He was a handsome, promising boy and Dick devoted much time to him, in the relationship of a sympathetic but exacting officer and respectful enlisted man.
“Why,” Lanier asked, “do you always leave a little lather on the top of your hair when you shave?”
Cautiously Dick parted soapy lips:
“I have never been able to find out.
I’ve often wondered.
I think it’s because I get the first finger soapy when I make the line of my side-burn, but how it gets up on top of my head I don’t know.”
“I’m going to watch it all to-morrow.”
“That’s your only question before breakfast?”
“I don’t really call it a question.”
“That’s one on you.”
Half an hour later Dick started up to the administration building.
He was thirty-eight—still declining a beard he yet had a more medical aura about him than he had worn upon the Riviera.
For eighteen months now he had lived at the clinic—certainly one of the best-appointed in Europe.
Like Dohmler’s it was of the modern type—no longer a single dark and sinister building but a small, scattered, yet deceitfully integrated village—Dick and Nicole had added much in the domain of taste, so that the plant was a thing of beauty, visited by every psychologist passing through Zurich.
With the addition of a caddy house it might very well have been a country club.
The Eglantine and the Beeches, houses for those sunk into eternal darkness, were screened by little copses from the main building, camouflaged strong-points.
Behind was a large truck farm, worked partly by the patients.
The workshops for ergo- therapy were three, placed under a single roof and there Doctor Diver began his morning’s inspection.
The carpentry shop, full of sunlight, exuded the sweetness of sawdust, of a lost age of wood; always half a dozen men were there, hammering, planing, buzzing— silent men, who lifted solemn eyes from their work as he passed through.
Himself a good carpenter, he discussed with them the efficiency of some tools for a moment in a quiet, personal, interested voice.
Adjoining was the book-bindery, adapted to the most mobile of patients who were not always, however, those who had the greatest chance for recovery.
The last chamber was devoted to beadwork, weaving and work in brass.
The faces of the patients here wore the expression of one who had just sighed profoundly, dismissing something insoluble—but their sighs only marked the beginning of another ceaseless round of ratiocination, not in a line as with normal people but in the same circle.
Round, round, and round.
Around forever.
But the bright colors of the stuffs they worked with gave strangers a momentary illusion that all was well, as in a kindergarten. These patients brightened as Doctor Diver came in.
Most of them liked him better than they liked Doctor Gregorovius.
Those who had once lived in the great world invariably liked him better.
There were a few who thought he neglected them, or that he was not simple, or that he posed.
Their responses were not dissimilar to those that Dick evoked in non- professional life, but here they were warped and distorted.
One Englishwoman spoke to him always about a subject which she considered her own.
“Have we got music to-night?”
“I don’t know,” he answered.
“I haven’t seen Doctor Ladislau.
How did you enjoy the music that Mrs. Sachs and Mr. Longstreet gave us last night?”
“It was so-so.”
“I thought it was fine—especially the Chopin.”
“I thought it was so-so.”
“When are you going to play for us yourself?”
She shrugged her shoulders, as pleased at this question as she had been for several years.
“Some time.
But I only play so-so.”
They knew that she did not play at all—she had had two sisters who were brilliant musicians, but she had never been able to learn the notes when they had been young together.
From the workshop Dick went to visit the Eglantine and the Beeches.
Exteriorly these houses were as cheerful as the others; Nicole had designed the decoration and the furniture on a necessary base of concealed grills and bars and immovable furniture.
She had worked with so much imagination—the inventive quality, which she lacked, being supplied by the problem itself—that no instructed visitor would have dreamed that the light, graceful filagree work at a window was a strong, unyielding end of a tether, that the pieces reflecting modern tubular tendencies were stancher than the massive creations of the Edwardians—even the flowers lay in iron fingers and every casual ornament and fixture was as necessary as a girder in a skyscraper.
Her tireless eyes had made each room yield up its greatest usefulness.
Complimented, she referred to herself brusquely as a master plumber.
For those whose compasses were not depolarized there seemed many odd things in these houses.
Doctor Diver was often amused in the Eglantine, the men’s building—here there was a strange little exhibitionist who thought that if he could walk unclothed and unmolested from the Etoile to the Place de la Concorde he would solve many things—and, perhaps, Dick thought, he was quite right.