At Zug Mademoiselle got out and left them. The Divers approached the Agiri Fair through a menagerie of mammoth steam-rollers that made way for them. Dick parked the car and, as Nicole looked at him without moving, he said: “Come on, darl.” Her lips drew apart into a sudden awful smile and his belly quailed, but as if he hadn’t seen it he repeated: “Come on. So the children can get out.”
“Oh, I’ll come all right,” she answered, tearing the words from some story spinning itself out inside her, too fast for him to grasp. “Don’t worry about that. I’ll come —”
“Then come.”
She turned from him as he walked beside her, but the smile still flickered across her face, derisive and remote. Only when Lanier spoke to her several times did she manage to fix her attention upon an object, a Punch—and—Judy show, and to orient herself by anchoring to it.
Dick tried to think what to do. The dualism in his views of her—that of the husband, that of the psychiatrist—was increasingly paralysing his faculties. In these nine years she had several times carried him over the line with her, disarming him by exciting emotional pity or by a flow of wit, fantastic and dissociated so that only after the episode did he realize, with the consciousness of his own relaxation from tension, that she had succeeded in getting a point against his better judgement.
A discussion with Topsy about the Guignol—as to whether the Punch was the same Punch they had seen last year in Cannes—having been settled, the family walked along again between the booths under the open sky. The women’s bonnets, perching over velvet vests, the bright, spreading skirts of many cantons, seemed demure against the blue and orange paint of the wagons and displays. There was the sound of a whining, tinkling hootchy-kootchy show.
Nicole began to run very suddenly, so suddenly that for a moment Dick did not miss her. Far ahead he saw her yellow dress twisting through the crowd, an ochre stitch along the edge of reality and unreality, and he started after her, Secretly she ran and secretly he followed. As the hot afternoon went shrill and terrible with her flight he had forgotten the children ; then he wheeled and ran back to them, drawing them this way and that by their arms, his eyes jumping from booth to booth.
“Madame,” he cried to a young woman behind a white lottery wheel, “Est-ce que je peux laisser ces petits avec vous deux minutes? C’est tres urgent—je vous donnerai dix francs.”
“Mais oui.”
He headed the children into the booth. “Alors—restez avec cette gentille dame.”
“Oui, Dick.”
He darted off again, but he had lost her ; he circled the merry-go-round, keeping up with it till he realized he was running beside it, staring always at the same horse. He elbowed through the crowd in the buvette ; then, remembering a predilection of Nicole’s, he snatched up an edge of a fortune-teller’s tent and peered within. A droning voice greeted him: “La septieme fille d’une septieme fille nee sur les rives du Nil—entrez, Monsieur—”
Dropping the flap, he ran along towards where the pleasance terminated at the lake and a small ferns wheel revolved slowly against the sky. There he found her.
She was alone in what was momentarily the top boat of the wheel and, as it descended, he saw that she was laughing hilariously ; he slunk back in the crowd, which, at the wheel’s next revolution, spotted the intensity of Nicole’s hysteria.
“Regardez-moi ca!”
“Regarde donc cette Anglaise!”
Down she dropped again—this time the wheel and its music were slowing and a dozen people were around her car, all of them impelled by the quality of her laughter to smile in sympathetic idiocy. But when Nicole saw Dick her laughter died—she made a gesture of slipping by and away from him, but he caught her arm and held it as they walked away.
“Why did you lose control of yourself like that?”
“You know very well why.”
“No, I don’t.”
“That’s just preposterous—let me loose—that’s an insult my intelligence. Don’t you think I saw that girl look at you—that little dark girl. Oh, this is farcical—a child, not more than fifteen. Don’t you think I saw?”
“Stop here a minute and quiet down.”
They sat at a table, her eyes in a profundity of suspicion, her hand moving across her line of sight as if it were obstructed. “I want a drink—I want a brandy.”
“You can’t have brandy—you can have a bock if you want it.”
“Why can’t I have a brandy?”
“We won’t go into that. Listen to me—this business about a girl is a delusion, do you understand that word?”
“It’s always a delusion when I see what you don’t want me to see.”
He had a sense of guilt, as in one of those nightmares where we are accused of a crime which we recognize as something undeniably experienced, but which upon waking we realize we have not committed. His eyes wavered from hers.
“I left the children with a gypsy woman in a booth. We ought to get them.”
“Who do you think you are?” she demanded. “Svengali?”
Fifteen minutes ago they had been a family. Now as she was crushed into a corner by his unwilling shoulder, he saw them all, child and man, as a perilous accident.
“We’re going home.”
“Home!” she roared in a voice so abandoned that its louder tones wavered and cracked. “And sit and think that we’re all rotting and the children’s ashes are rotting in every box I open? That filth!”
Almost with relief he saw that her words sterilized her, and Nicole, sensitized down to the corium of the skin, saw the withdrawal in his face. Her own face softened and she begged, “Help me, help me, Dick!”
A wave of agony went over him. It was awful that such a fine tower should not be erected, only suspended, suspended from him. Up to a point that was right: men were for that, beam and idea, girder and logarithm; but somehow Dick and Nicole had become one and equal, not opposite and complementary ; she was Dick too, the drought in the marrow of his bones. He could not watch her disintegrations without participating in them. His intuition rilled out of him as tenderness and compassion—he could only take the characteristically modern course, to interpose. He would get a nurse from Zurich, to take her over to-night.
“You can help me.”
Her sweet bullying pulled him forward off his feet. “You’ve helped me before—you can help me now.”
“I can only help you the same old way.”
“Someone can help me.”
“Maybe so. You can help yourself most. Let’s find the children.”
There were numerous lottery booths with white wheels. Dick was startled when he inquired at the first and encountered blank disavowals. Evil-eyed, Nicole stood apart, denying the children, resenting them as part of a downright world she sought to make amorphous. Presently Dick found them, surrounded by women who were examining them with delight like fine goods, and by peasant children staring.
“Merci, Monsieur, et Monsieur est trop genereux. C’etait un plaisir, M’sieur, Dame. Au revoir, mes petits.”
They started back with a hot sorrow streaming down upon them ; the car was weighted with their mutual apprehension and anguish, and the children’s mouths were grave with disappointment. Grief presented itself in its terrible, dark, unfamiliar colour. Somewhere around Zug, Nicole, with a convulsive effort, reiterated a remark she had made before about a misty yellow house set back from the road that looked like a painting not yet dry, but it was just an attempt to catch at a rope that was paying out too swiftly.
Dick tried to rest. The struggle would come presently at home and he might have to sit a long time re-stating the universe for her. A schizophrenic is well named as a split personality—Nicole was alternately a person to whom nothing need be explained and one to whom nothing could be explained. It was necessary to treat her with active and affirmative insistence, keeping the road to reality always open, making the road to escape harder going. But the brilliance, the versatility of madness is akin to the resourcefulness of water seeping through, over, and around a dyke. It requires the united front of many people to work against it. He felt it necessary that this time Nicole cure herself; he wanted to wait until she remembered the other times and revolted from them. In a tired way he planned that they would again resume the regime relaxed two years before.
He had turned up a hill that made a short cut to the clinic and now, as he stepped on the accelerator for a short, straightaway run parallel to the hillside, the car swerved violently left, swerved right, tipped on two wheels and, as Dick, with Nicole’s voice screaming in his ear, crushed down the mad hand clutching the steering wheel, righted itself, swerved once more and shot off the road ; it tore through low underbrush, tipped again, and settled slowly at an angle of ninety degrees against a tree.
The children were screaming and Nicole was screaming and cursing and trying to tear at Dick’s face. Thinking
