Her sister wrote some of them down—” He handed a much-folded piece of paper to the doctor.
“Almost always about men going to attack her, men she knew or men on the street—anybody—”
He told of their alarm and distress, of the horrors families go through under such circumstances, of the ineffectual efforts they had made in America, finally of the faith in a change of scene that had made him run the submarine blockade and bring his daughter to Switzerland.
“—on a United States cruiser,” he specified with a touch of hauteur.
“It was possible for me to arrange that, by a stroke of luck.
And, may I add,” he smiled apologetically, “that as they say: money is no object.”
“Certainly not,” agreed Dohmler dryly.
He was wondering why and about what the man was lying to him.
Or, if he was wrong about that, what was the falsity that pervaded the whole room, the handsome figure in tweeds sprawling in his chair with a sportsman’s ease?
That was a tragedy out there, in the February day, the young bird with wings crushed somehow, and inside here it was all too thin, thin and wrong.
“I would like—to talk to her—a few minutes now,” said Doctor Dohmler, going into English as if it would bring him closer to Warren.
Afterward when Warren had left his daughter and returned to Lausanne, and several days had passed, the doctor and Franz entered upon Nicole’s card:
Diagnostic: Schizophrenie.
Phase aigue en decroissance.
La peur des hommes est un symptome de la maladie, et n’est point constitutionnelle. . . . Le pronostic doit rester reserve.* * Diagnosis: Divided Personality. Acute and down-hill phase of the illness. The fear of men is a symptom of the illness and is not at all constitutional. . . . The prognosis must be reserved.
And then they waited with increasing interest as the days passed for Mr. Warren’s promised second visit.
It was slow in coming.
After a fortnight Doctor Dohmler wrote.
Confronted with further silence he committed what was for those days “une folie,” and telephoned to the Grand Hotel at Vevey.
He learned from Mr. Warren’s valet that he was at the moment packing to sail for America.
But reminded that the forty francs Swiss for the call would show up on the clinic books, the blood of the Tuileries Guard rose to Doctor Dohmler’s aid and Mr. Warren was got to the phone.
“It is—absolutely necessary—that you come.
Your daughter’s health—all depends.
I can take no responsibility.”
“But look here, Doctor, that’s just what you’re for.
I have a hurry call to go home!”
Doctor Dohmler had never yet spoken to any one so far away but he dispatched his ultimatum so firmly into the phone that the agonized American at the other end yielded.
Half an hour after this second arrival on the Zurichsee, Warren had broken down, his fine shoulders shaking with awful sobs inside his easy fitting coat, his eyes redder than the very sun on Lake Geneva, and they had the awful story.
“It just happened,” he said hoarsely.
“I don’t know—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.
Oh, after that, whenever we went places in an automobile or a train we used to hold hands. She used to sing to me.
We used to say,
‘Now let’s not pay any attention to anybody else this afternoon—let’s just have each other—for this morning you’re mine.’” A broken sarcasm came into his voice.
“People used to say what a wonderful father and daughter we were—they used to wipe their eyes.
We were just like lovers—and then all at once we were lovers—and ten minutes after it happened I could have shot myself—except I guess I’m such a Goddamned degenerate I didn’t have the nerve to do it.”
“Then what?” said Doctor Dohmler, thinking again of Chicago and of a mild pale gentleman with a pince-nez who had looked him over in Zurich thirty years before.
“Did this thing go on?”
“Oh, no!
She almost—she seemed to freeze up right away.
She’d just say,
‘Never mind, never mind, Daddy.
It doesn’t matter. Never mind.’”
“There were no consequences?”
“No.”
He gave one short convulsive sob and blew his nose several times.
“Except now there’re plenty of consequences.”
As the story concluded Dohmler sat back in the focal armchair of the middle class and said to himself sharply,
“Peasant!”—it was one of the few absolute worldly judgments that he had permitted himself for twenty years.
Then he said: