【有声英语文学名著】夜色温柔 Book 2（8）

Tender Is the Night - Book Two
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Chapter 8
During the next weeks Dick experienced a vast dissatisfaction. The pathological origin and mechanistic defeat of the affair left a flat and metallic 1 taste. Nicole's emotions had been used unfairly—what if they turned out to have been his own? Necessarily he must absent himself from felicity a while—in dreams he saw her walking on the clinic path swinging her wide straw hat… .
One time he saw her in person; as he walked past the Palace Hotel, a magnificent Rolls curved into the half-moon entrance. Small within its gigantic proportions, and buoyed 2 up by the power of a hundred superfluous 3 horses, sat Nicole and a young woman whom he assumed was her sister. Nicole saw him and momentarily her lips parted in an expression of fright. Dick shifted his hat and passed, yet for a moment the air around him was loud with the circlings of all the goblins on the Gross-Münster. He tried to write the matter out of his mind in a memorandum 4 that went into detail as to the solemn régime before her; the possibilities of another "push" of the malady 5 under the stresses which the world would inevitably 6 supply—in all a memorandum that would have been convincing to any one save to him who had written it.
The total value of this effort was to make him realize once more how far his emotions were involved; thenceforth he resolutely 7 provided antidotes 8. One was the telephone girl from Bar-sur-Aube, now touring Europe from Nice to Coblenz, in a desperate roundup of the men she had known in her never-to-be-equalled holiday; another was the making of arrangements to get home on a government transport in August; a third was a consequent intensification 9 of work on his proofs for the book that this autumn was to be presented to the German-speaking world of psychiatry 10.
Dick had outgrown 11 the book; he wanted now to do more spade work; if he got an exchange fellowship he could count on plenty of routine.
Meanwhile he had projected a new work: An Attempt at a Uniform and Pragmatic Classification of the Neuroses and Psychoses, Based on an Examination of Fifteen Hundred Pre-Krapælin and Post-Krapælin Cases as they would be Diagnosed in the Terminology 12 of the Different Contemporary Schools—and another sonorous 13 paragraph—Together with a Chronology of Such Subdivisions of Opinion as Have Arisen Independently.
This title would look monumental in German.*
 
*Ein Versuch die Neurosen und Psychosen gleichmässig und pragmatisch zu klassifizieren auf Grund der Untersuchung von fünfzehn hundert pre-Krapaelin und post-Krapaelin Fällen wie siz diagnostiziert sein würden in der Terminologie von den 14 verschiedenen Schulen der Gegenwart—and another sonorous paragraph—Zusammen mit einer Chronologic solcher Subdivisionen der Meinung welche unabhängig entstanden sind.
 
Going into Montreux Dick pedalled slowly, gaping 15 at the Jugenhorn whenever possible, and blinded by glimpses of the lake through the alleys 16 of the shore hotels. He was conscious of the groups of English, emergent after four years and walking with detective-story suspicion in their eyes, as though they were about to be assaulted in this questionable 17 country by German trained-bands. There were building and awakening 18 everywhere on this mound 19 of débris formed by a mountain torrent 20. At Berne and at Lausanne on the way south, Dick had been eagerly asked if there would be Americans this year. "By August, if not in June?"
He wore leather shorts, an army shirt, mountain shoes. In his knapsack were a cotton suit and a change of underwear. At the Glion funicular he checked his bicycle and took a small beer on the terrace of the station buffet 21, meanwhile watching the little bug 22 crawl down the eighty-degree slope of the hill. His ear was full of dried blood from La Tour de Pelz, where he had sprinted 23 under the impression that he was a spoiled athlete. He asked for alcohol and cleared up the exterior 24 while the funicular slid down port. He saw his bicycle embarked 25, slung 26 his knapsack into the lower compartment 27 of the car, and followed it in.
Mountain-climbing cars are built on a slant 28 similar to the angle of a hat-brim of a man who doesn't want to be recognized. As water gushed 29 from the chamber 30 under the car, Dick was impressed with the ingenuity 31 of the whole idea—a complimentary 32 car was now taking on mountain water at the top and would pull the lightened car up by gravity, as soon as the brakes were released. It must have been a great inspiration. In the seat across, a couple of British were discussing the cable itself.
"The ones made in England always last five or six years. Two years ago the Germans underbid us, and how long do you think their cable lasted?"
"How long?"
"A year and ten months. Then the Swiss sold it to the Italians. They don't have rigid 33 inspections 34 of cables."
"I can see it would be a terrible thing for Switzerland if a cable broke."
The conductor shut a door; he telephoned his confrere among the undulati, and with a jerk the car was pulled upward, heading for a pinpoint 35 on an emerald hill above. After it cleared the low roofs, the skies of Vaud, Valais, Swiss Savoy, and Geneva spread around the passengers in cyclorama. On the centre of the lake, cooled by the piercing current of the Rhône, lay the true centre of the Western World. Upon it floated swans like boats and boats like swans, both lost in the nothingness of the heartless beauty. It was a bright day, with sun glittering on the grass beach below and the white courts of the Kursal. The figures on the courts threw no shadows.
When Chillon and the island palace of Salagnon came into view Dick turned his eyes inward. The funicular was above the highest houses of the shore; on both sides a tangle 36 of foliage 37 and flowers culminated 38 at intervals 39 in masses of color. It was a rail-side garden, and in the car was a sign: Défense de cueillir les fleurs.
Though one must not pick flowers on the way up, the blossoms trailed in as they passed—Dorothy Perkins roses dragged patiently through each compartment slowly waggling with the motion of the funicular, letting go at the last to swing back to their rosy 40 cluster. Again and again these branches went through the car.
In the compartment above and in front of Dick's, a group of English were standing 41 up and exclaiming upon the backdrop of sky, when suddenly there was a confusion among them—they parted to give passage to a couple of young people who made apologies and scrambled 42 over into the rear compartment of the funicular—Dick's compartment. The young man was a Latin with the eyes of a stuffed deer; the girl was Nicole.
The two climbers gasped 43 momentarily from their efforts; as they settled into seats, laughing and crowding the English to the corners, Nicole said, "Hello." She was lovely to look at; immediately Dick saw that something was different; in a second he realized it was her fine-spun hair, bobbed like Irene Castle's and fluffed into curls. She wore a sweater of powder blue and a white tennis skirt—she was the first morning in May and every taint 44 of the clinic was departed.
"Plunk!" she gasped. "Whoo-oo that guard. They'll arrest us at the next stop. 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 45.
"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 46, to float and not to drag. She was a carnival 47 to watch—at times primly 48 coy, posing, grimacing 49 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 50 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 51 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 52 now. Something new was in the air; freshness—freshness embodying 53 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 54 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 55 donkey engine; they skirted a lost streak 56 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 57."
"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 58, remembering other women with flower-like mouths grooved 59 for bits.
"I'll drop in after dinner," Dick promised. "First I must get acclimated 60."
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.