Book 2

I

In the spring of 1917, when Doctor Richard Diver first arrived in Zurich, he was twenty-six years old, a fine age for a man, indeed the very acme of bachelorhood. Even in wartime days, it was a fine age for Dick, who was already too valuable, too much of a capital investment to be shot off on the front. Instructions from his military authorities were that he was to complete his studies in Zurich and take a degree as he had planned.

Switzerland was an island, washed on all sides by the waves of war.

Doctor Diver had been to Oxford in 1914. He returned home for a final year at Johns Hopkins University, and took his degree. In 1916 he managed to get to Vienna under the impression that, if he were not in a hurry, the great Freud would be killed by an aeroplane bomb. Dick managed to get enough coal and oil to sit in his room in the Damenstiff Strasse and write a book that he published in Zurich in 1920.

He had no idea that he was charming. In his last year at New Haven some one referred to him as “lucky Dick”.

At the beginning of 1917, when it was becoming difficult to find coal, Dick burned for fuel almost a hundred textbooks that he had collected; but he remembered what was within them very well.

After he took his degree, he received his orders to join a neurological unit forming in Bar-sur-Aube.

In France, he found time to complete the short textbook and collect the material for his next book. He returned to Zurich in the spring of 1919 discharged.

He had decided to remain another two years in Zurich. Today he went out to see Franz Gregorovius at Dohmler’s clinic on the Zurichsee. Franz, resident pathologist at the clinic, a few years older than Dick, met him at the tram stop. On the way to the clinic he asked: “Did you come down to see me or that girl?”

“Is she well?” Dick demanded.

“Perfectly well, I have charge of her, in fact I have charge of the majority of the English and American patients. They call me Doctor Gregory.”

“Let me explain about that girl,” Dick said. “I only saw her one time. When I came to say good-by to you just before I went over to France. It was the first time I put on my uniform. When I left you I saw a nurse and a young girl. I didn’t think the girl was a patient; I asked the nurse about tram times and we walked along. The girl was the prettiest thing I ever saw.”

“She still is.”

“She’d never seen an American uniform and we talked, and I didn’t think anything about it. That was absolutely all—till the letters began to come.”

“It was the best thing that could have happened to her,” said Franz. “I want you to come into my office and talk before you see her.”

Dick thought of the patient, the girl.

He had received about fifty letters from her written over a period of eight months. He wanted to know more about her; and Franz told Dick the story.

About a year and a half before, Doctor Dohmler had a letter from an American gentleman living in Lausanne, a Mr. Devereux Warren, of the Warren family of Chicago. A meeting was arranged and one day Mr. Warren arrived at the clinic with his daughter Nicole, a girl of sixteen. She was obviously not well.

Warren was a very handsome man looking less than forty. He was a fine American type in every way, tall, broad, well-made. He was nervous.

“Doctor Dohmler, my daughter isn’t right in the head. I’ve had lots of specialists and nurses for her but the thing has grown too big for me and I’ve been strongly recommended to come to you.”

“Very well,” said Doctor Dohmler. “Please start at the beginning and tell me everything.”

“There isn’t any beginning, at least there isn’t any insanity in the family that I know of, on either side. Nicole’s mother died when she was eleven and I’ve been father and mother to her, with the help of governesses.

As a child she was a darling thing—everybody was crazy about her. She liked to read or draw or dance or play the piano. I’ve got an older girl, too, and there was a boy that died, but Nicole was—”

He broke off and Doctor Dohmler helped him.

“She was a perfectly normal, happy child.”

“Perfectly.”

Doctor Dohmler waited. Mr. Warren shook his head, blew a long sigh, glanced quickly at Doctor Dohmler and then at the floor again.

“About eight months ago, or maybe it was six months ago she began to do funny things—crazy things.”

All the time Warren was talking to Doctor Dohmler, latter kept thinking of Chicago. Once in his younger days he had lived in Chicago as fellow and docent at the university. He knew Chicago great feudal families of Armour, Palmer, Field, Crane, Warren, Swift, and McCormick and many others.

“She got worse,” continued Warren. “She had a fit or something—the things she said got crazier and crazier. Almost always about men going to attack her, men she knew or men on the street—anybody—”

He told of the efforts they had made in America, finally of his decision to bring his daughter to Switzerland.

Dohmler was wondering why and about what the man was lying to him. Doctor Dohmler asked him questions and pressed and pressed, until half an hour later Warren broke down.

“It just happened,” he said. “I don’t know.”

“After her mother died when she was little she used to come into my bed every morning, sometimes she’d sleep in my bed. I was sorry for the little thing. People used to say what a wonderful father and daughter we were. We were just like lovers—and then all at once we were lovers—and ten minutes after it happened I could have shot myself.”

“Then what?” said Doctor Dohmler. “Did this thing go on?”

“Oh, no! She seemed to freeze up right away. She’d just say, ‘Never mind, never mind, Daddy. It doesn’t matter. Never mind.’”

When Warren had left his daughter and returned to Lausanne, and several days had passed, the doctor and Franz entered upon Nicole’s card:

Diagnosis: Divided Personality. Acute phase of the illness. The fear of men is a symptom of the illness. The prognosis must be reserved.

“The prognosis was bad—as you know, the percentage of cures is very low at that age.”

“Those first letters looked bad,” agreed Dick.

“Very bad—very typical. I didn’t want to let the first one get out of the clinic. It was nice of you to answer them.”

Dick sighed. “She was such a pretty thing. All I said in my letters was ‘Be a good girl and mind the doctors.’”

“That was enough—it gave her somebody to think of outside. For a while she didn’t have anybody—only one sister that she doesn’t seem very close to. Besides, reading her letters helped us here—they revealed her condition. About October she began to seem normal.”

When Dick first visited Miss Warren at the clinic, she met him at the veranda of the central building.

“How do you do, Captain,” she said. “Shall we sit out here? It’s summer practically. Are you here for a long time?”

“I’m in Zurich for a long time, if that’s what you mean. At least till July.”

“I’m leaving in June.”

“You’re going where?” Dick asked Nicole.

“Somewhere with my sister—somewhere exciting, I hope, because I’ve lost so much time. But perhaps they’ll think I ought to go to a quiet place at first.”

They talked of music, of the latest records. Whenever he turned toward her she was smiling a little, her face lighting up like an angel’s. She thanked him for everything, as if he had taken her to some party, and as Dick became less and less certain of his relation to her, her confidence increased.

II

It was May when he next saw her at luncheon in Zurich. The logic of his life tended away from the girl.

He was enough older than Nicole to take pleasure in her delights, the way she paused in front of the hall mirror on leaving the restaurant. He was glad to see her build up happiness and confidence. The difficulty was that Nicole brought everything to his feet.

“How about our patient?” Franz asked one day, when they were sitting at his place and drinking beer.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, you should know about her by now.”

“I like her. She’s attractive. What do you want me to do—devote my life to her?’

“We think it’s best to have a program. Four weeks have passed away—apparently the girl is in love with you. That’s not our business if we were in the world, but here in the clinic it is.”

“I’ll do whatever Doctor Dohmler says,” Dick agreed.

This was repeated when he and Franz went together to Professor Dohmler’s office.

“We have gone a certain way,” Professor Dohmler said. “It’s you, Doctor Diver, who can best help us now. I realize that your position has been difficult.”

“Yes, it has.”

Now the professor sat back and laughed: “Perhaps you have got sentimentally involved yourself. She’s a pretty girl—Have you thought of going away?”

“I can’t go away.”

Doctor Dohmler turned to Franz: “Then we can send Miss Warren away.”

“As you think best, Professor Dohmler,” Dick agreed. “It’s certainly a situation.”

“But it is a professional situation,” Professor Dohmler cried.

When the storm was over, Franz managed to get his word in.

“Doctor Diver is a man of fine character,” he said. “Dick can co-operate right here, without any one going away.”

“How do you feel about that?” Professor Dohmler asked Dick.

“I’m half in love with her—the question of marrying her has passed through my mind.”

Franz cried: “What! And devote half your life to being doctor and nurse and all—never! I know what these cases are. One time in twenty it doesn’t return—better never see her again!”

“What do you think?” Dohmler asked Dick.

“Of course Franz is right.”

It was late afternoon when they finished the discussion as to what Dick should do, he must be kind and yet eliminate his presence in her life. He went out and came upon her immediately.

She said: “When I was ill I didn’t mind sitting inside with the others in the evening—Naturally now I see them as ill—”

“You’ll be leaving soon.”

“Oh, yes. My sister, Beth, but she’s always been called Baby, she’s coming in a few weeks to take me somewhere; after that I’ll be back here for a last month.”

“The older sister?”

“Oh, quite a bit older. She’s twenty-four—she’s very English. She lives in London with my father’s sister. She was engaged to an Englishman but he was killed—”

Her face had a promise Dick had never seen before: the face would be handsome in middle life; it would be handsome in old age : the essential structure and the economy were there.

“You’re well,” he said. “Try to forget the past. Go back to America and fall in love—and be happy.”

“I couldn’t fall in love.”

“Sure you can,” Dick insisted. “Not for a year maybe, but sooner or later. You can have a perfectly normal life with children.”

There was a look of pain in her eyes as she heard his words.

“I know I won’t be able to marry any one for a long time,” she said humbly.

Dick was too upset to say any more.

Nicole’s world had fallen to pieces. Was it an hour ago she had waited by the entrance, looking into future with hope? For a moment she had a desperate idea of telling him how rich she was, what big houses she lived in. But she did not, even though there was no home left to her, save emptiness and pain.

“I have to go back to the clinic.”

He expected to hear from Nicole next day but there was no word. Wondering if she was ill, he called the clinic and talked to Franz.

“She came downstairs to luncheon yesterday and today,” said Franz. “She seemed a little in the clouds. How did it go off?”

“I tried to be distant, but I didn’t think enough happened to change her attitude.”

“From some things she said to her nurse I’m inclined to think she understood,” said Franz.

During the next weeks Dick felt dissatisfied. Nicole’s emotions had been used unfairly—what if it had happened to him?

He realized how far his emotions were involved; and he provided antidotes. One was the telephone girl from Bar-sur-Aube; another was making arrangements to get home in August; a third was intensification of work on his book that this autumn was to be presented to the German-speaking world of psychiatry.

He had projected a new work: An Attempt at a Uniform and Pragmatic Classification of the Neuroses and Psychoses, Based on an Examination of Fifteen Hundred Cases.

Having planned a short holiday in the mountains, he arrived at the station of the Glion funicular, and after a short wait got into a car.

When Chillon came into view, suddenly there was a confusion among passengers—they parted to give way to a couple of young people—a young man and Nicole.

Nicole said, “Hel-LO.” She was lovely to look at; immediately Dick saw that something was different; one could not believe she had been to the clinic.

“Doctor Diver, the Conte de Marmora,” she introduced them. “Sister in first-class—it’s a matter of principle with her.” Nicole and Marmora laughed.

“Where are you going?” asked Dick.

“Caux. You too?” Nicole looked at his costume.

“Yes. I’m going down Monday.”

Dick wished himself away from her, fearing that he reminded her of a world well left behind. He decided to go to the other hotel.

When they arrived, Nicole was beside him.

“Aren’t you at our hotel?” she asked.

“I’m economizing.”

“Will you come down and have dinner?” A crowd passed them.

“This is my sister—Doctor Diver from Zurich.” Dick bowed to a young woman of twenty-five, tall and confident.

“I’ll drop in after dinner,” Dick promised.

He left, feeling Nicole’s eyes following him, feeling her helpless first love.

They were waiting for him at the hotel. Baby Warren wanted to talk to Dick: “Nicole told me that you had a lot to do with her getting well. What I can’t understand is what WE should do—they only told me she ought to be natural and gay. But how can I tell what’s normal and what’s crazy?”

“Nicole isn’t going to be crazy, you needn’t be afraid.”

“I don’t mind the responsibility but we’ve never had anything like this in the family before,” she declared. “Actually I have a plan. They say Nicole will need to be looked after for a few years. I don’t know whether you know Chicago or not—”

“I don’t.”

“Well, there’s a North Side and a South Side. The North Side is chic and all that, and we’ve always lived over there, but lots of old Chicago families, if you know what I mean, still live on the South Side. The University is there. I mean it’s stuffy to some people, but anyhow it’s different from the North Side. We have lots of connections there—Father controls fellowships at the University, and I thought if we took Nicole home, what could be better in her condition than if she fell in love with some good doctor—”

The Warrens were going to buy Nicole a doctor! There was no use worrying about Nicole when they were able to buy her a nice young doctor.

“There must be many who’d jump at the chance,” Baby said. “Now where is Nicole—she’s gone off somewhere. I never know whether I ought to go find her.”

“I’ll take a look around,” Dick offered.

He found Nicole near the lake.

“Your sister is worried.”

“Oh! This has been an awfully exciting day.”

“I know.”

“I don’t want to do anything anti-social—I’ve caused everybody enough trouble. But tonight I wanted to get away.”

“You’re a nice person—just keep using your own judgment about yourself.”

“You like me?”

“Of course.”

“If I hadn’t been sick would you—I mean, would I have been the sort girl you might have—you know what I mean.”

He remembered the elder Miss Warren’s words about young doctors that could be bought, and he hardened for a moment. “You’re a nice kid, but I couldn’t fall in love.”

“You won’t give me a chance.”

“WHAT!”

The impertinence astonished him.

“Give me a chance now.”

She leaned toward him, and pressed her lips to his.

… For Doctor Diver to marry a mental patient? How did it happen? Where did it begin?

“BIG chance—oh, yes. My God!—they decided to buy a doctor? Well, they better find him in Chicago.” The following morning Dick went down to Montreux for a swim, got back to his hotel in time for dinner. A note awaited him.

DEAR DOCTOR DIVER: I phoned but you were out. I wonder if I may ask you a great big favor. I must go back to Paris. Can you let Nicole ride as far as Zurich with you, since you are going back Monday?

Sincerely,

BETH EVAN WARREN.

Dick was furious.

On the train Dick was sad to see Nicole’s relief at going back to the only home she knew. When he left her outside the clinic door on the Zurichsee and she looked at him he knew her problem was one they had together for good.