Page 356 - tender-is-the-night

‘Quite a lot, I’d say. Count on staying two or three days,
and get the boy up here if he needs to be watched. In any
case take your time, take your ease; combine business with
pleasure.’
After two hours’ train sleep Dick felt renewed, and he
approached the interview with Señor Pardo y Cuidad Real
in good spirits.
These interviews were much of a type. Often the sheer
hysteria of the family representative was as interesting psy-
chologically as the condition of the patient. This one was no
exception: Señor Pardo y Cuidad Real, a handsome iron-
gray Spaniard, noble of carriage, with all the appurtenances
of wealth and power, raged up and down his suite in the
Hôtel de Trois Mondes and told the story of his son with no
more self-control than a drunken woman.
‘I am at the end of my invention. My son is corrupt. He
was corrupt at Harrow, he was corrupt at King’s College,
Cambridge. He’s incorrigibly corrupt. Now that there is this
drinking it is more and more obvious how he is, and there
is continual scandal. I have tried everything—I worked out
a plan with a doctor friend of mine, sent them together for
a tour of Spain. Every evening Francisco had an injection of
cantharides and then the two went together to a reputable
bordello—for a week or so it seemed to work but the result
was nothing. Finally last week in this very room, rather in
that bathroom—‘ he pointed at it, ‘—I made Francisco strip
to the waist and lashed him with a whip—‘
Exhausted with his emotion he sat down and Dick
spoke:

356 Tender is the Night