Page 298 - tender-is-the-night

He had long been outside of the world of simple desires and
their fulfillments, and he was inept and uncertain. For all
he knew there might be some code among the wanderers of
obscure spas by which they found each other quickly.
—Perhaps the next gesture was his. Strange children
should smile at each other and say, ‘Let’s play.’
He moved closer, the shadow moved sideways. Possibly
he would be snubbed like the scapegrace drummers he had
heard of in youth. His heart beat loud in contact with the
unprobed, undissected, unanalyzed, unaccounted for. Sud-
denly he turned away, and, as he did, the girl, too, broke the
black frieze she made with the foliage, rounded a bench at
a moderate but determined pace and took the path back to
the hotel.
With a guide and two other men, Dick started up the
Birkkarspitze next morning. It was a fine feeling once they
were above the cowbells of the highest pastures—Dick
looked forward to the night in the shack, enjoying his own
fatigue, enjoying the captaincy of the guide, feeling a delight
in his own anonymity. But at mid-day the weather changed
to black sleet and hail and mountain thunder. Dick and one
of the other climbers wanted to go on but the guide refused.
Regretfully they struggled back to Innsbruck to start again
to-morrow.
After dinner and a bottle of heavy local wine in the de-
serted dining-room, he felt excited, without knowing why,
until he began thinking of the garden. He had passed the
girl in the lobby before supper and this time she had looked
at him and approved of him, but it kept worrying him: Why?

298 Tender is the Night