Somewhere around Zug, Nicole, with a convulsive effort, reiterated a remark she had made before about a misty yellow house set back from the road that looked like a painting not yet dry, but it was just an attempt to catch at a rope that was playing out too swiftly.
Dick tried to rest—the struggle would come presently at home and he might have to sit a long time, restating the universe for her.
A “schizophrene” is well named as a split personality—Nicole was alternately a person to whom nothing need be explained and one to whom nothing COULD be explained.
It was necessary to treat her with active and affirmative insistence, keeping the road to reality always open, making the road to escape harder going.
But the brilliance, the versatility of madness is akin to the resourcefulness of water seeping through, over and around a dike.
It requires the united front of many people to work against it.
He felt it necessary that this time Nicole cure herself; he wanted to wait until she remembered the other times, and revolted from them.
In a tired way, he planned that they would again resume the regime relaxed a year before.
He had turned up a hill that made a short cut to the clinic, and now as he stepped on the accelerator for a short straightaway run parallel to the hillside the car swerved violently left, swerved right, tipped on two wheels and, as Dick, with Nicole’s voice screaming in his ear, crushed down the mad hand clutching the steering wheel, righted itself, swerved once more and shot off the road; it tore through low underbrush, tipped again and settled slowly at an angle of ninety degrees against a tree.
The children were screaming and Nicole was screaming and cursing and trying to tear at Dick’s face.
Thinking first of the list of the car and unable to estimate it Dick bent away Nicole’s arm, climbed over the top side and lifted out the children; then he saw the car was in a stable position.
Before doing anything else he stood there shaking and panting.
“You—!” he cried.
She was laughing hilariously, unashamed, unafraid, unconcerned.
No one coming on the scene would have imagined that she had caused it; she laughed as after some mild escape of childhood.
“You were scared, weren’t you?” she accused him.
“You wanted to live!”
She spoke with such force that in his shocked state Dick wondered if he had been frightened for himself—but the strained faces of the children, looking from parent to parent, made him want to grind her grinning mask into jelly.
Directly above them, half a kilometer by the winding road but only a hundred yards climbing, was an inn; one of its wings showed through the wooded hill.
“Take Topsy’s hand,” he said to Lanier, “like that, tight, and climb up that hill—see the little path?
When you get to the inn tell them
‘La voiture Divare est cassee.’
Some one must come right down.”
Lanier, not sure what had happened, but suspecting the dark and unprecedented, asked:
“What will you do, Dick?”
“We’ll stay here with the car.”
Neither of them looked at their mother as they started off.
“Be careful crossing the road up there! Look both ways!” Dick shouted after them.
He and Nicole looked at each other directly, their eyes like blazing windows across a court of the same house.
Then she took out a compact, looked in its mirror, and smoothed back the temple hair.
Dick watched the children climbing for a moment until they disappeared among the pines half way up; then he walked around the car to see the damage and plan how to get it back on the road.
In the dirt he could trace the rocking course they had pursued for over a hundred feet; he was filled with a violent disgust that was not like anger.
In a few minutes the proprietor of the inn came running down.
“My God!” he exclaimed.
“How did it happen, were you going fast?
What luck!
Except for that tree you’d have rolled down hill!”
Taking advantage of Emile’s reality, the wide black apron, the sweat upon the rolls of his face, Dick signalled to Nicole in a matter-of-fact way to let him help her from the car; whereupon she jumped over the lower side, lost her balance on the slope, fell to her knees and got up again.
As she watched the men trying to move the car her expression became defiant.
Welcoming even that mood Dick said:
“Go and wait with the children, Nicole.”
Only after she had gone did he remember that she had wanted cognac, and that there was cognac available up there—he told Emile never mind about the car; they would wait for the chauffeur and the big car to pull it up onto the road.
Together they hurried up to the inn.
XVI
“I want to go away,” he told Franz.
“For a month or so, for as long as I can.”
“Why not, Dick?
That was our original arrangement—it was you who insisted on staying.
If you and Nicole—”
“I don’t want to go away with Nicole.