III

In September I came out on the hotel terrace where Dick had tea with Baby.

“Nicole’s rich, but that doesn’t make me an adventurer,” Dick said.

“That’s just it,” said Baby. “Nicole’s rich. We don’t think you’re an adventurer. We don’t know who you are.”

“I’m a doctor of medicine,” he said. “My father is a clergyman, now retired. We lived in Buffalo and my past is open to investigation. I went to New Haven. My great-grandfather was Governor of North Carolina.”

I listened and thought that Dick might change his mind to marry me.

… We went to the lawyer and signed some papers. I had had no idea that I possessed so much money.

… It was so funny being together. We just loved and loved. It was wonderful to reach out and find Dick warm beside me in the bed.

… Dick worked at the hospital. His book was selling everywhere—they wanted it published in six languages. I was to do the French translation but I was tired, so heavy with the baby.

… Dick would refuse to have a bigger apartment just because there was more Warren money than Diver money.

… We enjoyed our trip across Italy. Life was fun with Dick. We travelled a lot that year—we even went to Africa. But I had problems with my head by that time. That was why he took me travelling but after my second child, my little girl, Topsy, was born everything got dark again.

… When I got well I wanted to spend my money and have a house—I was tired of apartments and waiting for Dick. I wanted to have Dick at my side if I went to pieces again. I wanted to live near a warm beach where we could be brown and young together. We moved to Tarmes.

… Dick, why did you register at the hotel Mr. and Mrs. Diver instead of Doctor and Mrs. Diver? I just wondered—had Dick given up his work for good?

… Sometimes I sing, and I have a few friends too—Mary, for instance. Tommy Barban is in love with me, I think, a little. Enough, though, for him and Dick to dislike each other. I am among friends who like me. I am here on this quiet beach with my husband and two children.

… Yes, more new people—oh, that girl—yes. Who did you say she looked like… No, I haven’t, we don’t see new American pictures here. Rosemary who? Yes, she’s lovely…

IV

At the Villa Diana, Dick went to his work-room, and opened the shutters. On his two long tables, in confusion, lay the materials of his book.

He saw Nicole in the garden. Presently he must meet her and the prospect gave him a nasty feeling. Before her he must keep up a perfect front, now and tomorrow, next week and next year. All night in Paris he had held her in his arms while she slept under the luminol. At noon Dick and Nicole left for the Riviera.

Then there was a reaction. He was annoyed with Nicole. Twice within a fortnight she had broken up: there had been the night of the dinner at Tarmes when he had found her in her bedroom laughing crazily and telling Mrs. McKisco she could not go in the bathroom because the key was thrown down the well. Mrs. McKisco was astonished and suspected the true reason for this laughter. Dick had not been worried. What happened in Paris was another matter. It meant possibly a new cycle, a new stage of the illness. Having gone through her long illness after Topsy’s birth, he had hardened himself about her.

Dick didn’t want to talk—he wanted to be alone with his thoughts about work and the future. He looked about the house that Nicole had made, that Nicole’s grandfather had paid for. Out of three thousand a year and what he had from his publications he paid for his clothes and personal expenses, and for Lanier’s education. Living rather ascetically, travelling third-class when he was alone, with the cheapest wine, he had some financial independence. Naturally Nicole, wanting to own him, wanting him to be with her forever, encouraged him to spend her money.

His work became confused with Nicole’s problems; in addition, her income had increased so fast recently that it seemed to belittle his work.

Just as Dick was painfully comparing his and Nicole’s financial positions, Franz suggested that they two should buy a good clinic on the Zugersee, as its owner intended to retire. Dick’s first impulse was to refuse, for it was possible to do only with Warren money. However, taking in consideration Nicole’s unstable condition, he thought it was convenient to have a clinic at hand at any time.

Having used Warren money at the expense of his self-respect, Dick saw that two years on the Zugersee had been wasted time for Nicole. She had come out of her illness alive with new hopes, expecting so much, yet with no interest in life except Dick. Bringing up children, she could only pretend to love them. She led a lonely life owning Dick who did not want to be owned.

Dick was thirty-eight. For two years now he had lived at the clinic—certainly one of the best in Europe, visited by every psychologist passing through Zurich.

After Doctor Diver finished his morning inspection of the clinic, he returned to his villa. Nicole was wearing a strange expression.

“Read that,” she said.

He opened the letter. It was from a woman who had recently left them without progress. It accused him of having seduced her daughter, who had been at her mother’s side during her illness. It said that Mrs. Diver would be glad to have this information and learn what her husband was “really like”.

Dick read the letter again. He recognized it as the letter of a maniac. Once he had let the girl ride into Zurich with him and in the evening had brought her back to the clinic. Later, she tried to carry the affair further, but he was not interested and probably because of that, the girl had come to dislike him, and taken her mother away.

“This letter is crazy,” he said. “I had no relations of any kind with that girl. I didn’t even like her.”

“Yes, I’ve tried thinking that,” said Nicole.

“Surely you don’t believe it? This is a letter from a mental patient.”

“I was a mental patient.”

He stood up and spoke more authoritatively.

“Don’t have any nonsense, Nicole. Get the children ready and we’ll start.”

In the car Nicole was silent; Dick was uneasy at her straight hard gaze. Often he felt lonely with her, and tired of her. But this afternoon the situation seemed serious.

They arrived at Zug where there was a fair. Dick parked the car, and Nicole looked at him with a sudden awful smile.

Dick tried to think what to do. The dualism in his views of her—that of the husband, that of the psychiatrist —was increasingly paralyzing. In these six years she had several times had crises.

As they were watching a Punch-and-Judy show, Nicole began to run very suddenly. Far ahead he saw her yellow dress in the crowd, and he followed, he had even forgotten the children. Then he found her. She was laughing loudly in the crowd, a crowd which had gathered attracted by Nicole’s hysteria. But when she saw Dick her laughter died. 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.”

“I saw that girl look at you —that little dark girl, a child, not more than fifteen.”

“Stop here a minute and quiet down. I left the children at the Punch-and-Judy show. We ought to get them.”

Fifteen minutes ago they had been a family.

“We’re going home.”

“Home!” she shouted.

A wave of agony went over him. It was awful to watch her disintegration.

“Let’s find the children.”

Dick found them, surrounded by women who were examining them with delight like fine goods.

They started back.

He had turned up a hill to the clinic, and as he stepped on the accelerator the car turned violently left, then right, tipped on two wheels as Nicole’s mad hand clutched the steering wheel, and shot off the road; it ran into a tree.

The children were screaming and Nicole was screaming. Dick climbed over the top side and lifted out the children.

“You—!” he cried.

She was laughing crazily, unashamed, unafraid.

“You were scared, weren’t you?” she laughed. “You wanted to live!”

Directly above them, half a kilometer away, was a hotel.

“Take Topsy’s hand,” he said to Lanier, “and climb up that hill—see the hotel? Tell them to come down.”

Lanier, not sure what had happened, asked:

“What will you do, Dick?”

“We’ll stay here with the car.”

Neither of them looked at their mother as they started off.

Dick was filled with a violent disgust.

In a few minutes some men came running down.

Three months later he told Franz: “I want to go away. 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 down. Look here: if I go to Berlin to the Psychiatric Congress could you manage the place? For three months she’s been all right and she likes her nurse.”

In Zurich the next week Dick drove to the airport and took a plane for Munich.

V

Tommy Barban was a hero—Dick happened to meet Tommy in the Marienplatz in Munich, in one of those cafés, where the air was full of politics.

Tommy was at a table laughing. Recently an eighth of the area of his skull had been removed by a Warsaw surgeon and there was knitting under his hair, and the weakest person in the café could have killed him with a slap of cards.

“—this is Prince Chillicheff—” A Russian of fifty, “—and Mr. McKibben—and Mr. Hannan.” He said immediately to Dick: “What are you doing here in Munich? Dick—how’re you? How’s Nicole? You don’t look so lively as you used to.”

The remark sounded too irritating and Dick was about to say something when the extraordinary suits worn by Tommy and Prince Chillicheff caught his eye.

“I see you are regarding our clothes,” said the Prince. “We have just come out of Russia.”

“These were made in Poland by the court tailor,” said Tommy.

“You’ve been touring?” Dick asked.

They laughed.

“Yes, we have been touring. That’s it, touring.”

Dick waited for an explanation. It came from Mr. McKibben in two words.

“They escaped.”

“Have you been prisoners in Russia?”

“It was I,” explained Prince Chillicheff, his dead yellow eyes staring at Dick. “Not a prisoner but in hiding.”

“Did you have much trouble getting out?”

“Some trouble. We left three Red Guards dead at the border. Tommy left two. I left one.”

It was an escape story in the best tradition—an aristocrat hiding nine years with a former servant and working in a bakery; the eighteen-year-old daughter in Paris who knew Tommy Barban… Dick decided that this papier mâché relic of the past was scarcely worth the lives of three young men.

Hannan and Tommy were talking about something, Dick was not listening. Suddenly he heard they were talking about Abe North.

“The only difference is that Abe did it first,” said Tommy.

“I don’t agree,” persisted Hannan. “He got the reputation for being a good musician because he drank so much—”

“What’s this about Abe North? What about him? Is he in trouble?”

“Didn’t you read The Herald this morning?”

“No.”

“He’s dead. He was beaten to death in a bar in New York. He just managed to crawl home.”

“Abe North?”

“Yes, sure, they—”

“Abe North?” Dick stood up. “Are you sure he’s dead?”

“The paper said so,” McKibben insisted. “Beaten to death in a bar.”

The faces were only formally sad but Dick’s lungs burst for a moment with regret for Abe’s death, and his own youth of ten years ago.

He reached Innsbruck, sent his bags up to a hotel and walked into town. Dick had come away for his soul’s sake, and he began thinking about that. He had lost himself—he could not tell the hour when, or the day or the week, the month or the year.

His father’s struggles in poor districts had given rise to a desire for money. He had been swallowed up like a gigolo, and somehow allowed the Warrens to possess him.

“I’ve wasted eight years teaching the rich how to live in a society.”

After dinner and a bottle of local wine, he felt excited, without rested, excited without knowing why.

He was still excited, when he went up to his room to think. There he found a telegram from Buffalo, forwarded through Zurich.

“Your father died peacefully tonight. HOLMES.”

He read the message again. He sat down on the bed, breathing and staring.

Dick felt sad that he had died alone—he had survived his wife, and his brothers and sisters; there were cousins in Virginia but they were poor and not able to come North, and Holmes, his father’s curate, had had to sign the telegram. Dick loved his father—again and again he thought what his father would probably have thought or done. Dick was born several months after the death of two young sisters and his father had saved him from a spoiling by his mother by becoming his moral guide. He was one of those about whom it was said: “very much the gentleman, but not much get-up-and-go about him.”

… Dick chose a ship to go to America, then he put in a call for Nicole in Zurich, wishing he had always been as good as he had intended to be.

A day after Dick arrived in Buffalo, at the churchyard, his father was laid among a hundred Divers. It was very friendly leaving him there with all his relations around him. Dick had no more ties here now and did not believe he would come back. “Good-by, my father—good-by, all my fathers.”

Albert McKisco, the most fashionable writer of the moment, was travelling to Europe by sea. His novels were based on the works of the best people of his time, and in addition he possessed a gift for softening what he borrowed, so that many readers were charmed by the ease with which they could follow him. Success had improved him. He was no fool about his capacities—he realized that many men had superior talent, and he enjoyed the success he had. “I’ve done nothing yet,” he would say. “But if I keep trying I may write a good book.” His success was founded psychologically upon his duel with Tommy Barban, upon the basis of which he had created a new self-respect.

Seeing Dick Diver the second day out, he introduced himself in a friendly way and sat down. Dick laid aside his reading and, after the few minutes that it took to realize the change in McKisco, the disappearance of the man’s annoying sense of inferiority, found himself pleased to talk to him.

Violet was very grand now, charmed about the little discoveries that well-bred girls make in their teens. Now she “belonged”—together with several million other people—and she was happy.

The McKiscos got off at Gibraltar. Next evening Dick got off at Naples. A train took him to Rome, and Dick went to the Hotel Quirinal.

At the desk he suddenly stared, he saw her.

Rosemary saw him, too. She hurried over. As she came across the lobby, her beauty shocked him anew, “You WOULD turn up here—of all the people in the world.”

Her hands closed over his on the desk; “Dick—we’re making a picture; we may leave any day. We begin early because the mists rise at eleven—phone me at two.”

In his room Dick shaved, lay for half an hour in a warm bath and had breakfast.

At first he thought nothing. She was young and magnetic, but so was Topsy. He tried to collect all that might attract her—it was less than it had been four years ago. Dick had been at an emotional peak at the time of the previous meeting; now he had less enthusiasm.

At three he called Rosemary and was told to come up. He stopped in the bar for a gin-and-tonic.

“Hi, Doctor Diver!”

Only because of Rosemary’s presence in the hotel did Dick place the man immediately as Collis Clay. He had his old confidence.

“I was in Florence and I heard she was here so I came down last week. Now she’s a woman of the world—if you know what I mean.”

“You studying in Florence?”

“Me? Sure, I’m studying architecture there. I go back Sunday.”

As Dick came into her room, Rosemary was in black pajamas; a luncheon table was still in the room; she was having coffee.

“You’re still beautiful,” he said. “A little more beautiful than ever.”

“Do you want coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

“Mother’s coming over next month. She always asks me if I’ve seen you over here, as if she thought we were living next door. Mother always liked you—she always felt you were some one I ought to know.”

“Well, I’m glad she still thinks of me.”

“Oh, she does,” Rosemary said. “A very great deal.”

“I’ve seen you here and there in pictures,” said Dick.

“I have a good part in this one if it isn’t cut. How is Nicole—and Lanier and Topsy?”

“They’re fine. They often speak of you—”

“That’s done,” she said. “Do you realize I’ve spent the last hour getting ready for you?”

“Hard to sit here and be close to you, and not kiss you.” Then they kissed passionately in the centre of the floor. She pressed against him, and went back to her chair.

“Tell me the truth about you,” he demanded.

“I always have.”

“Are you actually a virgin?”

“No-o-o!” she sang. “I’ve slept with six hundred and forty men—if that’s the answer you want.”

“Looking at you as a perfectly normal girl of twenty-two, living in the year nineteen twenty-eight, I guess you’ve had a few lovers.”

“I can’t go out with you tonight, darling, because I promised some people a long time ago. But if you get up early I’ll take you out to the set tomorrow.”

He dined alone at the hotel, went to bed early, and met Rosemary in the lobby at half-past six. They came to the huge set of the forum, larger than the forum itself. Rosemary was working on a stage while he was watching with interest.

The session ended, Dick and Rosemary had luncheon at a splendid restaurant overlooking the ruined forum. Afterward they drove back to the hotel, all flushed and happy. She wanted to be taken and she was, and what had begun as a childish love affair on a beach was accomplished at last.

Rosemary had another dinner arrangement, a birthday party for a member of the company. Dick drank a cocktail in the lobby with Collis and his dissatisfaction crystallized as impatience—he was to go to the clinic. This was less a true feeling than a romantic memory. Nicole was his girl—too often he was sick at heart about her, yet she was his girl. Time with Rosemary was nothing—time with Collis was nothing plus nothing.

Rosemary asked Dick to lunch next day. They went to a little trattoria kept by an Italian who had worked in America. After Dick’s discovery that he was not in love with her, nor she with him he knew he would not enter further into her life, and she became the strange woman for him.

“Let me be curious about you again?” he asked.

“What do you want to know?”

“About men. I’m curious. Do you have anyone special?”

“It’s difficult.” She was suddenly crying. “I do love you, never anybody like you. But what have you got for me? I never felt so mixed up in my life.”

“I want to know the truth,” he said.

“Yes, then. My producer, Signor Nicotera. We’re a lot together, he wants to marry me, but I don’t want to. What of it? What do you expect me to do? You never asked me to marry you. Do you want me to play around forever with half-wits like Collis Clay?”

“You were with Nicotera last night?”

“That’s none of your business,” she sobbed.

“Is it like you felt toward me in Paris?”

“I feel comfortable and happy when I’m with you. In Paris it was different. But you never know how you once felt. Do you?

If he had to bring all the bitterness and hatred of the world into his heart, he was not going to be in love with her again.

“I don’t care about Nicotera!” she declared. “But I’ve got to go to Livorno with the company tomorrow. Oh, why did this have to happen? Why did you come here? Why couldn’t we just have the memory?”

“I’ve wondered for a long time.”

“But why bring it to me?”

“I guess I’m the Black Death,” he said slowly. “I don’t seem to bring people happiness any more.”