Percy thought he would like a cup of hot chocolate. The dreadful fascination of meeting an old flame in public! Armande had nothing to fear, naturally. She was in a totally different class, beyond competition. Hugh recalled R.'s famous novella Three Tenses.
"There was something else we didn't quite settle, Armande, or did we?"
"Well, we spent two hours at it," remarked Armande, rather grumpily – not realizing, perhaps, that she had nothing to fear. The fascination was of a totally different, purely intellectual or artistic order, as brought out so well in Three Tenses: a fashionable man in a night-blue tuxedo is supping on a lighted veranda with three bare-shouldered beauties, Alice, Beata, and Claire, who have never seen one another before. A. is a former love, B. is his present mistress, C. is his future wife.
He regretted now not having coffee as Armande and Julia were having. The chocolate proved unpalatable. You were served a cup of hot milk. You also got, separately, a little sugar and a dainty-looking envelope of sorts. You ripped open the upper margin of the envelope. You added the beige dust it contained to the ruthlessly homogenized milk in youi cup. You took a sip – and hurried to add sugar. But no sugar could improve the insipid, sad, dishonest taste.
Armande, who had been following the various phases of his astonishment and disbelief, smiled and said:
"Now you know what 'hot chocolate' has come to in Switzerland. My mother," she continued, turning to Julia (who with the revelatory sans-gКne of the Past Tense, though actually she prided herself on her reticence, had lunged with her little spoon toward Hugh's cup and collected a sample), "my mother actually broke into tears when she was first served this stuff, because she remembered so tenderly the chocolate of her chocolate childhood."
"Pretty beastly," agreed Julia, licking her plump pale lips, "but still I prefer it to our American fudge."
"That's because you are the most unpatriotic creature in the world," said Armande.
The charm of the Past Tense lay in its secrecy. Knowing Julia, he was quite sure she would not have told a chance friend about their affair – one sip among dozens of swallows. Thus, at this precious and brittle instant, Julia and he (alias Alice and the narrator) formed a pact of the past, an impalpable pact directed against reality as represented by the voluble street corner, with its swish-passing automobiles, and trees, and strangers. The B. of the trio was Busy Witt, while the main stranger – and this touched off another thrill – was his sweetheart of the morrow, Armande, and Armande was as little aware of the future (which the author, of course, knew in every detail) as she was of the past that Hugh now retasted with his brown-dusted mЬk. Hugh, a sentimental simpleton, and somehow not a very good Person (good ones are above that, he was merely a rather dear one), was sorry that no music accompanied the scene, no Rumanian fiddler dipped heartward for two monogram-entangled sakes. There was not even a mechanical rendition of "Fascination" (a waltz) by the cafe's loudplayer. Still there did exist a kind of supporting rhythm formed by the voices of foot passengers, the clink of crockery, the mountain wind in the venerable mass of the corner chestnut.
Presently, they started to leave. Armande reminded him of tomorrow's excursion. Julia shook hands with him and begged him to pray for her when she would be saying to that very passionate, very prominent poet je t'aime in Russian which sounded in English (gargling with the phrase) "yellow blue tibia." They parted. The two girls got into Julia's smart little car. Hugh Person started walking back to his hotel, but then pulled up short with a curse and went back to retrieve his parcel.
14
Friday morning. A quick Coke. A belch. A hurried shave. He put on his ordinary clothes, throwing in the turtleneck for style. Last interview with the mirror. He plucked a black hair out of a red nostril.
The first disappointment of the day awaited him on the stroke of seven at their rendezvous (the post-office square), where he found her attended by three young athletes, Jack, Jake, and Jacques, whose copper faces he had seen grinning around her in one of the latest photographs of the fourth album. Upon noticing the sullen way his Adam's apple kept working she gaily suggested that perhaps he did not care to join them after all "because we want to walk up to the only cable car that works in summer and that's quite a climb if you're not used to it." White-toothed Jacques, half-embracing the pert maiden, remarked confidentially that monsieur should change into sturdier brogues, but Hugh retorted that in the States one hiked in any old pair of shoes, even sneakers. "We hoped," said Armande, "we might induce you to learn skiing: we keep all the gear up there, with the fellow who runs the place, and he's sure to find something for you. You'll be making tempo turns in five lessons. Won't you, Percy? I think you should also need a parka, it may be summer here, at two thousand feet, but you'll find polar conditions at over nine thousand." "The liittle one is right," said Jacques with feigned admiration, patting her on the shoulder. "It's a forty-minute saunter," said one of the twins. "Limbers you up for the slopes.'"
It soon transpired that Hugh would not be able to keep up with them and reach the four-thousand-foot mark to catch the gondola )ust north of Witt. The promised "stroll" proved to be a horrible hike, worse than anything he had experienced on school picnics in Vermont or New Hampshire. The trail consisted of very steep ups and very slippery downs, and gigantic ups again, along the side of the next mountain, and was full of old ruts, rocks, and roots. He labored, hot, wretched Hugh, behind Armande's blond bun, while she lightly followed light Jacques. The English twins made up the rear guard. Possibly, had the pace been a little more leisurely, Hugh might have managed that simple climb, but his heartless and mindless companions swung on without mercy, practically bounding up the steep bits and zestfully sliding down the declivities, which Hugh negotiated with outspread arms, in an attitude of entreaty. He refused to borrow the stick he was offered, but finally, after twenty minutes of torment, pleaded for a short breathing spell. To his dismay not Armande but Jack and Jake stayed with him as he sat on a stone, bending his head and panting, a pearl of sweat hanging from his pointed nose. They were taciturn twins and now merely exchanged silent glances as they stood a little above him on the trail, arms akimbo. He felt their sympathy ebbing and begged them to continue on their way, he would follow shortly. When they had gone he waited a little and then limped back to the village. At one spot between two forested stretches he rested again, this time on an open bluff where a bench, eyeless but eager, faced an admirable view. As he sat there smoking, he noticed his party very high above him, blue, gray, pink, red, waving to him from a cliff. He waved back and resumed his gloomy retreat.
But Hugh Person refused to give up. Mightily shod, alpenstocked, munching gum, he again accompanied them next morning. He begged them to let him set his own pace, without waiting for him anywhere, and he would have reached the cableway had he not lost his bearings and ended up in a brambly burn at the end of a logging road. Another attempt a day or two later was more successful. He almost reached timberline – but there the weather changed, a damp fog enveloped him, and he spent a couple of hours shivering all alone in a smelly shippon, waiting for the whirling mists to uncover the sun once more.
Another time he volunteered to carry after her a pair of new skis she had just acquired – weird-looking, reptile-green things made of metal and fiberglass. Their elaborate bindings looked like first cousins of orthopЙdie devices meant to help a cripple to walk. He was allowed to shoulder those precious skis, which at first felt miraculously light but soon grew as heavy as great slabs of malachite, under which he staggered in Armande's wake like a clown helping to change properties in a circus arena. His load was snatched from him as soon as he sat down for a rest. He was offered a paper bag (four small oranges) in exchange but he pushed it away without looking.