Page 170 - tender-is-the-night

at phantom French and Germans; the purpose was to assure
the Swiss heart that it had shared the contagious glory of
those days. As the massacre continued the posters withered
away, and no country was more surprised than its sister re-
public when the United States bungled its way into the war.
Doctor Diver had seen around the edges of the war by
that time: he was an Oxford Rhodes Scholar from Con-
necticut in 1914. He returned home for a final year at Johns
Hopkins, and took his degree. In 1916 he managed to get to
Vienna under the impression that, if he did not make haste,
the great Freud would eventually succumb to an aeroplane
bomb. Even then Vienna was old with death but Dick man-
aged to get enough coal and oil to sit in his room in the
Damenstiff Strasse and write the pamphlets that he later de-
stroyed, but that, rewritten, were the backbone of the book
he published in Zurich in 1920.
Most of us have a favorite, a heroic period, in our lives
and that was Dick Diver’s. For one thing he had no idea that
he was charming, that the affection he gave and inspired was
anything unusual among healthy people. In his last year at
New Haven some one referred to him as ‘lucky Dick’—the
name lingered in his head.
‘Lucky Dick, you big stiff,’ he would whisper to himself,
walking around the last sticks of flame in his room. ‘You
hit it, my boy. Nobody knew it was there before you came
along.’
At the beginning of 1917, when it was becoming difficult
to find coal, Dick burned for fuel almost a hundred text-
books that he had accumulated; but only, as he laid each one

170 Tender is the Night