Doctor Diver, the Conte de Marmora.”
“Gee-imminy!” She felt her new hair, panting.
“Sister bought first-class tickets—it’s a matter of principle with her.”
She and Marmora exchanged glances and shouted:
“Then we found that first- class is the hearse part behind the chauffeur—shut in with curtains for a rainy day, so you can’t see anything.
But Sister’s very dignified—” Again Nicole and Marmora laughed with young intimacy.
“Where you bound?” asked Dick.
“Caux.
You too?”
Nicole looked at his costume.
“That your bicycle they got up in front?”
“Yes.
I’m going to coast down Monday.”
“With me on your handle-bars?
I mean, really—will you?
I can’t think of more fun.”
“But I will carry you down in my arms,” Marmora protested intensely.
“I will roller-skate you—or I will throw you and you will fall slowly like a feather.”
The delight in Nicole’s face—to be a feather again instead of a plummet, to float and not to drag.
She was a carnival to watch—at times primly coy, posing, grimacing and gesturing—sometimes the shadow fell and the dignity of old suffering flowed down into her finger tips.
Dick wished himself away from her, fearing that he was a reminder of a world well left behind.
He resolved to go to the other hotel.
When the funicular came to rest those new to it stirred in suspension between the blues of two heavens.
It was merely for a mysterious exchange between the conductor of the car going up and the conductor of the car coming down.
Then up and up over a forest path and a gorge—then again up a hill that became solid with narcissus, from passengers to sky.
The people in Montreux playing tennis in the lakeside courts were pinpoints now.
Something new was in the air; freshness—freshness embodying itself in music as the car slid into Glion and they heard the orchestra in the hotel garden.
When they changed to the mountain train the music was drowned by the rushing water released from the hydraulic chamber.
Almost overhead was Caux, where the thousand windows of a hotel burned in the late sun.
But the approach was different—a leather-lunged engine pushed the passengers round and round in a corkscrew, mounting, rising; they chugged through low-level clouds and for a moment Dick lost Nicole’s face in the spray of the slanting donkey engine; they skirted a lost streak of wind with the hotel growing in size at each spiral, until with a vast surprise they were there, on top of the sunshine.
In the confusion of arrival, as Dick slung his knapsack and started forward on the platform to get his bicycle, Nicole was beside him.
“Aren’t you at our hotel?” she asked.
“I’m economizing.”
“Will you come down and have dinner?”
Some confusion with baggage ensued.
“This is my sister—Doctor Diver from Zurich.”
Dick bowed to a young woman of twenty-five, tall and confident.
She was both formidable and vulnerable, he decided, remembering other women with flower-like mouths grooved for bits.
“I’ll drop in after dinner,” Dick promised.
“First I must get acclimated.”
He wheeled off his bicycle, feeling Nicole’s eyes following him, feeling her helpless first love, feeling it twist around inside him.
He went three hundred yards up the slope to the other hotel, he engaged a room and found himself washing without a memory of the intervening ten minutes, only a sort of drunken flush pierced with voices, unimportant voices that did not know how much he was loved.
IX
They were waiting for him and incomplete without him.
He was still the incalculable element; Miss Warren and the young Italian wore their anticipation as obviously as Nicole.
The salon of the hotel, a room of fabled acoustics, was stripped for dancing but there was a small gallery of Englishwomen of a certain age, with neckbands, dyed hair and faces powdered pinkish gray; and of American women of a certain age, with snowy-white transformations, black dresses and lips of cherry red.
Miss Warren and Marmora were at a corner table—Nicole was diagonally across from them forty yards away, and as Dick arrived he heard her voice:
“Can you hear me?
I’m speaking naturally.”
“Perfectly,”