“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.
“Ladislau 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 is 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 content with a simple regimentation 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 nine 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.