“I’m not sure it’s advisable.
I must first talk on the phone to Dick.”
“Then I’ll miss the train down,” Nicole protested, “and then I’ll miss the three o’clock from Zurich!
If my father is dying I must—” She left this in the air, afraid to formulate it.
“I MUST go.
I’ll have to run for the train.”
She was running even as she spoke toward the sequence of flat cars that crowned the bare hill with bursting steam and sound.
Over her shoulder she called back,
“If you phone Dick tell him I’m coming, Franz!” . . .
. . .
Dick was in his own room in the hotel reading The New York Herald when the swallow-like nun rushed in—simultaneously the phone rang.
“Is he dead?” Dick demanded of the nun, hopefully.
“Monsieur, il est parti—he has gone away.”
“Com-MENT?”
“Il est parti—his man and his baggage have gone away too!”
It was incredible.
A man in that condition to arise and depart.
Dick answered the phone-call from Franz.
“You shouldn’t have told Nicole,” he protested.
“Kaethe told her, very unwisely.”
“I suppose it was my fault.
Never tell a thing to a woman till it’s done.
However, I’ll meet Nicole . . . say, Franz, the craziest thing has happened down here—the old boy took up his bed and walked. . . .”
“At what?
What did you say?”
“I say he walked, old Warren—he walked!”
“But why not?”
“He was supposed to be dying of general collapse . . . he got up and walked away, back to Chicago, I guess. . . . I don’t know, the nurse is here now. . . . I don’t know, Franz—I’ve just heard about it. . . . Call me later.”
He spent the better part of two hours tracing Warren’s movements.
The patient had found an opportunity between the change of day and night nurses to resort to the bar where he had gulped down four whiskeys; he paid his hotel bill with a thousand dollar note, instructing the desk that the change should be sent after him, and departed, presumably for America.
A last minute dash by Dick and Dangeu to overtake him at the station resulted only in Dick’s failing to meet Nicole; when they did meet in the lobby of the hotel she seemed suddenly tired, and there was a tight purse to her lips that disquieted him.
“How’s father?” she demanded.
“He’s much better.
He seemed to have a good deal of reserve energy after all.”
He hesitated, breaking it to her easy.
“In fact he got up and went away.”
Wanting a drink, for the chase had occupied the dinner hour, he led her, puzzled, toward the grill, and continued as they occupied two leather easy-chairs and ordered a high-ball and a glass of beer:
“The man who was taking care of him made a wrong prognosis or something—wait a minute, I’ve hardly had time to think the thing out myself.”
“He’s GONE?”
“He got the evening train for Paris.”
They sat silent.
From Nicole flowed a vast tragic apathy.
“It was instinct,” Dick said, finally.
“He was really dying, but he tried to get a resumption of rhythm—he’s not the first person that ever walked off his death-bed—like an old clock—you know, you shake it and somehow from sheer habit it gets going again.
Now your father—”
“Oh, don’t tell me,” she said.
“His principal fuel was fear,” he continued.
“He got afraid, and off he went.
He’ll probably live till ninety—”
“Please don’t tell me any more,” she said.