the phrase transpiring
up through the crust of pain humbled him.

“We
would like to go into the true reasons that brought you here—” he began but she
interrupted.

“I am
here as a symbol of something. I thought perhaps you would know what it was.”

“You are
sick,” he said mechanically.

“Then
what was it I had almost found?”

“A greater sickness.”

“That’s
all?”

“That’s
all.” With disgust he heard himself lying, but here and now the vastness of the
subject could only be compressed into a lie. “Outside of that there’s only
confusion and chaos. I won’t lecture to you—we have too acute a realization of
your physical suffering. But it’s only by meeting the problems of every day, no
matter how trifling and boring they
seem,
that you can
make things drop back into place again. After that—perhaps you’ll be able again
to examine—”

He had
slowed up to avoid the inevitable end of his thought: “—the frontiers of
consciousness.” The frontiers that artists must explore were not for her, ever.
She was fine-spun, inbred— eventually she might find rest in some quiet
mysticism. Exploration was for those with a measure of peasant blood, those
with big thighs and thick ankles who could take punishment as they took bread
and salt, on every inch of flesh and spirit.

—Not for
you, he almost said. It’s too tough a game for you.

Yet in
the awful majesty of her pain he went out to her unreservedly, almost sexually.
He wanted to gather her up in his arms, as he so often had Nicole, and cherish
even her mistakes, so deeply were they part of her. The orange light through
the drawn blind, the sarcophagus of her figure on the bed, the spot of face,
the voice searching the vacuity of her illness and finding only remote
abstractions.

As he
arose the tears fled lava-like into her bandages.

“That is
for something,” she whispered. “Something must come out of it.”

He
stooped and kissed her forehead.

“We must
all try to be good,” he said.

Leaving
her room he sent the nurse in to her. There were other patients to see: an
American girl of fifteen who had been brought up on the basis that childhood
was intended to be all fun—his visit was provoked by the fact that she had just
hacked off all her hair with a nail scissors. There was nothing much to be done
for her—a family history of neurosis and nothing stable in her past to build
on. The father, normal and conscientious himself, had tried to protect a nervous
brood from life’s troubles and had succeeded merely in preventing them from
developing powers of adjustment to life’s inevitable surprises. There was
little that Dick could say: “Helen, when you’re in doubt you must ask a nurse,
you must learn to take advice. Promise me you will.”

What was
a promise with the head sick? He looked in upon a frail exile from the
Caucasus
buckled securely in a sort of hammock which in
turn was submerged in a warm medical bath, and upon the three daughters of a
Portuguese general who slid almost imperceptibly toward paresis. He went into
the room next to them and told a collapsed psychiatrist that he was better,
always better, and the man tried to read his face for conviction, since he hung
on the real world only through such reassurance as he could find in the
resonance, or lack of it, in Doctor Diver’s voice. After that Dick discharged a
shiftless orderly and by then it was the lunch hour.

Meals
with the patients were a chore he approached with apathy. The gathering, which
of course did not include residents at the Eglantine or the Beeches, was
conventional enough at first sight, but over it brooded always a heavy
melancholy. Such doctors as were present kept up a conversation but most of the
patients, as if exhausted by their morning’s endeavor, or depressed by the
company, spoke little, and ate looking into their plates.

Luncheon
over, Dick returned to his villa. Nicole was in the salon wearing a strange
expression.

“Read
that,” she said.

He
opened the letter. It was from a woman recently discharged, though with
skepticism on the part of the faculty. It accused him in no uncertain terms of
having seduced her daughter, who had been at her mother’s side during the
crucial stage of the illness. It presumed that Mrs. Diver would be glad to have
this information and learn what her husband was “really like.”

Dick
read the letter again. Couched in clear and concise English he yet recognized
it as the letter of a maniac. Upon a single occasion he had let the girl, a
flirtatious little brunette, ride into
Zurich
with him, upon her request, and in the evening had brought her back to the
clinic. In an idle, almost indulgent way, he kissed her. Later, she tried to
carry the affair further, but he was not interested and subsequently, probably
consequently, the girl had come to dislike him, and taken her mother away.

“This
letter is deranged,” he said. “I had no relations of any kind with that girl. I
didn’t even like her.”

“Yes,
I’ve tried thinking that,” said Nicole.

“Surely
you don’t believe it?”

“I’ve
been sitting here.”

He sank
his voice to a reproachful note and sat beside her.

“This is
absurd. This is a letter from a mental patient.”

“I was a
mental patient.”

He stood
up and spoke more authoritatively.

“Suppose
we don’t have any nonsense, Nicole. Go and round up the children and we’ll
start.”

In the
car, with Dick driving, they followed the little promontories of the lake,
catching the burn of light and water in the windshield,
tunnelling
through cascades of evergreen. It was Dick’s car, a Renault so dwarfish that
they all stuck out of it except the children, between whom Mademoiselle towered
mastlike
in the rear seat. They knew every kilometer
of the road—where they would smell the pine needles and the black stove smoke.
A high sun with a face traced on it beat fierce on the straw hats of the
children.

Nicole
was silent; Dick was uneasy at her straight hard gaze. Often he felt lonely
with her, and frequently she
tired
him with the short
floods of personal revelations that she reserved exclusively for him, “I’m like
this—I’m more like that,” but this afternoon he would have been glad had she
rattled on in staccato for a while and given him glimpses of her thoughts. The
situation was always most threatening when she backed up into herself and
closed the doors behind her.

At Zug
Mademoiselle got out and left them. The Divers approached the
Agiri
Fair through a menagerie of mammoth steamrollers that
made way for them. Dick parked the car, and as Nicole looked at him without
moving, he said: “Come on,
darl
.” Her lips drew apart
into a sudden awful smile, and his belly quailed, but as if he hadn’t seen it
he repeated: “Come on. So the children can get out.”

“Oh,
I’ll come all right,” she answered, tearing the words from some story spinning itself
out inside her, too fast for him to grasp. “Don’t worry about that. I’ll come—”

“Then
come.”

She
turned from him as he walked beside her but the smile still flickered across
her face, derisive and remote. Only when Lanier spoke to her several times did
she manage to fix her attention upon an object, a Punch-and-Judy show, and to
orient herself by anchoring to it.

Dick
tried to think what to do. The dualism in his views of her— that of the
husband, that of the psychiatrist—was increasingly paralyzing his faculties. In
these six years she had several times carried him over the line with her,
disarming him by exciting emotional pity or by a flow of wit, fantastic and
disassociated, so that only after the episode did he realize with the
consciousness of his own relaxation from tension, that she had succeeded in
getting a point against his better judgment.