"I am alone to-day," said Dick testily. "But I may not be alone tomorrow. After that I'll fold up my napkin like your father and grunt."
Franz waited a moment.
"How about our patient?" he asked.
"I don't know."
"Well, you should know about her by now."
"I like her. She's attractive. What do you want me to do--take her up in the edelweiss?"
"No, I thought since you go in for scientific books you might have an idea."
"--devote my life to her?"
Franz called his wife in the kitchen: "Du lieber Gott! Bitte, bringe Dick noch ein Glas Bier."
"I don't want any more if I've got to see Dohmler."
"We think it's best to have a program. Four weeks have passed away--apparently the girl is in love with you. That's not our business if we were in the world, but here in the clinic we have a stake in the matter."
"I'll do whatever Doctor Dohmler says," Dick agreed.
But he had little faith that Dohmler would throw much light on the matter; he himself was the incalculable element involved. By no conscious volition of his own, the thing had drifted into his hands. It reminded him of a scene in his childhood when everyone in the house was looking for the lost key to the silver closet, Dick knowing he had hid it under the handkerchiefs in his mother's top drawer; at that time he had experienced a philosophical detachment, and this was repeated now when he and Franz went together to Professor Dohmler's office.
The professor, his face beautiful under straight whiskers, like a vine-overgrown veranda of some fine old house, disarmed him. Dick knew some individuals with more talent, but no person of a class qualitatively superior to Dohmler.
--Six months later he thought the same way when he saw Dohmler dead, the light out on the veranda, the vines of his whiskers tickling his stiff white collar, the many battles that had swayed before the chink-like eyes stilled forever under the frail delicate lids----
"... Good morning, sir." He stood formally, thrown back to the army.
Professor Dohmler interlaced his tranquil fingers. Franz spoke in terms half of liaison officer, half of secretary, till his senior cut through him in mid-sentence.
"We have gone a certain way," he said mildly. "It's you, Doctor Diver, who can best help us now."
Routed out, Dick confessed: "I'm not so straight on it myself."
"I have nothing to do with your personal reactions," said Dohmler. "But I have much to do with the fact that this so-called 'transference,'" he darted a short ironic look at Franz which the latter returned in kind, "must be terminated. Miss Nicole does well indeed, but she is in no condition to survive what she might interpret as a tragedy."
Again Franz began to speak, but Doctor Dohmler motioned him silent.
"I realize that your position has been difficult."
"Yes, it has."
Now the professor sat back and laughed, saying on the last syllable of his laughter, with his sharp little gray eyes shining through: "Perhaps you have got sentimentally involved yourself."
Aware that he was being drawn on, Dick, too, laughed.
"She's a pretty girl--anybody responds to that to a certain extent. I have no intention----"
Again Franz tried to speak--again Dohmler stopped him with a question directed pointedly at Dick. "Have you thought of going away?"
"I can't go away."
Doctor Dohmler turned to Franz: "Then we can send Miss Warren away."
"As you think best, Professor Dohmler," Dick conceded. "It's certainly a situation."
Professor Dohmler raised himself like a legless man mounting a pair of crutches.
"But it is a professional situation," he cried quietly.
He sighed himself back into his chair, waiting for the reverberating thunder to die out about the room. Dick saw that Dohmler had reached his climax, and he was not sure that he himself had survived it. When the thunder had diminished Franz managed to get his word in.
"Doctor Diver is a man of fine character," he said. "I feel he only has to appreciate the situation in order to deal correctly with it. In my opinion Dick can co-operate right here, without any one going away."
"How do you feel about that?" Professor Dohmler asked Dick.
Dick felt churlish in the face of the situation; at the same time he realized in the silence after Dohmler's pronouncement that the state of inanimation could not be indefinitely prolonged; suddenly he spilled everything.
"I'm half in love with her--the question of marrying her has passed through my mind."
"Tch! Tch!" uttered Franz.
"Wait." Dohmler warned him. Franz refused to wait: "What! And devote half your life to being doctor and nurse and all--never! I know what these cases are. One time in twenty it's finished in the first push--better never see her again!"
"What do you think?" Dohmler asked Dick.
"Of course Franz is right."
VII
IT was late afternoon when they wound up the discussion as to what Dick should do, he must be most kind and yet eliminate himself. When the doctors stood up at last, Dick's eyes fell outside the window to where a light rain was falling--Nicole was waiting, expectant, somewhere in that rain. When, presently, he went out buttoning his oil-skin at the throat, pulling down the brim of his hat, he came upon her immediately under the roof of the main entrance.
"I know a new place we can go," she said. "When I was ill I didn't mind sitting inside with the others in the evening--what they said seemed like everything else. Naturally now I see them as ill and it's--it's----"
"You'll be leaving soon."
"Oh, soon. My sister, Beth, but she's always been called Baby, she's coming in a few weeks to take me somewhere; after that I'll be back here for a last month."
"The older sister?"
"Oh, quite a bit older. She's twenty-four--she's very English. She lives in London with my father's sister. She was engaged to an Englishman but he was killed--I never saw him."
Her face, ivory gold against the blurred sunset that strove through the rain, had a promise Dick had never seen before: the high cheek-bones, the faintly wan quality, cool rather than feverish, was reminiscent of the frame of a promising colt--a creature whose life did not promise to be only a projection of youth upon a grayer screen, but instead, a true growing; the face would be handsome in middle life; it would be handsome in old age: the essential structure and the economy were there.
"What are you looking at?"
"I was just thinking that you're going to be rather happy."
Nicole was frightened: "Am I? All right--things couldn't be worse than they have been."
In the covered woodshed to which she had led him, she sat cross-legged upon her golf shoes, her burberry wound about her and her cheeks stung alive by the damp air. Gravely she returned his gaze, taking in his somewhat proud carriage that never quite yielded to the wooden post against which he leaned; she looked into his face that always tried to discipline itself into molds of attentive seriousness, after excursions into joys and mockeries of its own. That part of him which seemed to fit his reddish Irish coloring she knew least; she was afraid of it, yet more anxious to explore--this was his more masculine side: the other part, the trained part, the consideration in the polite eyes, she expropriated without question, as most women did.
"At least this institution has been good for languages," said Nicole. "I've spoken French with two doctors, and German with the nurses, and Italian, or something like it, with a couple of scrub-women and one of the patients, and I've picked up a lot of Spanish from another."
"That's fine."
He tried to arrange an attitude but no logic seemed forthcoming."
"--Music too. Hope you didn't think I was only interested in ragtime. I practise every day--the last few months I've been taking a course in Zurich on the history of music. In fact it was all that kept me going at times--music and the drawing." She leaned suddenly and twisted a loose strip from the sole of her shoe, and then looked up.
"I'd like to draw you just the way you are now."
It made him sad when she brought out her accomplishments for his approval.
"I envy you. At present I don't seem to be interested in anything except my work."
"Oh, I think that's fine for a man," she said quickly. "But for a girl I think she ought to have lots of minor accomplishments and pass them on to her children."
"I suppose so," said Dick with deliberated indifference.
Nicole sat quiet. Dick wished she would speak so that he could play the easy role of wet blanket, but now she sat quiet.
"You're all well," he said. "Try to forget the past; don't overdo things for a year or so. Go back to America and be a debutante and fall in love--and be happy."
"I couldn't fall in love." Her injured shoe scraped a cocoon of must from the log on which she sat.
"Sure you can," Dick insisted. "Not for a year maybe, but sooner or later." Then he added brutally: "You can have a perfectly normal life with a houseful of beautiful descendants. The very fact that you could make a complete comeback at your age proves that the precipitating factors were pretty near everything. Young woman, you'll be pulling your weight long after your friends are carried off screaming."
--But there was a look of pain in her eyes as she took the rough dose, the harsh reminder.
"I know I wouldn't be fit to marry any one for a long time," she said humbly.
Dick was too upset to say any more. He looked out into the grain field trying to recover his hard brassy attitude.
"You'll be all right--everybody here believes in you. Why, Doctor Gregory is so proud of you that he'll probably----"
"I hate Doctor Gregory."
"Well, you shouldn't."
Nicole's world had fallen to pieces, but it was only a flimsy and scarcely created world; beneath it her emotions and instincts fought on. Was it an hour ago she had waited by the entrance, wearing her hope like a corsage at her belt?
... Dress stay crisp for him, button stay put, bloom narcissus--air stay still and sweet.
"It will be nice to have fun again," she fumbled on. For a moment she entertained a desperate idea of telling him how rich she was, what big houses she lived in, that really she was a valuable property--for a moment she made herself into her grandfather, Sid Warren, the horse-trader. But she survived the temptation to confuse all values and shut these matters into their Victorian side-chambers--even though there was no home left to her, save emptiness and pain.
"I have to go back to the clinic. It's not raining now."
Dick walked beside her, feeling her unhappiness, and wanting to drink the rain that touched her cheek.
"I have some new records," she said. "I can hardly wait to play them. Do you know----"
After supper that evening, Dick thought, he would finish the break; also he wanted to kick Franz's bottom for having partially introduced him to such a sordid business. He waited in the hall. His eyes followed a beret, not wet with waiting like Nicole's beret, but covering a skull recently operated on. Beneath it human eyes peered, found him and came over:
"Bonjour, Docteur."
"Bonjour, Monsieur."
"Il fait beau temps."
"Oui, merveilleux."
"Vous etes ici maintenant?"
"Non, pour la journee seulement."
"Ah, bon. Alors--au revoir, Monsieur."
Glad at having survived another contact, the wretch in the beret moved away. Dick waited. Presently a nurse came downstairs and delivered him a message.
"Miss Warren asks to be excused, Doctor. She wants to lie down. She wants to have dinner upstairs to-night."
The nurse hung on his response, half expecting him to imply that Miss Warren's attitude was pathological.
"Oh, I see. Well--" He rearranged the flow of his own saliva, the pulse of his heart. "I hope she feels better. Thanks."
He was puzzled and discontent. At any rate it freed him.
Leaving a note for Franz begging off from supper, he walked through the countryside to the tram station. As he reached the platform, with spring twilight gilding the rails and the glass in the slot machines, he began to feel that the station, the hospital, was hovering between being centripetal and centrifugal. He felt frightened. He was glad when the substantial cobble-stones of Zurich clicked once more under his shoes.
He expected to hear from Nicole next day but there was no word. Wondering if she was ill, he called the clinic and talked to Franz.
"She came downstairs to luncheon yesterday and to-day," said Franz. "She seemed a little abstracted and in the clouds. How did it go off?"
Dick tried to plunge over the Alpine crevasse between the sexes.
"We didn't get to it--at least I didn't think we did. I tried to be distant, but I didn't think enough happened to change her attitude if it ever went deep."
Perhaps his vanity had been hurt that there was no coup de grace to administer.
"From some things she said to her nurse I'm inclined to think she understood."
"All right."
"It was the best thing that could have happened. She doesn't seem over-agitated--only a little in the clouds."
"All right, then."
"Dick, come soon and see me."
VIII
DURING the next weeks Dick experienced a vast dissatisfaction. The pathological origin and mechanistic defeat of the affair left a flat and metallic taste. Nicole's emotions had been used unfairly--what if they turned out to have been his own? Necessarily he must absent himself from felicity a while39--in dreams he saw her walking on the clinic path swinging her wide straw hat....
One time he saw her in person; as he walked past the Palace Hotel, a magnificent Rolls curved into the half-moon entrance. Small within its gigantic proportions, and buoyed up by the power of a hundred superfluous horses, sat Nicole and a young woman who he assumed was her sister. Nicole saw him and momentarily her lips parted in an expression of fright. Dick shifted his hat and passed, yet for a moment the air around him was loud with the circlings of all the goblins on the Gross-Munster. He tried to write the matter out of his mind in a memorandum that went into detail as to the solemn regime before her; the possibilities of another "push" of the malady under the stresses which the world would inevitably supply--in all a memorandum that would have been convincing to any one save to him who had written it.
The total value of this effort was to make him realize once more how far his emotions were involved; thenceforth he resolutely provided antidotes. One was the telephone girl from Bar-sur-Aube, now touring Europe from Nice to Coblenz, in a desperate roundup of the men she had known in her never-to-be-equalled holiday; another was the making of arrangements to get home on a government transport in August; a third was a consequent intensification of work on his proofs for the book that this autumn was to be presented to the German-speaking world of psychiatry.
Dick had outgrown the book; he wanted now to do more spade work; if he got an exchange fellowship he could count on plenty of routine.
Meanwhile he had projected a new work: An Attempt at a Uniform and Pragmatic Classification of the Neuroses and Psychoses, Based on an Examination of Fifteen Hundred Pre-Kraepelin and Post-Kraepelin Cases as they would be Diagnosed in the Terminology of the Different Contemporary Schools--and another sonorous paragraph--Together with a Chronology of Such Subdivisions of Opinion as Have Arisen Independently.
This title would look monumental in German.*
Going into Montreux Dick pedalled slowly, gaping at the Jugenhorn whenever possible, and blinded by glimpses of the lake through the alleys of the shore hotels. He was conscious of the groups of English, emergent after four years and walking with detective-story suspicion in their eyes, as though they were about to be assaulted in this questionable country by German train-bands. There were building and awakening everywhere on this mound of debris formed by a mountain torrent. At Berne and at Lausanne on the way south, Dick had been eagerly asked if there would be Americans this year. "By August,
if not in June?"
He wore leather shorts, an army shirt, mountain shoes. In his knapsack were a cotton suit and a change of underwear. At the Glion funicular he checked his bicycle and took a small beer on the terrace of the station buffet, meanwhile watching the little bug crawl down the eighty-degree slope of the hill. His ear was full of dried blood from la Tour de Peilz, where he had sprinted under the impression that he was a spoiled athlete. He asked for alcohol and cleared up the exterior while the funicular slid down into port. He saw his bicycle embarked, slung his knapsack into the lower compartment of the car, and followed it in.
Mountain-climbing cars are built on a slant similar to the angle of a hat-brim of a man who doesn't want to be recognized. As water gushed from the chamber under the car, Dick was impressed with the ingenuity of the whole idea--a complementary car was now taking on mountain water at the top and would pull the lightened car up by gravity, as soon as the brakes were released. It must have been a great inspiration. In the seat across, a couple of British were discussing the cable itself.
"The ones made in England always last five or six years. Two years ago the Germans underbid us, and how long do you think their cable lasted?"
"How long?"
"A year and ten months. Then the Swiss sold it to the Italians. They don't have rigid inspections of cables."
"I can see it would be a terrible thing for Switzerland if a cable broke."
The conductor shut a door; he telephoned his confrere among the undulati, and with a jerk the car was pulled upward, heading for a pinpoint on an emerald hill above. After it cleared the low roofs, the skies of Vaud, Valais, Savoy, and Geneva spread around the passengers in cyclorama. On the centre of the lake, cooled by the piercing current of the Rhone, lay the true centre of the Western World. Upon it floated swans like boats and boats like swans, both lost in the nothingness of the heartless beauty. It was a bright day, with sun glittering on the grass beach below and the white courts of the Kursaal. The figures on the courts threw no shadows.