of the central isle of Lyons, which is the side bounded by the Saône, there is a steep hill surmounted by the church of Notre-Dame-de-Fourvière, a famous place of pilgrimage for the devout. And there, one day, while pilgrims filed in to see the relics and pay devotion to their saint, and while some monks were chanting from their sonorous and reverberating litany through the great spaces, he saw a girl he could not forget: she sat down across the aisle from him, looked at him, smiled drowsily. She was small, plump; her figure was erotically seductive; she raised her head, and seemed to listen drowsily to chanting monks, and he saw that in her neck, a warm, slow pulse was beating—slowly, slowly, richly, warmly beating. She turned her eyes, which were grey and smoky with a cat-like potency, and looked at him again, smiled drowsily, and slowly crossed her heavy legs with a slow, sensual sliding of warm silk. And all the time the pulse beat slowly, richly, with a drowsy warmth of maddening and hot desire—and that was the last of the four things he saw, remembered, and could not forget of Lyons.
A shining river, emerald-green, and magic with its Alpine prescience of spring, of known, undiscovered loveliness; the noble cooking of Mother Guy and Mother Filliou; a pulse in the throat of an unknown girl that beat its slow, warm promise of fulfilled desire—these, of a town of more than six hundred thousand lives and faces, were all that later clearly would remain.
The rest was smoke and silence—some faces here and there, a scheme of streets, an enormous square, a hill crowned with a pilgrim’s church, a priest, broad-hatted, with slit mouth and gimlet eyes, some museum relics out of ancient Gaul—all fugitive and broken, gone like smoke.
… An emerald river and a shining light; some glorious cookery and drink; the pulse-beat in the warm throat of a girl—these would remain. Smoke! Smoke! has it been otherwise with any man?
And again, he was hurtling southward in a train.
C
Time, please, time…. What time is it?… Gentlemen, it’s closing time…. Time, gentlemen… that time of year thou mayst in me behold…. In the good old summer-time…. I keep thinking of you all the time… all the time… and all the time…. A long time
