Page 267 - tender-is-the-night

‘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 administra-
tion 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, scat-
tered, 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 pass-
ing 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 dark-
ness, 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 ergother-
apy 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

267