F. Scott Fitzgerald - Tender is the Night [93]
“Take Topsy’s hand,” he said to Lanier, “like that, tight, and climb up that hill—see the little path? When you get to the inn tell them ‘La voiture Divare est cassée.’ Some one must come right down.”
Lanier, not sure what had happened, but suspecting the dark and unprecedented, asked:
“What will you do, Dick?”
“We’ll stay here with the car.”
Neither of them looked at their mother as they started off. “Be careful crossing the road up there! Look both ways!” Dick shouted after them.
He and Nicole looked at each other directly, their eyes like blazing windows across a court of the same house. Then she took out a compact, looked in its mirror, and smoothed back the temple hair. Dick watched the children climbing for a moment until they disappeared among the pines half way up; then he walked around the car to see the damage and plan how to get it back on the road. In the dirt he could trace the rocking course they had pursued for over a hundred feet; he was filled with a violent disgust that was not like anger.
In a few minutes the proprietor of the inn came running down.
“My God!” he exclaimed. “How did it happen, were you going fast? What luck! Except for that tree you’d have rolled down hill!”
Taking advantage of Emile’s reality, the wide black apron, the sweat upon the rolls of his face, Dick signalled to Nicole in a matter-of-fact way to let him help her from the car; whereupon she jumped over the lower side, lost her balance on the slope, fell to her knees and got up again. As she watched the men trying to move the car her expression became defiant. Welcoming even that mood Dick said:
“Go and wait with the children, Nicole.”
Only after she had gone did he remember that she had wanted cognac, and that there was cognac available up there—he told Emile never mind about the car; they would wait for the chauffeur and the big car to pull it up onto the road. Together they hurried up to the inn.
XVI
“I want to go away,” he told Franz. “For a month or so, for as long as I can.”
“Why not, Dick? That was our original arrangement—it was you who insisted on staying. If you and Nicole—”
“I don’t want to go away with Nicole. I want to go away alone. This last thing knocked me sideways—if I get two hours’ sleep in twenty-four, it’s one of Zwingli’s miracles.”
“You wish a real leave of abstinence.”
“The word is ‘absence.’ Look here: if I go to Berlin to the Psychiatric Congress could you manage to keep the peace? For three months she’s been all right and she likes her nurse. My God, you’re the only human being in this world I can ask this of.”
Franz grunted, considering whether or not he could be trusted to think always of his partner’s interest.
In Zurich the next week Dick drove to the airport and took the big plane for Munich. Soaring and roaring into the blue he felt numb, realizing how tired he was. A vast persuasive quiet stole over him, and he abandoned sickness to the sick, sound to the motors, direction to the pilot. He had no intention of attending so much as a single session of the congress—he could imagine it well enough, new pamphlets by Bleuler and the elder Forel that he could much better digest at home, the paper by the American who cured dementia præcox by pulling out his patient’s teeth or cauterizing their tonsils, the half-derisive respect with which this idea would be greeted, for no more reason than that America was such a rich and powerful country. The other delegates from America—red-headed Schwartz with his saint’s face and his infinite patience in straddling two worlds, as well as dozens of commercial alienists with hang-dog faces, who would be present partly to increase their standing, and hence their reach for the big plums of the criminal practice, partly to master novel sophistries that they could weave into their stock in trade, to the infinite confusion of all values. There would be cynical Latins, and some man of Freud’s from Vienna. Articulate