“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 Lladislau and, as he approached, said: “Will you represent us in saying good-bye 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 the question that absorbed Dick after the disappearance of the caravan was to what extent he had provoked this. He drank claret with each meal, took a night-cap, 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 regime 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 Lladislau on the veranda.”
“What did Lladislau 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 Lladislau into a colonial subject by the time I came along. What about Lladislau? 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. “Lladislau 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 his 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 are 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 were content with a simple regimen 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 seven 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. Owing 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 Pekingese 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. 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
