“You know very well why.”
“No, I don’t.”
“That’s just preposterous—let me loose—that’s an insult to my intelligence.
Don’t you think I saw that girl look at you—that little dark girl.
Oh, this is farcical—a child, not more than fifteen.
Don’t you think I saw?”
“Stop here a minute and quiet down.”
They sat at a table, her eyes in a profundity of suspicion, her hand moving across her line of sight as if it were obstructed.
“I want a drink—I want a brandy.”
“You can’t have brandy—you can have a bock if you want it.”
“Why can’t I have a brandy?”
“We won’t go into that.
Listen to me—this business about a girl is a delusion, do you understand that word?”
“It’s always a delusion when I see what you don’t want me to see.”
He had a sense of guilt as in one of those nightmares where we are accused of a crime which we recognize as something undeniably experienced, but which upon waking we realize we have not committed.
His eyes wavered from hers.
“I left the children with a gypsy woman in a booth.
We ought to get them.”
“Who do you think you are?” she demanded.
“Svengali?”
Fifteen minutes ago they had been a family.
Now as she was crushed into a corner by his unwilling shoulder, he saw them all, child and man, as a perilous accident.
“We’re going home.”
“Home!” she roared in a voice so abandoned that its louder tones wavered and cracked.
“And sit and think that we’re all rotting and the children’s ashes are rotting in every box I open?
That filth!”
Almost with relief he saw that her words sterilized her, and Nicole, sensitized down to the corium of the skin, saw the withdrawal in his face.
Her own face softened and she begged,
“Help me, help me, Dick!”
A wave of agony went over him.
It was awful that such a fine tower should not be erected, only suspended, suspended from him.
Up to a point that was right: men were for that, beam and idea, girder and logarithm; but somehow Dick and Nicole had become one and equal, not opposite and complementary; she was Dick too, the drought in the marrow of his bones.
He could not watch her disintegrations without participating in them.
His intuition rilled out of him as tenderness and compassion—he could only take the characteristically modern course, to interpose—he would get a nurse from Zurich, to take her over to-night.
“You CAN help me.”
Her sweet bullying pulled him forward off his feet.
“You’ve helped me before—you can help me now.”
“I can only help you the same old way.”
“Some one can help me.”
“Maybe so.
You can help yourself most.
Let’s find the children.”
There were numerous lottery booths with white wheels—Dick was startled when he inquired at the first and encountered blank disavowals.
Evil-eyed, Nicole stood apart, denying the children, resenting them as part of a downright world she sought to make amorphous.
Presently Dick found them, surrounded by women who were examining them with delight like fine goods, and by peasant children staring.
“Merci, Monsieur, ah Monsieur est trop genereux.
C’etait un plaisir, M’sieur, Madame.
Au revoir, mes petits.”
They started back with a hot sorrow streaming down upon them; the car was weighted with their mutual apprehension and anguish, and the children’s mouths were grave with disappointment.
Grief presented itself in its terrible, dark unfamiliar color.