Page 371 - tender-is-the-night

was plunged in it before he reached his office. Dick met him
there.
‘How was Mount Everest?’
‘We could very well have done Mount Everest the rate we
were doing. We thought of it. How goes it all? How is my
Kaethe, how is your Nicole?’
‘All goes smooth domestically. But my God, Franz, we
had a rotten scene this morning.’
‘How? What was it?’
Dick walked around the room while Franz got in touch
with his villa by telephone. After the family exchange was
over, Dick said: ‘The Morris boy was taken away—there was
a row.’
Franz’s buoyant face fell.
‘I knew he’d left. I met Ladislau on the veranda.’
‘What did Ladislau say?’
‘Just that young Morris had gone—that you’d tell me
about it. What about it?’
‘The usual incoherent reasons.’
‘He was a devil, that boy.’
‘He was a case for anesthesia,’ Dick agreed. ‘Anyhow,
the father had beaten Ladislau into a colonial subject by the
time I came along. What about Ladislau? Do we keep him? I
say no—he’s not much of a man, he can’t seem to cope with
anything.’ Dick hesitated on the verge of the truth, swung
away to give himself space within which to recapitulate.
Franz perched on the edge of a desk, still in his linen duster
and travelling gloves. Dick said:
‘One of the remarks the boy made to his father was that

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