Page 273 - tender-is-the-night

peasant blood, those with big thighs and thick ankles who
could take punishment as they took bread and salt, on every
inch of flesh and spirit.
—Not for you, he almost said. It’s too tough a game for
you.
Yet in the awful majesty of her pain he went out to her
unreservedly, almost sexually. He wanted to gather her up
in his arms, as he so often had Nicole, and cherish even her
mistakes, so deeply were they part of her. The orange light
through the drawn blind, the sarcophagus of her figure on
the bed, the spot of face, the voice searching the vacuity of
her illness and finding only remote abstractions.
As he arose the tears fled lava-like into her bandages.
‘That is for something,’ she whispered. ‘Something must
come out of it.’
He stooped and kissed her forehead.
‘We must all try to be good,’ he said.
Leaving her room he sent the nurse in to her. There were
other patients to see: an American girl of fifteen who had
been brought up on the basis that childhood was intended
to be all fun—his visit was provoked by the fact that she
had just hacked off all her hair with a nail scissors. There
was nothing much to be done for her—a family history of
neurosis and nothing stable in her past to build on. The
father, normal and conscientious himself, had tried to pro-
tect a nervous brood from life’s troubles and had succeeded
merely in preventing them from developing powers of ad-
justment to life’s inevitable surprises. There was little that
Dick could say: ‘Helen, when you’re in doubt you must ask a

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