“How’s father?” she demanded.
“He’s much better. He seemed to have a good deal of reserve energy after all.” He hesitated, breaking it to her easy. “In fact he got up and went away.”
Wanting a drink, for the chase had occupied the dinner hour, he led her, puzzled, toward the grill, and continued as they occupied two leather easy-chairs and ordered a high-ball and a glass of beer: “The man who was taking care of him made a wrong prognosis or something--wait a minute, I’ve hardly had time to think the thing out myself.”
“He’s gone?”
“He got the evening train for Paris.”
They sat silent. From Nicole flowed a vast tragic apathy.
“It was instinct,” Dick said, finally. “He was really dying, but he tried to get a resumption of rhythm--he’s not the first person that ever walked off his death-bed--like an old clock--you know, you shake it and somehow from sheer habit it gets going again. Now your father--”
“Oh, don’t tell me,” she said.
“His principal fuel was fear,” he continued. “He got afraid, and off he went. He’ll probably live till ninety--”
“Please don’t tell me any more,” she said. “Please don’t--I couldn’t stand any more.”
“All right. The little devil I came down to see is hopeless. We may as well go back to-morrow.”
“I don’t see why you have to--come in contact with all this,” she burst forth.
“Oh, don’t you? Sometimes I don’t either.”
She put her hand on his.
“Oh, I’m sorry I said that, Dick.”
Some one had brought a phonograph into the bar and they sat listening to The Wedding of the Painted Doll.
III
One morning a week later, stopping at the desk for his mail, Dick became aware of some extra commotion outside: Patient Von Cohn Morris was going away. His parents, Australians, were putting his baggage vehemently into a large limousine, and beside them stood Doctor Ladislau protesting with ineffectual attitudes against the violent gesturings of Morris, senior. The young man was regarding his embarkation with aloof cynicism as Doctor Diver approached.
“Isn’t this a little sudden, Mr. Morris?”
Mr. Morris started as he saw Dick--his florid face and the large checks on his suit seemed to turn off and on like electric lights. He approached Dick as though to strike him.
“High time we left, we and those who have come with us,” he began, and paused for breath. “It is high time, Doctor Diver. High time.”
“Will you come in my office?” Dick suggested.
“Not I! I’ll talk to you, but I’m washing my hands of you and your place.”
He shook his finger at Dick. “I was just telling this doctor here. We’ve wasted our time and our money.”
Doctor Ladislau stirred in a feeble negative, signalling up a vague Slavic evasiveness. Dick had never liked Ladislau. He managed to walk the excited Australian along the path in the direction of his office, trying to persuade him to enter; but the man shook his head.
“It’s you, Doctor Diver, you, the very man. I went to Doctor Ladislau because you were not to be found, Doctor Diver, and because Doctor Gregorovius is not expected until the nightfall, and I would not wait. No, sir! I would not wait a minute after my son told me the truth.”
He came up menacingly to Dick, who kept his hands loose enough to drop him if it seemed necessary. “My son is here for alcoholism, and he told us he smelt liquor on your breath. Yes, sir!” He made a quick, apparently unsuccessful sniff. “Not once, but twice Von Cohn says he has smelt liquor on your breath. I and my lady have never touched a drop of it in our lives. We hand Von Cohn to you to be cured, and within a month he twice smells liquor on your breath! What kind of cure is that there?”
Dick hesitated; Mr. Morris was quite capable of making a scene on the clinic drive.
“After all, Mr. Morris, some people are not going to give up what they regard as food because of your son--”
“But you’re a doctor, man!” cried Morris furiously. “When the workmen drink their beer that’s bad ‘cess to them--but you’re here supposing to cure--”
“This has gone too far. Your son came to us because of kleptomania.”
“What was behind it?” The man was almost shrieking. “Drink--black drink. Do you know what color black is? It’s black! My own uncle was hung by the neck because of it, you hear? My son comes to a sanitarium, and a doctor reeks of it!”
“I must ask you to leave.”
“You ask me! We are leaving!”
“If you could be a little temperate we could tell you the results of the treatment to date. Naturally, since you feel as you do, we would not want your son as a patient--”
“You dare to use the word temperate to me?”
Dick called to Doctor Ladislau and as he approached, said: “Will you represent us in saying good-by to the patient and to his family?”
He bowed slightly to Morris and went into his office, and stood rigid for a moment just inside the door. He watched until they drove away, the gross parents, the bland, degenerate offspring: it was easy to prophesy the family’s swing around Europe, bullying their betters with hard ignorance and hard money. But what absorbed Dick after the disappearance of the caravan was the question as to what extent he had provoked this. He drank claret with each meal, took a nightcap, generally in the form of hot rum, and sometimes he tippled with gin in the afternoons--gin was the most difficult to detect on the breath. He was averaging a half-pint of alcohol a day, too much for his system to burn up.
Dismissing a tendency to justify himself, he sat down at his desk and wrote out, like a prescription, a régime that would cut his liquor in half. Doctors, chauffeurs, and Protestant clergymen could never smell of liquor, as could painters, brokers, cavalry leaders; Dick blamed himself only for indiscretion. But the matter was by no means clarified half an hour later when Franz, revivified by an Alpine fortnight, rolled up the drive, so eager to resume work that he was plunged in it before he reached his office. Dick met him there.
“How was Mount Everest?”
“We could very well have done Mount Everest the rate we were doing. We thought of it. How goes it all? How is my Kaethe, how is your Nicole?”
“All goes smooth domestically. But my God, Franz, we had a rotten scene this morning.”
“How? What was it?”
Dick walked around the room while Franz got in touch with his villa by telephone. After the family exchange was over, Dick said: “The Morris boy was taken away--there was a row.”
Franz’s buoyant face fell.
“I knew he’d left. I met Ladislau on the veranda.”
“What did Ladislau say?”
“Just that young Morris had gone--that you’d tell me about it. What about it?”
“The usual incoherent reasons.”
“He was a devil, that boy.”
“He was a case for anesthesia,” Dick agreed. “Anyhow, the father had beaten Ladislau into a colonial subject by the time I came along. What about Ladislau? Do we keep him? I say no--he’s not much of a man, he can’t seem to cope with anything.” Dick hesitated on the verge of the truth, swung away to give himself space within which to recapitulate. Franz perched on the edge of a desk, still in his linen duster and travelling gloves. Dick said:
“One of the remarks the boy made to his father was that your distinguished collaborator was a drunkard. The man is a fanatic, and the descendant seems to have caught traces of vin-du-pays on me.”
Franz sat down, musing on his lower lip. “You can tell me at length,” he said finally.
“Why not now?” Dick suggested. “You must know I’m the last man to abuse liquor.” His eyes and Franz’s glinted on each other, pair on pair. “Ladislau let the man get so worked up that I was on the defensive. It might have happened in front of patients, and you can imagine how hard it could be to defend yourself in a situation like that!”
Franz took off h
is gloves and coat. He went to the door and told the secretary, “Don’t disturb us.” Coming back into the room he flung himself at the long table and fooled with his mail, reasoning as little as is characteristic of people in such postures, rather summoning up a suitable mask for what he had to say.
“Dick, I know well that you are a temperate, well-balanced man, even though we do not entirely agree on the subject of alcohol. But a time has come--Dick, I must say frankly that I have been aware several times that you have had a drink when it was not the moment to have one. There is some reason. Why not try another leave of abstinence?”
“Absence,” Dick corrected him automatically. “It’s no solution for me to go away.”
They were both chafed, Franz at having his return marred and blurred.
“Sometimes you don’t use your common sense, Dick.”
“I never understood what common sense meant applied to complicated problems--unless it means that a general practitioner can perform a better operation than a specialist.”
He was seized by an overwhelming disgust for the situation. To explain, to patch--these were not natural functions at their age--better to continue with the cracked echo of an old truth in the ears.
“This is no go,” he said suddenly.
“Well, that’s occurred to me,” Franz admitted. “Your heart isn’t in this project any more, Dick.”
“I know. I want to leave--we could strike some arrangement about taking Nicole’s money out gradually.”
“I have thought about that too, Dick--I have seen this coming. I am able to arrange other backing, and it will be possible to take all your money out by the end of the year.”
Dick had not intended to come to a decision so quickly, nor was he prepared for Franz’s so ready acquiescence in the break, yet he was relieved. Not without desperation he had long felt the ethics of his profession dissolving into a lifeless mass.
IV
The Divers would return to the Riviera, which was home. The Villa Diana had been rented again for the summer, so they divided the intervening time between German spas and French cathedral towns where they were always happy for a few days. Dick wrote a little with no particular method; it was one of those parts of life that is an awaiting; not upon Nicole’s health, which seemed to thrive on travel, nor upon work, but simply an awaiting. The factor that gave purposefulness to the period was the children.
Dick’s interest in them increased with their ages, now eleven and nine. He managed to reach them over the heads of employees on the principle that both the forcing of children and the fear of forcing them were inadequate substitutes for the long, careful watchfulness, the checking and balancing and reckoning of accounts, to the end that there should be no slip below a certain level of duty. He came to know them much better than Nicole did, and in expansive moods over the wines of several countries he talked and played with them at length. They had that wistful charm, almost sadness, peculiar to children who have learned early not to cry or laugh with abandon; they were apparently moved to no extremes of emotion, but content with a simple regimentation and the simple pleasures allowed them. They lived on the even tenor found advisable in the experience of old families of the Western world, brought up rather than brought out. Dick thought, for example, that nothing was more conducive to the development of observation than compulsory silence.
Lanier was an unpredictable boy with an inhuman curiosity. “Well, how many Pomeranians would it take to lick a lion, father?” was typical of the questions with which he harassed Dick. Topsy was easier. She was nine and very fair and exquisitely made like Nicole, and in the past Dick had worried about that. Lately she had become as robust as any American child. He was satisfied with them both, but conveyed the fact to them only in a tacit way. They were not let off breaches of good conduct--”Either one learns politeness at home,” Dick said, “or the world teaches it to you with a whip and you may get hurt in the process. What do I care whether Topsy ‘adores’ me or not? I’m not bringing her up to be my wife.”
Another element that distinguished this summer and autumn for the Divers was a plenitude of money. Due to the sale of their interest in the clinic, and to developments in America, there was now so much that the mere spending of it, the care of goods, was an absorption in itself. The style in which they travelled seemed fabulous.
Regard them, for example, as the train slows up at Boyen where they are to spend a fortnight visiting. The shifting from the wagon-lit has begun at the Italian frontier. The governess’s maid and Madame Diver’s maid have come up from second class to help with the baggage and the dogs. Mlle. Bellois will superintend the hand-luggage, leaving the Sealyhams to one maid and the pair of Pekinese to the other. It is not necessarily poverty of spirit that makes a woman surround herself with life--it can be a superabundance of interest, and, except during her flashes of illness, Nicole was capable of being curator of it all. For example with the great quantity of heavy baggage--presently from the van would be unloaded four wardrobe trunks, a shoe trunk, three hat trunks, and two hat boxes, a chest of servants’ trunks, a portable filing-cabinet, a medicine case, a spirit lamp container, a picnic set, four tennis rackets in presses and cases, a phonograph, a typewriter. Distributed among the spaces reserved for family and entourage were two dozen supplementary grips, satchels and packages, each one numbered, down to the tag on the cane case. Thus all of it could be checked up in two minutes on any station platform, some for storage, some for accompaniment from the “light trip list” or the “heavy trip list,” constantly revised, and carried on metal-edged plaques in Nicole’s purse. She had devised the system as a child when travelling with her failing mother. It was equivalent to the system of a regimental supply officer who must think of the bellies and equipment of three thousand men.
The Divers flocked from the train into the early gathered twilight of the valley. The village people watched the debarkation with an awe akin to that which followed the Italian pilgrimages of Lord Byron a century before. Their hostess was the Contessa di Minghetti, lately Mary North. The journey that had begun in a room over the shop of a paperhanger in Newark had ended in an extraordinary marriage.
“Conte di Minghetti” was merely a papal title--the wealth of Mary’s husband flowed from his being ruler-owner of manganese deposits in southwestern Asia. He was not quite light enough to travel in a pullman south of Mason-Dixon; he was of the Kyble-Berber-Sabaean-Hindu strain that belts across north Africa and Asia, more sympathetic to the European than the mongrel faces of the ports.
When these princely households, one of the East, one of the West, faced each other on the station platform, the splendor of the Divers seemed pioneer simplicity by comparison. Their hosts were accompanied by an Italian major-domo carrying a staff, by a quartet of turbaned retainers on motorcycles, and by two half-veiled females who stood respectfully a little behind Mary and salaamed at Nicole, making her jump with the gesture.
To Mary as well as to the Divers the greeting was faintly comic; Mary gave an apologetic, belittling giggle; yet her voice, as she introduced her husband by his Asiatic title, flew proud and high.
In their rooms as they dressed for dinner, Dick and Nicole grimaced at each other in an awed way: such rich as want to be thought democratic pretend in private to be swept off their feet by swank.
“Little Mary North knows what she wants,” Dick muttered through his shaving cream. “Abe educated her, and now she’s married to a Buddha. If Europe ever goes Bolshevik she’ll turn up as the bride of Stalin.”
Nicole looked around from her dressing-case. “Watch your tongue, Dick, will you?” But she laughed. “They’re very swell. The warships all fire at them or salute them or something. Mary rides in the royal bus in London.”
“All right,” he agreed. As he heard Nicole at the door asking for pins, he called, “I wonder if I could have some whiskey; I feel the mountain air!”
“She’ll see to it,” presently Nicole called through the bathroom door. “It was one o
f those women who were at the station. She has her veil off.”
“What did Mary tell you about life?” he asked.
“She didn’t say so much--she was interested in high life--she asked me a lot of questions about my genealogy and all that sort of thing, as if I knew anything about it. But it seems the bridegroom has two very tan children by another marriage--one of them ill with some Asiatic thing they can’t diagnose. I’ve got to warn the children. Sounds very peculiar to me. Mary will see how we’d feel about it.” She stood worrying a minute.
“She’ll understand,” Dick reassured her. “Probably the child’s in bed.”
At dinner Dick talked to Hosain, who had been at an English public school. Hosain wanted to know about stocks and about Hollywood and Dick, whipping up his imagination with champagne, told him preposterous tales.
“Billions?” Hosain demanded.
“Trillions,” Dick assured him.
“I didn’t truly realize--”
“Well, perhaps millions,” Dick conceded. “Every hotel guest is assigned a harem--or what amounts to a harem.”
“Other than the actors and directors?”
“Every hotel guest--even travelling salesmen. Why, they tried to send me up a dozen candidates, but Nicole wouldn’t stand for it.”
Nicole reproved him when they were in their room alone. “Why so many highballs? Why did you use your word spic in front of him?”
“Excuse me, I meant smoke. The tongue slipped.”
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 110
