Page 296 - tender-is-the-night

XVIII

He reached Innsbruck at dusk, sent his bags up to a hotel
and walked into town. In the sunset the Emperor Maximil-
ian knelt in prayer above his bronze mourners; a quartet
of Jesuit novices paced and read in the university garden.
The marble souvenirs of old sieges, marriages, anniver-
saries, faded quickly when the sun was down, and he had
erbsen-suppe with würstchen cut up in it, drank four hel-
les of Pilsener and refused a formidable dessert known as
‘kaiser-schmarren.’
Despite the overhanging mountains Switzerland was far
away, Nicole was far away. Walking in the garden later when
it was quite dark he thought about her with detachment,
loving her for her best self. He remembered once when the
grass was damp and she came to him on hurried feet, her
thin slippers drenched with dew. She stood upon his shoes
nestling close and held up her face, showing it as a book
open at a page.
‘Think how you love me,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t ask
you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember.
Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-
night.’
But Dick had come away for his soul’s sake, and he be-
gan thinking about that. He had lost himself—he could not
tell the hour when, or the day or the week, the month or

296 Tender is the Night