Episode 3

"I don't mean that."

"If we would have hired a good mechanic instead of a half-baked Kikuyu driver, he would have

checked the oil and never burned out that bearing in the truck."

"I don't mean that."

"If you hadn't left your own people, your goddamned Old Westbury Saratoga, Palm Beach people to

take me on " *'Why, I loved you. That's not fair. I love you now. I'll always love you. Don't you love

me?"

"No," said the man. "I don't think so. I never have."

"Harry, what are you saying? You're out of your head."

"No. I haven't any head to go out of."

"Don't drink that," she said. "Darling, please don't drink that. We have to do everything we can."

"You do it," he said. "I'm tired."

Now in his mind he saw a railway station at Karagatch and he was standing with his pack and that was the

headlight of the Simplon-Offent cutting the dark now and he was leaving Thrace then after the retreat. That was one

of the things he had saved to write, with, in the morning at breakfast, looking out the window and seeing snow on the

mountains in Bulgaffa and Nansen's Secretary asking the old man if it were snow and the old man looking at it and

saying, No, that's not snow. It's too early for snow. And the Secretary repeating to the other girls, No, you see. It's not

snow and them all saying, It's not snow we were mistaken. But it was the snow all right and he sent them on into it

when he evolved exchange of populations. And it was snow they tramped along in until they died that winter.

It was snow too that fell all Christmas week that year up in the Gauertal, that year they lived in the woodcutter's

house with the big square porcelain stove that filled half the room, and they slept on mattresses filled with beech leaves,

the time the deserter came with his feet bloody in the snow. He said the police were right behind him and they gave him

woolen socks and held the gendarmes talking until the tracks had drifted over.

In Schrunz, on Christmas day, the snow was so bright it hurt your eyes when you looked out from the Weinstube

and saw every one coming home from church. That was where they walked up the sleigh-smoothed urine-yellowed road

along the river with the steep pine hills, skis heavy on the shoulder, and where they ran down the glacier above the

Madlenerhaus, the snow as smooth to see as cake frosting and as light as powder and he remembered the noiseless rush

the speed made as you dropped down like a bird.

They were snow-bound a week in the Madlenerhaus that time in the blizzard playing cards in the smoke by the

lantern light and the stakes were higher all the time as Herr Lent lost more. Finally he lost it all. Everything, the

Skischule money and all the season's profit and then his capital. He could see him with his long nose, picking up the

cards and then opening, "Sans Voir." There was always gambling then. When there was no snow you gambled and

when there was too much you gambled. He thought of all the time in his life he had spent gambling.

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