Tender Is the Night
Page 84With another smile Swanson hurried away, resuming his official expression of disapproval.
Now they came into a courtyard on all four sides of which outer stairways mounted to the chambers above. As they crossed the flags a groaning, hissing, booing sound went up from the loiterers in the courtyard, voices full of fury and scorn. Dick stared about.
“What’s that?” he demanded, aghast.
One of the carabinieri spoke to a group of men and the sound died away.
They came into the court-room. A shabby Italian lawyer from the Consulate spoke at length to the judge while Dick and Collis waited aside. Some one who knew English turned from the window that gave on the yard and explained the sound that had accompanied their passage through. A native of Frascati had raped and slain a five- year-old child and was to be brought in that morning—the crowd had assumed it was Dick.
In a few minutes the lawyer told Dick that he was freed—the court considered him punished enough.
“Enough!” Dick cried. “Punished for what?”
“Come along,” said Collis. “You can’t do anything now.”
“But what did I do, except get into a fight with some taxi-men?”
“They claim you went up to a detective as if you were going to shake hands with him and hit him—”
“That’s not true! I told him I was going to hit him—I didn’t know he was a detective.”
“Come along.” Collis took his arm and they descended the steps.
“I want to make a speech,” Dick cried. “I want to explain to these people how I raped a five-year-old girl. Maybe I did—”
“Come along.”
Baby was waiting with a doctor in a taxi-cab. Dick did not want to look at her and he disliked the doctor, whose stern manner revealed him as one of that least palpable of European types, the Latin moralist. Dick summed up his conception of the disaster, but no one had much to say. In his room in the Quirinal the doctor washed off the rest of the blood and the oily sweat, set his nose, his fractured ribs and fingers, disinfected the smaller wounds and put a hopeful dressing on the eye. Dick asked for a quarter of a grain of morphine, for he was still wide awake and full of nervous energy. With the morphine he fell asleep; the doctor and Collis left and Baby waited with him until a woman could arrive from the English nursing home. It had been a hard night but she had the satisfaction of feeling that, whatever Dick’s previous record was, they now possessed a moral superiority over him for as long as he proved of any use.
(ii)
BOOK 3
I
Frau Kaethe Gregorovius overtook her husband on the path of their villa.
“How was Nicole?” she asked mildly; but she spoke out of breath, giving away the fact that she had held the question in her mind during her run.
Franz looked at her in surprise.
“You see her so much—I thought she must be sick.”
“We will talk of this in the house.”
Kaethe agreed meekly. His study was over in the administration building and the children were with their tutor in the living-room; they went up to the bedroom.
“Excuse me, Franz,” said Kaethe before he could speak. “Excuse me, dear, I had no right to say that. I know my obligations and I am proud of them. But there is a bad feeling between Nicole and me.”
“Birds in their little nests agree,” Franz thundered. Finding the tone inappropriate to the sentiment he repeated his command in the spaced and considered rhythm with which his old master, Doctor Dohmler, could cast significance on the tritest platitude. “Birds— in—their—nests—AGREE!”
“I realize that. You haven’t seen me fail in courtesy toward Nicole.”
“I see you failing in common sense. Nicole is half a patient—she will possibly remain something of a patient all her life. In the absence of Dick I am responsible.” He hesitated; sometimes as a quiet joke he tried to keep news from Kaethe. “There was a cable from Rome this morning. Dick has had grippe and is starting home to-morrow.”
Relieved, Kaethe pursued her course in a less personal tone:
“I think Nicole is less sick than any one thinks—she only cherishes her illness as an instrument of power. She ought to be in the cinema, like your Norma Talmadge—that’s where all American women would be happy.”
“Are you jealous of Norma Talmadge, on a film?”
“You like Dick?”
“I like him,” she admitted. “He’s different, he thinks of others.”
—And so does Norma Talmadge, Franz said to himself. Norma Talmadge must be a fine, noble woman beyond her loveliness. They must compel her to play foolish rôles; Norma Talmadge must be a woman whom it would be a great privilege to know.
Kaethe had forgotten about Norma Talmadge, a vivid shadow that she had fretted bitterly upon one night as they were driving home from the movies in Zurich.
“—Dick married Nicole for her money,” she said. “That was his weakness—you hinted as much yourself one night.”
“You’re being malicious.”
“I shouldn’t have said that,” she retracted. “We must all live together like birds, as you say. But it’s difficult when Nicole acts as—when Nicole pulls herself back a little, as if she were holding her breath—as if I SMELT bad!”