The thin tunes, holding lost times and future hopes in liaison, twisted upon the Valais night.
In the lulls of the phonograph a cricket held the scene together with a single note.
By and by Nicole stopped playing the machine and sang to him. “Lay a silver dollar On the ground
And watch it roll Because it’s round—”
On the pure parting of her lips no breath hovered.
Dick stood up suddenly.
“What’s the matter, you don’t like it?”
“Of course I do.”
“Our cook at home taught it to me:
“A woman never knows What a good man she’s got Till after she turns him down . . .”
“You like it?”
She smiled at him, making sure that the smile gathered up everything inside her and directed it toward him, making him a profound promise of herself for so little, for the beat of a response, the assurance of a complimentary vibration in him.
Minute by minute the sweetness drained down into her out of the willow trees, out of the dark world.
She stood up too, and stumbling over the phonograph, was momentarily against him, leaning into the hollow of his rounded shoulder.
“I’ve got one more record,” she said. “—Have you heard
‘So Long, Letty’?
I suppose you have.”
“Honestly, you don’t understand—I haven’t heard a thing.”
Nor known, nor smelt, nor tasted, he might have added; only hot- cheeked girls in hot secret rooms.
The young maidens he had known at New Haven in 1914 kissed men, saying “There!”, hands at the man’s chest to push him away.
Now there was this scarcely saved waif of disaster bringing him the essence of a continent. . . .
VI
It was May when he next found her.
The luncheon in Zurich was a council of caution; obviously the logic of his life tended away from the girl; yet when a stranger stared at her from a nearby table, eyes burning disturbingly like an uncharted light, he turned to the man with an urbane version of intimidation and broke the regard.
“He was just a peeper,” he explained cheerfully.
“He was just looking at your clothes.
Why do you have so many different clothes?”
“Sister says we’re very rich,” she offered humbly.
“Since Grandmother is dead.”
“I forgive you.”
He was enough older than Nicole to take pleasure in her youthful vanities and delights, the way she paused fractionally in front of the hall mirror on leaving the restaurant, so that the incorruptible quicksilver could give her back to herself.
He delighted in her stretching out her hands to new octaves now that she found herself beautiful and rich.
He tried honestly to divorce her from any obsession that he had stitched her together—glad to see her build up happiness and confidence apart from him; the difficulty was that, eventually, Nicole brought everything to his feet, gifts of sacrificial ambrosia, of worshipping myrtle.
The first week of summer found Dick re-established in Zurich.
He had arranged his pamphlets and what work he had done in the Service into a pattern from which he intended to make his revise of
“A Psychology for Psychiatrists.”
He thought he had a publisher; he had established contact with a poor student who would iron out his errors in German.
Franz considered it a rash business, but Dick pointed out the disarming modesty of the theme.
“This is stuff I’ll never know so well again,” he insisted.
“I have a hunch it’s a thing that only fails to be basic because it’s never had material recognition.
The weakness of this profession is its attraction for the man a little crippled and broken.
Within the walls of the profession he compensates by tending toward the clinical, the ‘practical’—he has won his battle without a struggle.
“On the contrary, you are a good man, Franz, because fate selected you for your profession before you were born.
You better thank God you had no ‘bent’—I got to be a psychiatrist because there was a girl at St. Hilda’s in Oxford that went to the same lectures.
Maybe I’m getting trite but I don’t want to let my current ideas slide away with a few dozen glasses of beer.”
“All right,” Franz answered.
“You are an American.
You can do this without professional harm.
I do not like these generalities.
Soon you will be writing little books called