Page 220 - tender-is-the-night

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 pro-
tested 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 ges-
turing—sometimes the shadow fell and the dignity of old
suffering flowed down into her finger tips. Dick wished him-
self 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; fresh-
ness—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

220 Tender is the Night