“You can’t do that,” Linda interrupted, “without making me a common carrier, and then the insurance wouldn’t be any good.”
The waiter stood respectfully silent, and Rob hoped no one noticed the eagerness in his voice as he accepted the invitation and asked them what they wanted to drink, all in one breath.
While the waiter was taking their orders, Linda regarded Rob with thoughtful speculation. “What on earth have you been doing here all this time?” she asked.
“Watching people, looking for... well, just watching.”
Linda turned to Marion Essex. “Don’t pay any attention to what he says,” she warned. “I had a chance to sound him out on the ship. I didn’t get anywhere. He’s a dog trainer, and he’s over here to investigate foreign methods.”
“How interesting,” Marion Essex said. “Aren’t you rather young for that, Mr. Trenton?”
It was Frank Essex who answered the question, gazing at Marion with that look of amused superiority with which husbands sometimes regard their wives. “What does age have to do with it?”
“Well, I thought... I thought, you know, the training of animals takes experience, and...”
“He’s older than the dogs,” Frank Essex said.
They all laughed.
As the waiter brought their drinks Linda observed, “I think it would be a swell idea to train a dog to carry a pouch containing passport, vaccination certificates, customs declarations and all the red tape. My bag is bursting at the seams.”
“Swell idea — a pooch with a pouch,” Frank Essex said. “Or you might get the St. Bernards to carry mint juleps in summer instead of the usual keg of brandy.”
“What do you do with the dogs after you train them?” Marion Essex asked, quite apparently trying to draw him out.
“Oh, he probably trains them to retrieve and things like that,” Frank commented.
“I give my dogs basic training for more serious things than that,” Rob said, trying not to seem curt. He was embarrassed at being discussed so freely.
“You mean hunting?” Marion Essex asked.
“Hunting men,” Linda Carroll explained. “He’s told me all about it. He’s close-mouthed and probably won’t tell you a thing, but I’ll give you the high spots. State police use bloodhounds to trail persons, but a bloodhound with a really good nose is very valuable. He’s not what you’d call expendable in a military sense. So when a criminal has been run to earth and the trail begins to get hot, they use dogs like German Shepherds or Doberman pinschers to go in for the kill. Those dogs are expendable and they move like a streak of greased lightning.”
Frank Essex regarded Trenton with new-found respect. “Sounds interesting. Perhaps you’ll tell us more about it while we’re on the tour.”
“It’s hard to get him to talk,” Linda said. “It took moonlight, an hour’s silent contemplation of the wake of the ship, and two cocktails before he loosened up for me. Well, here’s to a swell trip.”
All four raised their glasses, touched them lightly together and drank.
There followed dream days filled with a variegated panorama of rolling green plateau country and ridges covered with thick conifers; winding roads and breath-taking vistas of mountains white with snow and studded with glaciers; quaint farms and towns roofed with pink tile; lakes which varied their moods with the sky, laughing and blue or dark grey with mystery.
Marion and Linda sat together in the front seat. Rob and Frank Essex occupied the rear, an arrangement which was definitely distasteful to Rob but which had been initiated by Frank Essex on that first day. It had thereafter acquired the force of custom, so that any change would have been an innovation.
Rob Trenton tried to find some clue to Linda’s feeling — and tried in vain. He felt certain she hadn’t invited him to come along on the trip simply for the purpose of sharing expenses. On the ship he had been drawn to her as by a magnet. So had a dozen other young men, of course, yet Rob felt she had been particularly interested in him and in his theories of animal training. And she certainly must have hunted him up there at the Café de la Paix with a definite purpose in mind. Yet as time passed, Rob was forced to admit to himself that Linda Carroll became even more mysterious than ever.
One day, when he had seen her intent over a sketchbook while Frank and Marion Essex were in a nearby cocktail bar, he had asked her a direct question, “Do you paint for a living?”
She turned to regard him with quizzical eyes. “I didn’t hear you coming along the pathway behind me.”
“The question,” Rob said, smiling so that his insistence would not seem impertinent, “was, ‘Do you paint for a living?’”
“My painting is definitely not important,” she said.
Then, suddenly something clicked in Rob Trenton’s mind. “Wait,” he said, “I remember one of the most unusual paintings I ever saw. It was on a calendar, and was the picture of a lake in Switzerland with snow-capped peaks and wisps of clouds. It was early in the morning and there was a lake deep down in the valley in the shadows. There was a campfire on the shore of the lake and the smoke went almost straight up for two or three hundred feet and then suddenly dispersed laterally, just as you sometimes see it in the early morning on a lake. That painting was signed Linda Carroll.”
For a moment her eyes seemed to have something akin to panic in them. “You... you’re certain of the signature?” she asked as though sparring for time.
“That picture made a tremendous impression on me,” Rob said. “I’d been wondering where I’d heard your name before. I think that was one of the most wonderful paintings I’ve ever seen. It caught the spirit of early dawn. And now to think that I’d meet you... to think that I’d be traveling through Switzerland with you, and...”
“Rob,” she said, “I didn’t paint that picture.”
“Linda, you must have. It’s exactly the way you would have seen the country. It was a completely unconventional approach. It...”
She suddenly snapped her sketchbook shut, closed the package of crayons, and said firmly, “Rob, I did not paint that picture, and I dislike people who ask intimate personal questions. Now would you like to join me for a cocktail?”
There had been such sudden, bitter finality in her voice that Rob had not dared to press the matter further.
In fact, from that moment on, it seemed that she erected a barrier so far as any matter pertaining to her background was concerned. She was cordial enough otherwise, but her attitude indicated a cold determination to keep from any discussion of her personal affairs; nor would she let anyone see the inside of her sketchbook. Several times Rob saw her in the distance, sketching, and there was that in the swift motions of her hand, the smooth pivoting of her wrist, which indicated a mastery of her subject, a sure control and a deft touch. But the subject of her work and the sketchbook were both definitely closed.
They breezed along through Switzerland, a gay and friendly foursome, discussing matters of general interest, taking pictures, commenting on the different exposure speeds and diaphragm openings, and for the most part keeping the conversation on an impersonal plane, and filled with light banter.
Nevertheless, underlying this casual association, there was a consciousness of growing intimacy. Frank and Marion Essex had the bond of marriage, and rapidly Rob and Linda were developing a bond of their own, a sense of belonging which ripened without the aid of words and filled Rob with happiness.
At Lucerne there was an unexpected development. A cablegram caught up with Frank and Marion Essex which necessitated their taking the first plane out from Zurich, and Linda Carroll and Rob Trenton found themselves confronted with a dilemma.