Page 282 - tender-is-the-night

They started back with a hot sorrow streaming down
upon them; the car was weighted with their mutual appre-
hension and anguish, and the children’s mouths were grave
with disappointment. Grief presented itself in its terrible,
dark unfamiliar color. 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 at-
tempt 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 ‘schizophrêne’ is well named as a split
personality—Nicole was alternately a person to whom noth-
ing need be explained and one to whom nothing COULD be
explained. It was necessary to treat her with active and affir-
mative 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 régime 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 vio-
lently left, swerved right, tipped on two wheels and, as Dick,
with Nicole’s voice screaming in his ear, crushed down

282 Tender is the Night