After supper that evening, Dick thought, he would finish the break; also he wanted to kick Franz’s bottom for having partially introduced him to such a sordid business.
He waited in the hall.
His eyes followed a beret, not wet with waiting like Nicole’s beret, but covering a skull recently operated on.
Beneath it human eyes peered, found him and came over:
“Bonjour, Docteur.” “Bonjour, Monsieur.”
“Il fait beau temps.”
“Oui, merveilleux.”
“Vous etes ici maintenant?”
“Non, pour la journee seulement.”
“Ah, bon.
Alors—au revoir, Monsieur.”
Glad at having survived another contact, the wretch in the beret moved away.
Dick waited.
Presently a nurse came downstairs and delivered him a message.
“Miss Warren asks to be excused, Doctor.
She wants to lie down.
She wants to have dinner upstairs to-night.”
The nurse hung on his response, half expecting him to imply that Miss Warren’s attitude was pathological.
“Oh, I see.
Well—” He rearranged the flow of his own saliva, the pulse of his heart.
“I hope she feels better.
Thanks.”
He was puzzled and discontent.
At any rate it freed him.
Leaving a note for Franz begging off from supper, he walked through the countryside to the tram station.
As he reached the platform, with spring twilight gilding the rails and the glass in the slot machines, he began to feel that the station, the hospital, was hovering between being centripetal and centrifugal.
He felt frightened.
He was glad when the substantial cobble-stones of Zurich clicked once more under his shoes.
He expected to hear from Nicole next day but there was no word.
Wondering if she was ill, he called the clinic and talked to Franz.
“She came downstairs to luncheon yesterday and to-day,” said Franz.
“She seemed a little abstracted and in the clouds.
How did it go off?”
Dick tried to plunge over the Alpine crevasse between the sexes.
“We didn’t get to it—at least I didn’t think we did.
I tried to be distant, but I didn’t think enough happened to change her attitude if it ever went deep.”
Perhaps his vanity had been hurt that there was no coup de grace to administer.
“From some things she said to her nurse I’m inclined to think she understood.”
“All right.”
“It was the best thing that could have happened.
She doesn’t seem over-agitated—only a little in the clouds.”
“All right, then.”
“Dick, come soon and see me.”
VIII
During the next weeks Dick experienced a vast dissatisfaction.
The pathological origin and mechanistic defeat of the affair left a flat and metallic taste.
Nicole’s emotions had been used unfairly— what if they turned out to have been his own?
Necessarily he must absent himself from felicity a while—in dreams he saw her walking on the clinic path swinging her wide straw hat. . . .
One time he saw her in person; as he walked past the Palace Hotel, a magnificent Rolls curved into the half-moon entrance.
Small within its gigantic proportions, and buoyed up by the power of a hundred superfluous horses, sat Nicole and a young woman whom he assumed was her sister.