Page 174 - tender-is-the-night

II

It was a damp April day, with long diagonal clouds over
the Albishorn and water inert in the low places. Zurich is
not unlike an American city. Missing something ever since
his arrival two days before, Dick perceived that it was the
sense he had had in finite French lanes that there was noth-
ing more. In Zurich there was a lot besides Zurich—the
roofs upled the eyes to tinkling cow pastures, which in turn
modified hilltops further up—so life was a perpendicular
starting off to a postcard heaven. The Alpine lands, home of
the toy and the funicular, the merry-go-round and the thin
chime, were not a being HERE, as in France with French
vines growing over one’s feet on the ground.
In Salzburg once Dick had felt the superimposed qual-
ity of a bought and borrowed century of music; once in the
laboratories of the university in Zurich, delicately poking
at the cervical of a brain, he had felt like a toy-maker rather
than like the tornado who had hurried through the old red
buildings of Hopkins, two years before, unstayed by the iro-
ny of the gigantic Christ in the entrance hall.
Yet he had decided to remain another two years in Zur-
ich, for he did not underestimate the value of toy-making,
in infinite precision, of infinite patience.
To-day he went out to see Franz Gregorovius at Dohm-
ler’s clinic on the Zurichsee. Franz, resident pathologist at

174 Tender is the Night