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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77646 ***
+
+                                OBERLAND
+
+                         VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES
+
+                        POINTED ROOFS
+                        BACKWATER
+                        HONEYCOMB
+                        THE TUNNEL
+                        INTERIM
+                        DEADLOCK
+                        REVOLVING LIGHTS
+                        THE TRAP
+                        OBERLAND
+                        (The next volume is in preparation)
+
+
+
+
+                                OBERLAND
+
+
+                                   BY
+                         DOROTHY M. RICHARDSON
+                    AUTHOR OF “POINTED ROOFS,” ETC.
+
+
+                               DUCKWORTH
+                       3 HENRIETTA STREET, LONDON
+
+
+                          First published 1927
+                         (All rights reserved)
+
+
+   Printed in Great Britain by Ebenezer Baylis & Son, Ltd., The Trinity
+                           Press, Worcester.
+
+
+                                   TO
+                                J. H. B.
+
+
+
+
+                                OBERLAND
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER I
+
+
+The sight of a third porter, this time a gentle-looking man carrying a
+pile of pillows and coming slowly, filled her with hope. But he passed
+on his way as heedless as the others. It seemed incredible that not one
+of these men should answer. She wasted a precious moment seeing again
+the three brutishly preoccupied forms as figures moving in an evil
+dream. If only she were without the miserable handbags she might run
+alongside one of these villains, with a tip in an outstretched hand and
+buy the simple yes or no that was all she needed. But she could not
+bring herself to abandon her belongings to the mercy of this
+ill-mannered wilderness where not a soul would care if she wandered
+helpless until the undiscovered train had moved off into the night. She
+knew this would not be and that what she was resenting was not the human
+selfishness about her of which she had her own full share, but this
+turning of her weariness into exhaustion ruining the rest of the journey
+that already had held suffering enough.
+
+There must be several minutes left of the ten the big clock had marked
+as she neared the platforms. Recalling its friendly face she saw also
+that of the little waiter at the buffet who had tried to persuade her to
+take wine and murmured too late that there was no extra charge for it,
+very gently. Rallying the remainder of her strength she dropped her
+things on the platform with a decisiveness she tried just in vain to
+scorn, and stood still and looked about amongst the hurrying passengers
+and saw passing by and going ahead to the movement of an English stride
+the familiar, blessed outlines of a Burberry. Ignoring the near train
+the man was crossing a pool of lamplight and making for the dark
+unlikely platform over the way. She caught up her bags and followed and
+in a moment was at peace within the semi-darkness of the further
+platform amongst people she had seen this morning at Victoria, and the
+clangorous station was reduced to an enchanting background for confident
+behaviour.
+
+All these people were serene; had come in groups, unscathed, knowing
+their way, knowing how to quell the bloused fiends into helpfulness. But
+then, also, the journey to them was uniform grey, a tiresome business to
+be got through; not black and sudden gold. Yet even they were relieved
+to find themselves safely through the tangle. They strode unnecessarily
+about, shouted needlessly to each other; expressing travellers’ joy in
+the English way.
+
+There seemed to be plenty of time and for awhile she strolled delighting
+in them, until the sight of an excited weary child, in a weatherproof
+that trailed at its heels, marching sturdily about adream with pride and
+joy perfectly caricaturing the rest of the assembly, made her turn away
+content to see no more, to hoist up her baggage and clamber after it
+into cover, into the company of her own joy.
+
+Into a compartment whose blinds were snugly drawn upon soft diffused
+light falling on the elegance of dove-grey repp and white lace that had
+been the surprise and refreshment of this morning’s crowded train, but
+that now, evening-lit and enclosed, gave the empty carriage the air of a
+little salon.
+
+Installed here, with fatigue suddenly banished and the large P.L.M.
+weaving within the mesh of the lace its thrilling assurance of being
+launched on long continental distances, it was easy to forgive the
+coercion that had imposed the longer sea-route for its cheapness and the
+first-class ticket for the chance of securing solitude on the night
+journey.
+
+And indeed this steaming off into the night, that just now had seemed to
+be the inaccessible goal and end of the journey, was only the beginning
+of its longest stretch; but demanding only endurance. With hurry and
+uncertainty at an end there could be nothing to compare with what lay
+behind; nothing that could compare with the state of being a helpless
+projectile that had spoiled Dieppe and made Paris a nightmare.
+
+Yet Dieppe and Paris and the landscape in between, now that they were
+set, by this sudden haven, far away in the past, were already coming
+before her eyes transformed, lit by the joy that, hovering all the time
+in the background, had seen and felt. France, for whose sake at once she
+had longed to cease being a hurrying traveller robbed right and left of
+things passing too swiftly, had been seen. Within her now, an
+irrevocable extension of being, was France.
+
+France that had spoken from its coast the moment she came up from the
+prison of the battened-down saloon; the moment before the shouting
+fiends charged up the gangway; spoken from the quay, from the lounging
+blue-bloused figures, the buildings, the way the frontage of the town
+met the sky and blended with the air, softly, yet clear in its softness,
+and with serenity that was vivacious, unlike the stolid English peace.
+
+And later those slender trees along the high bank of a river, the way
+they had of sailing-by, mannered, _coquettish_; awakening affection for
+the being of France.
+
+And Paris barely glimpsed and shrouded with the glare of night ... the
+emanation even of Paris was peace. An emanation as powerful as that of
+London, more lively and yet more serene. Serene where gracious buildings
+presided over the large flaring thoroughfares, serene even in the
+dreadful by-streets.
+
+And that woman at the station. Black-robed figure, coming diagonally
+across the clear space yellow in gaslight against the background of
+barriered platforms, seeming with her swift assured gait, bust first,
+head reared and a little tilted back on the neck, so insolently
+feminine, and then, as she swept by, suddenly beautiful; from head to
+foot all gracefully moving rhythm. _Style_, of course, redeeming
+ugliness and cruelty. She was the secret of France. France concentrated.
+
+Michael, staying in Paris, said that the French are indescribably evil
+and their children like monkeys. He had fled eagerly to England. But
+Michael’s perceptions are moral. France, within his framework, falls
+back into shadow.
+
+The train carrying her through beloved France and away from it to a
+bourne that had now ceased to be an imagined place, and become an idea,
+useless, to be lost on arrival as her idea of France had been lost, was
+so quiet amidst its loud rattling that the whole of it might be asleep.
+No sound came from the corridor. No one passed. There was nothing but
+the continuous rattling and the clatter of gear. The world deserting her
+just when she would have welcomed, for wordless communication of the joy
+of achievement, the sight and sound of human kind.
+
+Twelve hours away, and now only a promise of daylight and of food, lay
+Berne. Beyond Berne, somewhere in the far future of to-morrow afternoon,
+the terminus, the business of finding and bargaining for a sleigh—the
+last effort.
+
+A muffled figure filled the doorway, entered the carriage, deposited
+bags. A middle-aged Frenchman, dark, with sallow cheeks bulging above a
+little pointed beard. Thinking her asleep he moved quietly, arranging
+his belongings with deft, maturely sociable hands. From one of them a
+ring gleamed in the gaslight. He showed no sign of relief in escaping
+into silence, no sign of being alone. Conversation radiated from him.
+Where, on the train, could he have been so recently talking that at this
+moment he was almost making remarks into his bag?
+
+She closed her eyes, listening to his sounds that sent to a distance the
+sounds of the train. He had driven away also the outer spaces. The grey
+and white interior spoke no longer of the strange wide distances of
+France. He was France at home in a railway carriage, preparing to sleep
+until, at the end of a definite short space of hours, the Swiss dawn
+appeared at the windows. Before he came the night had stretched ahead,
+timeless.
+
+A moment’s stillness, and then a sound like the pumping of nitrous-oxide
+into a bag. She opened her eyes upon him seated opposite with cheeks
+distended and eyes strained wide above indeed a bag, held to his lips
+and limply flopping. Bracing herself to the presence either of a lunatic
+or a pitiful invalid believing himself unobserved, she watched while
+slowly the bag swelled up and took, obedient to an effort that seemed
+about to make his eyeballs start from his head, the shape of a cushion,
+circular about a flattened centre. Setting it down in the corner
+corresponding to that where lay her own head, he took off his boots,
+pulled on slippers and pattered out into the corridor where he became
+audible struggling with a near ventilator that presently gave and
+clattered home. Tiptoeing back into the carriage where already it seemed
+that the air grew close, he stood under the light, peering upwards with
+raised arm. A gentle click, and two little veils slid down over the
+globe and met, leaving the light quenched to a soft glimmer: beautiful,
+shrouding hard outlines, keeping watch through the night, speaking of
+night and travel, yet promising day and the end of travel.
+
+But he had not done. He was battling now with the sliding door. It was
+closing, closed, and the carriage converted into a box almost in
+darkness and suddenly improper. With a groaning sigh he flung himself
+down and drew his rug to the margin of the pale disc that was his face
+and that turned sharply as she rose and passed it to reach the door, and
+still showed, when the corridor light flowed in through the opened door,
+a perfect astonishment. His inactivity, while she struggled out with her
+baggage into the inhospitable corridor checked the words with which she
+would have explained her inability to remain sealed for the night in a
+small box. As she pushed the door to she thought she heard a small
+sound, a sniggering expletive, mirth at the spectacle of British
+prudery.
+
+She was alone in the corridor of the sleeping train, in a cold air that
+reeked of rusting metal and resounded with the clangour of machinery.
+Exploring in both directions she found no sign of an attendant, nothing
+but closely shrouded carriages telling of travellers outstretched and
+slumbering. Into either of these she felt it impossible to break. There
+was nothing for it but to abandon the hope of a night’s rest and drop to
+a class whose passengers would be numerous and seated. The train had
+gathered a speed that flung her from side to side as she went. In two
+journeys she got her belongings across the metal bridge that swayed
+above the couplings, and arrived with bruised arms and shoulders in
+another length of corridor, a duplicate in noise and cold emptiness of
+the one she had left. Everywhere shrouded carriages. But something had
+changed, there was something even in the pitiless clangour that seemed
+to announce a change of class.
+
+The door she pushed open revealed huddled shapes whose dim faces,
+propped this way and that, were all relaxed in slumber. There was no
+visible vacant place, but as she hesitated within the emerging reek a
+form stirred and sat forward as if to enquire; and when she struggled in
+with her bags and her apology the carriage came to life in heavily
+draped movement.
+
+She was seated, shivering in a fog of smells, but at rest, escaped from
+nightmare voyaging amongst swaying shadows. The familiar world was about
+her again and she sat blessing the human kindliness of these sleeping
+forms, blessing the man who had first moved, even though his rousing had
+proved to be anxiety about the open door which, the moment she was
+inside, he had closed with the gusty blowings of one who takes refuge
+from a blizzard.
+
+But the sense of home-coming began presently to fade under the pressure
+of suffering that promised only to increase. She had long ceased to
+wonder what made it possible for these people to add wraps and rugs to
+the thick layers of the stifling atmosphere and remain serene. The
+effort was no longer possible that had carried her through appearances
+into a sense of the reality beneath. She saw them now as repellent
+mysteries, pitiless aliens dowered with an unfathomable faculty for
+dispensing with air. With each breath the smells that had greeted her,
+no longer separately apparent, advanced in waves whose predominant
+flavour was the odour of burnt rubber rising from the grating that ran
+along the middle of the floor and seemed to sear the soles of her feet.
+Getting beneath them her rolled rug she abandoned all but the sense of
+survival and sank into herself, into a coma in which everything but the
+green-veiled oscillating light was motionless forever. Forever the night
+would go on and her head turn now this way now that against the harsh
+upholstery.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+The train was slowing, stopping. Its rumbling clatter subsided to a
+prolonged squeak that ended on a stillness within which sounded one
+against the other the rapid ticking of a watch and a steady rhythmic
+snore. No one stirred, and for a moment there was nothing but these
+sounds to witness that life went on. Then faintly and as if from very
+far away she heard the metallic clangours of a large high station and
+amidst them a thin clarion voice singing out an indistinguishable name.
+Some large sleeping provincial town signalling its importance; a
+milestone, marking off hours passed through that need not be braved
+again. Yet when the train moved on it seemed impossible even to imagine
+the ending of the night. She had no idea of how long she had sat hemmed
+and suffering, with nothing in her mind but snatches of song that would
+not be dismissed, with aching brow and burning eyeballs and a
+ceaselessly on-coming stupor that would not turn to sleep. And at the
+next stop with its echoing clangour and faintness of clarion voices she
+no longer desired somehow to get across the encumbered carriage and
+taste from a corridor window the sweet fresh air of the railway station
+so freely breathed by those who were crying in the night.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+A numbness had crept into the movement of the train, as though, wearying
+it had ceased to clatter and were dropping into a doze. It was moving so
+quietly that the ticking of the watch again became audible. The wheels
+under the carriage seemed to be muffled and to labour, pushing heavily
+forward ... _Snow_. The journey across France ending on the heights
+along its eastern edge. Her drugged senses awoke bewailing Paris,
+gleaming now out of reach far away in the north, challenging with the
+memory of its glimpsed beauty whatever loveliness might be approaching
+through the night.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Again outside the stopping train a far-off voice but this time a jocund
+sound, ringing echoless in open air. In a moment through a lifted window
+it became a rousing summons. Blinds went up, and on the huddled forms
+emerging serene and bright-eyed from their hibernation a blueish light
+came in. The opened door admitted crisp sounds close at hand and air,
+advancing up the carriage.
+
+Upon the platform the air was motionless and yet, walked through, an
+intensity of movement—movement upon her face of millions of
+infinitesimal needles attacking. Mountain air “like wine,” but this
+effervescence was solid, holding one up, feeding every nerve.
+
+A little way down the platform she came upon the luggage, a few trunks
+set side by side on a counter, and saw at once that her portmanteau was
+not there. Anxiety dogging her steps. But this air, that reached, it
+seemed, to her very spirit, would not let her feel anxious.
+
+The movements of the people leaving the train were leisurely, promising
+a long wait. Most of the passengers were the English set free, strolling
+happily about in fur-coats and creased Burberrys. English voices took
+possession of the air. Filled it with the sense of the incorrigible
+English confidence. And upon a table beyond the counter stood rows and
+rows of steaming cups. Coffee. Café, mon dieu! Offered casually, the
+normal beverage of these happy continentals.
+
+The only visible official stood at ease beyond the table answering
+questions, making no move towards the ranged luggage. He looked very
+mild, had a little blue-black beard. She thought of long-forgotten
+Emmerich, the heavy responsible pimpled face of the German official who
+plunged great hands in amongst her belongings. Perhaps the customs’
+officers were yet to appear.
+
+Fortified by coffee she strolled up and made her enquiry in French, but
+carefully in the slipshod English manner. For a moment her demand seemed
+to embarrass him. Then, very politely:
+
+“_Vous arrivez, madame?_”
+
+“_De Londres._”
+
+“_Et vous allez?_”
+
+“_À Oberland._”
+
+“_Vous n’avez qu’a monter dans le train_,” and hospitably he indicated
+the train that stood now emptied, and breathing through its open doors.
+Walking on down the platform she caught through a door ajar in the
+background a glimpse of a truckle bed with coverings thrown back. Here
+as they laboured forward through the darkness the douanier had been
+sleeping, his station ready-staged for their coming, a farcical
+half-dozen trunks laid out to represent the belongings of the trainful
+of passengers. Appearances thus kept up, he was enjoying his rôle of
+pleasant host. Tant mieux, tant very much mieux. One could enjoy the fun
+of being let out into the night.
+
+The solid air began to be intensely cold. But in its cold there was no
+bitterness and it attained only her face, whose shape it seemed to
+change. And all about the station were steep walls of starless darkness
+and overhead in a blue-black sky, stars oddly small and numerous; very
+sharp and near.
+
+When the train moved on night settled down once more. Once more there
+was dim gaslight and jolting shadows. But the air was clearer and only
+two passengers remained, two women, each in her corner and each in a
+heavy black cloak. Strangers to each other, with the length of the
+carriage between them, yet alike, indistinguishable; above each cloak a
+plump middle-aged face not long emerged from sleep: sheened with the
+sleep that had left the oily, glinting brown eyes. Presently they began
+to speak, with the freemasonry of women unobserved, socially off duty.
+Their voices frugal, dull and flat; the voices of those who have
+forgotten even the desire to find sympathy, to find anything turned
+their way with an offering.
+
+They reached details. One of them was on her way home to a place with a
+tripping gentle name, a fairy keep agleam on a lakeside amidst
+mountains. To her it was dailiness, life as now she knew it, a hemmed-in
+loneliness. Visitors came from afar. Found it full of poetry. Saw her
+perhaps as a part of it, a figure of romance.
+
+When their patient voices ceased they were ghosts. Not even ghosts, for
+they seemed uncreated, seemed never to have lived and yet to preside
+over life, fixed in their places, an inexorable commentary. Each sat
+staring before her into space, patient and isolated, undisguised
+isolation. To imagine them alert and busied with their families about
+them made them no less sad. Immovable at the centre of their lives was
+loneliness, its plaints silenced, its source forgotten or unknown.
+
+Of what use traveller’s joy? Frivolous, unfounded, dependent altogether
+on oblivions.
+
+One of them was rummaging in a heavy sack made of black twill and corded
+at the neck. Toys, she said, were there—“_pour mes p’tits enfants_.”
+
+“_Ça porte beaucoup de soins, les enfants_,” said the other, and
+compressed dry lips. The first agreed and they sat back, each in her
+corner, fallen into silence. Children to them seemed to be not persons
+but a material, an unvarying substance wearily known to them both and to
+be handled in that deft adjusting way of the French. Satisfied with this
+mutual judgment on life, made in camera, they relapsed into
+contemplation, leaving the air weighted with their shared, secretly
+scornful, secretly impatient resignation.
+
+Yet they were fortunate. Laden with wealth they did not count. It spoke
+in their complacency. Aspiration asleep. They looked for joy in the
+wrong place. In this they were humanity, blindly pursuing its way. Their
+pallid plump faces, so salient, could smile impersonally. Their heads
+were well-poised above shapely subdued bodies.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now that it was empty and the blinds drawn up, the carriage seemed all
+window, letting in the Swiss morning that was mist opening here and
+there upon snow still greyed by dawn. Through the one she had just
+pushed up came life, smoothing away the traces of the night. She lay
+back in her corner and heard with closed eyes the steady voice of the
+train. The rattle and clatter of its night-long rush through France
+seemed to be checked by a sense of achievement, as if now it took its
+ease, delighting in the coming of day, in the presence of this
+Switzerland for whose features it was watching through the mist.
+
+Incredible that in this same carriage where now she was at peace in
+morning light she had sat through a flaming darkness, penned and
+enduring. Lifting weary eyes she boldly surveyed it, saw the soilure and
+shabbiness the gaslight had screened, saw a friend, grimed with
+beneficent toil, and turned once more blissfully towards the window and
+its view of thin mist and dawn-greyed snowfields.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+The leap of recognition, unknowing between the mountains and herself
+which was which, made the first sight of them—smoothed snow and crinkled
+rock in unheard-of unimagined tawny light—seem, even at the moment of
+seeing, already long ago.
+
+They knew, they smiled joyfully at the glad shock they were, sideways
+gigantically advancing while she passed as over a bridge across which
+presently there would be no return, seeing and unseeing, seeing again
+with the first keen vision.
+
+They closed in upon the train, summitless, their bases gliding by, a
+ceaseless tawny cliff throwing its light into the carriage, almost
+within touch; receding, making space at its side for sudden blue water,
+a river accompanying, giving them gentleness who were its mighty edge;
+broadening, broadening, becoming a wide lake, a stretch of smooth
+peerless blue with mountains reduced and distant upon its hither side.
+With the sideways climbing of the train the lake dropped away, down and
+down until presently she stood up to see it below in the distance, a
+blue pool amidst its encirclement of mountain and of sky: a picture
+sliding away, soundlessly, hopelessly demanding its perfect word.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+“_Je suis anglaise_,” she murmured as the window came down into place.
+
+“_Je le crois, madame. Mais
+comment-voulez-vous-mon-dieu-vous-autres-anglais-qu’on-chauffe-les-coupés?_”
+
+She was left to pictures framed and glazed.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Berne was a snowstorm blotting out everything but small white
+green-shuttered houses standing at angles about the open space between
+the station and the little restaurant across the way, their strangeness
+veiled by falling flakes, flakes falling fast on freshly fallen snow
+that was pitted with large deep-sunken foot-prints. The electric air of
+dawn had softened, and as she plunged, following the strides of a row of
+foot-prints, across to her refuge, it wrapped her about, a pleasant
+enlivening density, warmed by the snow. Monstrous snowstorm, adventure,
+and an excuse for shirking the walk to the Bridge and its view of the
+Bernese heights. She was not ready for heights. This little secret tour,
+restricted to getting from train to breakfast and back again to the
+train, gave her, with its charm of familiar activity in a strange place,
+a sharp first sense of Switzerland that in obediently following the
+dictated programme she would have missed. But coming forth,
+strengthened, once more into the snow she regretted the low
+walking-shoes that prevented the following up of her glad meeting with
+the forgotten details of the continental breakfast, its tender-crusted
+rolls, the small oblongs of unglistening sugar that sweetened the
+life-giving coffee, by an exploration of the nearer streets.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Presently their talk fell away and the journeying cast again its full
+spell. Almost soundlessly the train was labouring along beside a ridge
+that seemed to be the silent top of the world gliding by, its narrow
+strip of grey snow-thick sky pierced by the tops of the crooked stakes
+that were a fence submerged. From time to time the faint clear sound of
+a bell, ting-ting, and a neat toy station slid by half buried in snow.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+“I don’t dislike those kind of breakfasts myself,” she said and turned
+her face to the window. Her well-cut lips had closed unpressing,
+flowerlike. Both the girls had the slender delicate fragility of
+flowers. And strength. Refined and gentle, above a strength of which
+they were unaware. They were immensely strong or they would not appear
+undisturbed by their long journeying, would not look so exactly as if
+they were returning home in an omnibus from an afternoon’s shopping in
+their own Croydon.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+They had come so far together that it would seem churlish, with the
+little terminus welcoming the whole party, to turn away from them. And
+she liked them, was attached to them as fellow adventurers, fellow
+survivors of the journey. The falling into the trap of travellers’
+freemasonry was inevitable: a fatal desire to know the whence and the
+whither, and, before you are aware of it you have pooled your enterprise
+and the new reality is at a distance. But so far it had not come to
+that. There were no adieux. They had melted away, they and their things,
+lost in the open while she, forgetful of everything but the blessed
+cessation, had got herself out of the train.
+
+The station was in a wilderness. High surrounding mountains making it
+seem that their half-day’s going up and still up had brought them out
+upon a modest lowland. There was no sign from where she stood of any
+upward track. Sheds, dumped upon a waste of snow beyond which mountains
+filled the sky and barred the way.
+
+Fierce-looking men in blue gaberdines and slouch hats, lounging about.
+One of these must be attacked and bargained with for a sleigh. But there
+were no sleighs to be seen, nothing at all resembling a vehicle, unless
+indeed one braved the heights in one of those rough shallow frameworks
+on runners, some piled with hay and some with peeled yellow timbers,
+neatly lashed. Perhaps a sleigh should be ordered in advance? Perhaps
+here she met disaster....
+
+The man knew her requirements before she spoke and was all hot-eyed
+eagerness, yet off-hand. Brutish, yet making her phrases, that a London
+cabby would have received with deference, sound discourteous. In his
+queer German he agreed to the smaller sum and turned away to
+expectorate.
+
+The large barn-like restaurant was empty save for a group of people at
+the far end, forgotten again and again as she sat too happy to swoop the
+immense distance between herself and anything but the warm brownness of
+the interior and its strange quality, its intensity of welcoming
+shelter—sharp contrast with the bleak surrounding snow. Switzerland was
+here, already surrounding and protecting with an easy practised hand.
+And there was a generous savouriness.... She could not recall any
+lunching on an English journey affording this careless completeness of
+comfort.
+
+Incompletely sharing these appreciations her tired and fevered body
+cowered within the folds of the beneficent fur-coat seeking a somnolence
+that refused to possess it. Fever kept her mind alert, but circling at a
+great pace round and round amidst reiterated assertions. Turn and turn
+about they presented themselves, were flung aside in favour of what
+waited beyond, and again thrust themselves forward, as if determined, so
+emphatic they were, not only to share but to steer her adventure. And
+away behind them, standing still and now forever accessible, were the
+worlds she had passed through since the sleet drove in her face at
+Newhaven. And ahead unknown Oberland, summoning her up amongst its
+peaks.
+
+And hovering vehement above them all hung the cloud of her pity for
+those who had never bathed in strangeness—and its dark lining, the
+selfish congratulation that reminded her how at the beginning of her
+life, in the face of obstructions, she had so bathed and now under
+kindly compulsion was again bathing. And again alone. Loneliness, that
+had long gone from her life, had come back for this sudden voyaging to
+be her best companion, to shelter strangeness that can be known only in
+solitude.
+
+In a swift glimpse, caught through the mesh woven by the obstinate
+circlings of her consciousness, she saw her time in Germany, how perfect
+in pain and joy, how left complete and bright had been that piece of her
+life. And in Belgium—in spite of the large party. Yet even the party,
+though they had taken the edge from many things had now become a rich
+part of the whole. But the things that came back most sharply had been
+seen in solitude: in those times of going out alone on small
+commissions, the way the long vista of boulevard seemed to sing for joy,
+the sharp turn, the clean pavé and neat bright little shops; the
+charcuterie just round the corner, the old pharmacien who had understood
+and quickly and gravely chloroformed the kitten quite dead; the long
+walk through the grilling lively Brussels streets to get the circular
+tickets—little shadow over it of pain at the thought of the frightened
+man who believed it sinful to go to mass and saw the dull little English
+Church as light in a pagan darkness; the afternoon alone in the polished
+old salon while the others were packing for the Ardennes tour just
+before the great thunderstorm, bright darkness making everything gleam,
+the candles melting in the heavy heat, drooping from their sconces,
+white, and gracious in their oddity, against the dark panelling: rich
+ancient gloom and gleam and the certainty of the good of mass, of the
+way so welcome and so right as an interval in living it stayed the
+talkative brain and made the soul sure of itself. That moment in
+Bruges—after the wrangling at the station, after not wanting to go
+deliberately to see the Belfry, after feeling forever blank in just this
+place that was fulfilling all the so different other places, showing
+itself to be their centre and secret, while aunt Bella bought the prawns
+and we all stood fuming in the sweltering heat—of being suddenly struck
+alive, drawn running away from them all down the little brown street—the
+Belfry and its shadow, all its might and sweetness and surroundedness,
+safe, before they all came up with their voices and their books.
+
+And oh! that first glimpse that had begun it all, of Brussels in the
+twilight from the landing window; old peaked houses, grouped irregularly
+and rising out of greenery, gothic, bringing happy nostalgia. Gothic
+effects bring nostalgia, have a deep recognisable quality of life. A
+gothic house is a person, a square house is a thing....
+
+In silence and alone; yet most people prefer to see everything in
+groups, collectively. They never lose themselves in strangeness and wake
+changed.
+
+That man is cheerfully bearing burdens. Usually in a party there is one
+who _is_ alone. Harassed, yet quietly seeing.
+
+He was smiling, the smile of an old friend. With a sharp effort she
+pushed her way through, wondering how long she had sat staring at them,
+to recognition of the Croydon party. Who else indeed could it be? She
+gathered herself together and instantly saw in the hidden future not the
+sunlit mountains of her desire but for the first time the people already
+ensconced at the Alpenstock, demanding awareness and at least the
+semblance of interest. Sports-people, not only to the manner born—that,
+though they would not know it, was a tie, a home-tie pulling at her
+heart—but to the manner dressed, making one feel not merely inadequate
+but improperly hard-up. But since she was to live on a balcony? And
+there was the borrowed fur-coat ... and the blue gown.
+
+The words sung out by the Croydon father were lost amongst their echoes
+in the rafters. She heard only the English voice, come, as she had come,
+so far and so laboriously. Her gladly answering words were drowned by
+the sudden jingling of sleighbells at the door near by.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Behind the sturdy horse, whose head-tossings caused the silvery clash of
+bells was the sleigh of _The Polish Jew_, brought out of the darkness at
+the back of the stage and brightly coloured: upon a background of
+pillar-box red, flourishing gilt scrolls surrounded little landscape
+scenes painted upon its sides in brilliant deep tones that seemed to
+spread a warmth and call attention to the warmth within the little
+carriage sitting compact and low on its runners and billowing with a
+large fur rug.
+
+As unexpected as the luxurious vehicle was the changed aspect of the
+driver. Still wearing smock and slouch hat he had now an air of gravity,
+the air of a young student of theology. And on his face as he put her
+into the sleigh was a look of patient responsibility. He packed and
+arranged with the manner of one handling valuables, silently; the Swiss
+manner perhaps of treating the English, acquired and handed down through
+long experience of the lavish generosity of these travellers from whom
+it was useless to expect an intelligible word. But there was contempt
+too; deep-rooted, patient contempt.
+
+This was luxury. There was warmth under her feet, fur lining upon the
+back of the seat reinforced by the thickness of the fur-coat and all
+about her the immense fur rug. There was nothing to fear from the air
+that presently would be in movement, driving by and growing colder as
+the sleigh went up into the unknown heights. Away ahead the Croydon
+party made a compact black mass between the two horses of their larger
+sleigh and the luggage standing out behind in unwieldy cubes just above
+the snow. Their driver was preparing to start. On all the upward way
+they would be visible ahead, stealing its mystery, heralding the hotel
+at the end.
+
+They were off, gliding swiftly over the snow, gay voices mingling with
+the sound of bells, silvery crashings going to the rhythm of a soundless
+trit-trot. Every moment her own horse threw up a spray of tinkles
+promising the fairy crashing that would ring upon the air against the
+one now rapidly receding. The mountains frowning under the grey sky and
+the snowfields beyond the flattened expanse round the station came to
+life, listening to the confidently receding bells.
+
+The Croydon party disappeared round a bend and again there was silence
+and a mighty inattention. But her man, come round from lashing on her
+luggage, was getting into his seat just as he was, coatless and
+gathering up the reins with bare hands.
+
+“Euh!”
+
+The small sound, like a word spoken _sotto voce_ to a neighbour, barely
+broke the stillness, but the sleigh leapt to the pull of the horse, and
+glided smoothly off. Its movement was pure enchantment. No driving on
+earth could compare to this skimming along on hard snow to the note of
+the bells that was higher than that of those gone on ahead and seemed to
+challenge them with an overtaking eagerness. Gay and silvery sweet, it
+seemed to make a sunlight within the sunless air and to call up to the
+crinkled tops of the mountains that were now so magnificently in
+movement.
+
+“Euh-euh!”
+
+On they swept through the solidly impinging air. Again the million
+needles attacking. In a moment they were round the bend and in sight of
+the large sleigh, a moving patch upon the rising road.
+
+“Euh-euh-euh,” urged the driver laconically, and the little sleigh flew
+rocking up the slight incline. They were overtaking. The heavier note of
+the bells ahead joined its slower rhythm to their swift light jinglings.
+The dark mass of the Croydon party showed four white faces turned to
+watch.
+
+“You are well off with your fur-coat,” cried the father as her sleigh
+skimmed by. They had looked a little crouched and enduring. Not knowing
+the cold she had endured in the past, cold that lay ahead to be endured
+again, in winters set in a row.
+
+Ringing in her head as she sped upwards along the road narrowing and
+flanked by massive slopes whose summits had drawn too near to be seen,
+were the shouted remarks exchanged by the drivers. They had fallen
+resonantly upon the air and opened within it a vision of the sunlit
+heights known to these men with the rich deep voices. But there was the
+hotel....
+
+After all no one was to witness her apprenticeship. And to get up within
+sight of the summits was worth much suffering. Suffering that would be
+forgotten. And if these were Oberland men, then there was to be
+_ski-running_ to-morrow. Si-renna, what else could that mean? Patois,
+rich and soft. Doomed to die. Other words gathered unawares on the way
+came and placed themselves beside those ringing in her ears.
+Terminations, turns of sound, upon a new quality of voice. Strong and
+deep and ringing with a wisdom that brought her a sense of helpless
+ignorance. The helpless ignorance of town culture.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+The thin penetrating mist promised increasing cold. The driver flung on
+a cloak, secured at the neck but falling open across his chest and
+leaving exposed his thinly clad arms and bare hands.
+
+She pulled high the collar of her fur-coat, rimy now at its edges, and
+her chin ceased to ache and only her eyes and cheekbones felt the thin
+icy attacking mist that had appeared so suddenly. The cold of a few
+moments ago numbing her face had brought a hint of how one might freeze
+quietly to death, numbed and as if warmed by an intensity of cold; and
+that out amongst the mountains it would not be terrible. But this raw
+mist bringing pain in every bone it touched would send one aching to
+one’s death, crushed to death by a biting increasing pain.
+
+She felt elaborately warm, not caring even now how long might go on this
+swift progress along a track that still wound through corridors of
+mountains and still found mountains rising ahead. But night would come
+and the great shapes all about her would be wrapped away until they were
+a darkness in the sky.
+
+If this greying light were the fall of day then certainly the cold would
+increase. She tried to reckon how far she had travelled eastwards, by
+how much earlier the sun would set. But south, too, she had come....
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+The mist was breaking, being broken from above. It dawned upon her that
+they had been passing impossibly through clouds and were now reaching
+their fringe. Colour was coming from above, was already here in dark
+brilliance, thundery. Turning to look down the track she saw distance,
+cloud masses, light-soaked and gleaming.
+
+And now from just ahead high in the mist, a sunlit peak looked down.
+
+Long after she had sat erect from her warm ensconcement, the sunlit
+mountain corridors still seemed to be saying watch, see, if you can
+believe it, what we can do. And all the time it seemed that they must
+open out and leave her upon the hither side of enchantment, and still
+they turned and brought fresh vistas. Sungilt masses beetling variously
+up into pinnacles that truly cut the sky high up beyond their
+high-clambering pinewoods, where their snow was broken by patches of
+tawny crag. She still longed to glide forever onwards through this
+gladness of light.
+
+But the bright gold was withdrawing. Presently it stood only upon the
+higher ridges. The colour was going and the angular shadows, leaving a
+bleakness of white, leaving the mountains higher in their whiteness. The
+highest sloped more swiftly than the others from its lower mass and
+ended in a long cone of purest white with a flattened top sharply aslant
+against the deepening blue; as if walking up it. It held her eyes, its
+solid thickness of snow, the way from its blunted tower it came
+broadening down unbroken by crag, radiant white until far down its
+pinewoods made a gentleness about its base. Up there on the quiet of its
+topmost angle it seemed there must be someone, minutely rejoicing in its
+line along the sky.
+
+A turn brought peaks whose gold had turned to rose. She had not eyes
+enough for seeing. Seeing was not enough. There was sound, if only one
+could hear it, in this still, signalling light.
+
+The last of it was ruby gathered departing upon the topmost crags,
+seeming, the moment before it left them, to be deeply wrought into the
+crinkled rock.
+
+At a sharp bend the face of the sideways-lounging driver came into
+sight, expressionless.
+
+“_Schön, die letzte Glüh_,” he said quietly.
+
+When she had pronounced her “_Wunderschön_,” she sat back released from
+intentness seeing the scene as one who saw it daily; and noticed then
+that the colour ebbed from the mountains had melted into the sky. It was
+this marvel of colour, turning the sky to molten rainbow, that the
+driver had meant as well as the rubied ridges that had kept the sky
+forgotten.
+
+Just above a collar of snow, that dipped steeply between the peaks it
+linked, the sky was a soft greenish purple paling upwards from
+mauve-green to green whose edges melted imperceptibly into the deepening
+blue. In a moment they were turned towards the opposite sky, bold in
+smoky russet rising to amber and to saffron-rose expanding upwards; a
+high radiant background for its mountain, spread like a banner, not
+pressed dense and close with deeps strangely moving, like the little sky
+above the collar.
+
+The mountain lights were happiness possessed, sure of recurrence. But
+these skies, never to return, begged for remembrance.
+
+The dry cold deepened, bringing sleep. Drunk, she felt now, with sleep;
+dizzy with gazing, and still there was no sign of the end. They were
+climbing a narrow track between a smooth high drift, a greying wall of
+snow, and a precipice sharply falling.
+
+An opening; the floor of a wide valley. Mountains hemming it, exposed
+from base to summit, moving by as the sleigh sped along the level to
+where a fenced road led upwards. Up this steep road they went in a slow
+zig-zag that brought the mountains across the way now right now left,
+and a glimpse ahead against the sky of a village, angles and peaks of
+low buildings sharply etched, quenched by snow, crushed between snow and
+snow, and in their midst the high snow-shrouded cone of a little church;
+Swiss village, lost in wastes of snow.
+
+At a tremendous pace they jingled along a narrow street of shops and
+châlets. The street presently opened to a circle about the little church
+and narrowed again and ended, showing beyond, as the sleigh pulled up at
+the steps of a portico, rising ground and the beginning of pinewoods.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER II
+
+
+She followed the little servant, who had darted forth to seize her
+baggage, into a small lounge whose baking warmth recalled the worst of
+the train journey; seeming—though, since still one breathed, air was
+there—like an over-heated vacuum.
+
+The brisk little maid, untroubled, was already at the top of a short
+flight of wide red-carpeted stairs, and making impatient rallying
+sounds—like one recalling a straying dog. Miriam went gladly to the
+promise of the upper air. But in going upwards there was no relief.
+
+Glancing, as she passed at the turn of the stairs a figure standing in a
+darkness made by the twilight in the angle of the wall, she found the
+proprietress receiving her; a thick rigid figure in a clumsy black
+dress, silent, and with deep-set glinting eyes hostile and suspicious
+stirring a memory of other eyes gazing out like this upon the world, of
+peasant women at cottage doors in German villages, peering out with evil
+eyes, but from worn and kindly faces. There was nothing kindly about
+this woman, and her commonness was almost startling, dreary and meagre
+and seeming to be of the spirit.
+
+She blamed for the unmitigated impression the fatigue she was silently
+pleading whilst she searched for the mislaid German phrases in which to
+explain that she had chosen the cheaper room. She found only the woman’s
+name: Knigge. This was Frau Knigge, at once seeming more human, and
+obviously waiting for her to speak.
+
+Suddenly, and still unbending from her rigid pose, she made statements
+in slow rasping English and a flat voice, that came unwillingly and told
+of vanished interest in life. Life, as she spoke, looked terrible that
+could make a being so crafty and so cold, that could show to anyone on
+earth as it showed to this woman.
+
+Admitting her identity, seeing herself as she was being seen, Miriam
+begged for her room, hurrying through her words to hide the thoughts
+that still they seemed to reveal, and that were changing, as she heard
+the sound of her own voice, dreadfully, not to consideration for one
+whose lot had perhaps been too hard to bear, but to a sudden resentment
+of parleying, in her character as Roman citizen, with this peasant whose
+remoteness of being was so embarrassing her.
+
+The woman’s face lit up with an answering resentment and a mocking
+contempt for her fluent German. Too late she realised that Roman
+citizens do not speak German. But the details were settled, the
+interview was at an end, and the woman’s annoyance due perhaps only to
+the choice of the cheaper room. When she turned to shout instructions to
+the maid she became humanity, in movement, moving in twilight that for
+her too was going on its way towards the light of to-morrow.
+
+When the door was at last blessedly closed upon the narrow room whose
+first statements miscarried, lost in the discovery that even up here
+there was no change in the baked dry air, she made for the cool light of
+the end window but found in its neighbourhood not only no lessening but
+an increase of the oppressive warmth.
+
+The window was a door giving on to a little balcony whose wooden paling
+hid the floor of the valley and the bases of the great mountains across
+the way. The mountains were now bleak white, patched and streaked with
+black, and as she stood still gazing at them set there arrested and
+motionless and holding before her eyes an unthinkable grey bitterness of
+cold, she found a new quality in her fast closed windows and the
+exaggerated warmth. Though still oppressive they were triumphant also,
+speaking a knowledge and a defiance of the uttermost possibilities of
+cold.
+
+Cold was banished, by day and by night. For a fortnight taken from the
+rawest depths of the London winter there would be no waste of life in
+mere endurance.
+
+She discovered the source of the stable warmth in an unsightly row of
+pipes at the side of the large window, bent over like hairpins and
+scorching to the touch. The concentrated heat revived her weary nerves.
+At the end of the coil there was a regulator. Turning it she found the
+heat of the pipes diminish and hurriedly reversed the movement and
+glanced out at the frozen world and loved the staunch metallic warmth
+and the flavour of timber added to it in this room whose walls and
+furniture were all of naked wood.
+
+Turning to it in greeting she found it seem less small. It was small but
+made spacious by light. Light came from a second window that was now
+calling—a small square beside the bed with the high astonishing smooth
+billow of covering oddly encased in thin sprigged cotton—offering
+mountains not yet seen.
+
+The way to it was endless across the short room from whose four quarters
+there streamed, as she moved, a joy so deep that she brought up opposite
+the window as if on another day of life and glanced out carelessly at a
+distant group of pinnacles darkening in a twilight that was not grey but
+lit wanly in its fading, by snow.
+
+The little servant came in with the promised tea and made, as she set it
+upon the little table with the red and white check cover of remembered
+German cafés, bent over it in her short-skirted check dress and squab of
+sleek flaxen hair, a picture altogether German. She answered questions
+gravely, responsibility speaking even in the smile that shone from her
+plump toil-sheened young face, telling the story of how she and her
+like, permanently toiling, were the price of happiness for visitors. But
+this she did not know. She was happy. Liked being busy and smiling and
+being smiled at and shutting the door very carefully.
+
+Some movement of hers had set swinging an electric bulb hanging by a
+cord above the little table. Over the head of the bed there was another.
+Light and warmth in profusion—in a cheap room in a modest hotel.
+
+Switching on the light that concentrated on the table and its loaded
+little tray and transformed the room to a sitting-room, “I’m in
+Switzerland,” she said aloud to the flowered earthenware and bright
+nickel, and sat down to revel in freedom and renewal and at once got up
+again realising that hurry had gone from her days and flung off her
+blouse and found hot water set waiting on the washstand and was
+presently at the table in négligé and again ecstatically telling it her
+news.
+
+The familiar sound of tea pouring into a cup heightened the surrounding
+strangeness. In the stillness of the room it was like a voice announcing
+her installation, and immediately from downstairs there came as if in
+answer the sound of a piano, crisply and gently touched, seeming not so
+much to break the stillness as to reveal what lay within it.
+
+She set down her teapot and listened and for a moment could have
+believed that the theme was playing itself only in her mind, that it had
+come back to her because once again she was within the strange happiness
+of being abroad. Through all the years she had tried in vain to recall
+it, and now it came, to welcome her, piling joy on joy, setting its seal
+upon the days ahead and taking her back to her Germany where life had
+been lived to music that had flowed over its miseries and made its
+happinesses hardly to be borne.
+
+For an instant she was back in it, passing swiftly from scene to scene
+of the months in Waldstrasse and coming to rest in a summer’s evening:
+warm light upon the garden, twilight in the saal. Leaving it she turned
+to the other scenes, freshly revived, faithfully fulfilling their
+remembered promise to endure in her forever, but each one as she paused
+in it changed to the summer’s evening she had watched from the darkening
+saal, the light upon the little high-walled garden, making space and
+distance with the different ways it fell on trees and grass and
+clustering shrubs, falling full on the hushed group of girls turned
+towards it with Fräulein Pfaff in their midst disarmed to equality by
+the surrounding beauty, making a little darkness in the summer-house
+where Solomon shone in her white dress. And going back to it now it
+seemed as though some part of her must have lived continuously there so
+that she was everywhere at once, in saal and garden and summer-house and
+out, beyond the enclosing walls, in the light along the spacious
+forbidden streets.
+
+She relived the first moment of knowing gladly and without feeling of
+disloyalty how far a Sommerabend outdoes a summer’s evening, how the
+evening beauty was intensified by the deeps of poetry in the Germans all
+about her, and remembered her fear lest one of the English should sound
+an English voice and break the spell. And how presently Clara Bergmann,
+unasked, had retreated into the shadowy saal and played this ballade and
+in just this way, the way of slipping it into the stillness.
+
+“_Man soll sich des Lebens freuen, im Berg und Thal. In so was kann sich
+ein’ Engländerin nie hineinleben._”
+
+Perhaps not, but in that small group of English there had been two who
+would in spite of homesickness have given anything just to go on, on any
+terms, existing in Germany.
+
+It is their joy; the joyful rich depth of life in them.
+
+And this ballade was joy. Eternal Sommerabend; and now to-morrow’s Swiss
+sunlight. Someone there was downstairs to whom it was a known and
+cherished thing, who was perhaps wise about it, wise in music and able
+to place it in relation to other compositions.
+
+Its charm she now saw, coming to it afresh and with a deepened
+recognition, lay partly in the way it opened: not beginning, but
+continuing something gone before. It was a shape of tones caught from a
+pattern woven continuously and drawn, with its rhythm ready set,
+gleaming into sight. The way of the best nocturnes. But with nothing of
+their pensiveness. It danced in the sky and tiptoed back to earth down
+the group of little chords that filled the pause, again sprang forth and
+up and came wreathing down to touch deep lower tones who flung it to and
+fro. Up again until once more upon down-stepping chords it came into the
+rhythm of its dance.
+
+It was being played from memory, imperfectly, by someone who had the
+whole clear within him and in slowing up for the complicated passages
+never stumbled or lost the rhythm or ceased to listen. Someone choosing
+just this fragment of all the music in the world to express his state:
+joy in being up here in snow and sunlight.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+When the gown was on, the creasing was more evident; all but the
+enlivening strange harmony of embroidered blues and greens and mauves
+was a criss-cross of sharp lines and shadows.
+
+For the second time the long loud buzzing of the downstairs bell
+vibrated its summons through the house.
+
+Standing once more before the little mirror that reflected only her head
+and shoulders she recreated the gown in its perfection of cut, the soft
+depths of its material that hung and took the light so beautifully.
+
+“Your first Switzerland must be good. I want your first Switzerland to
+be good.” And then, in place of illuminating hints, that little diagram
+on the table: of life as a zig-zag. Saddening. Perhaps he was right.
+Then, since the beginning had been so good, all a sharp zig, what now
+waited downstairs, heralded by the creased dress, was a zag, equally
+sharp.
+
+The dining-room, low ceiled and oblong, was large and seemed almost
+empty. Small tables set away towards a window on the right and only one
+of them occupied, left clear the large space of floor between the door
+at which she had come in and a table, filling the length of the far side
+of the room where beside a gap in the row of diners a servant stood
+turned towards her with outstretched indicating hand.
+
+No one but the servant had noticed her entry. Voices were sounding,
+smooth easy tones leaving the air composed, as she slipped into her
+place in a light that beside the unscreened glare upstairs was mellow,
+subdued by shades. The voices were a man’s across the way—light and
+kindly, ’Varsity, the smiling tone of one who is amiable even in
+disagreement—and that of the woman on her left, a subdued deep bass.
+Other voices dropped in, as suave and easy, and clipping and slurring
+their words in the same way; but rather less poised.
+
+The tone of these people was balm. Sitting with eyes cast down aware
+only of the subdued golden light, she recalled her fleeting glimpse of
+them as she had crossed the room, English in daily evening dress, and
+was carried back to the little world of Newlands where first she had
+daily shared the evening festival of diners dressed and suave about a
+table free of dishes, set with flowers and elegancies beneath a clear
+and softly shaded light: the world she had sworn never to leave. She
+remembered a summer morning, the brightness of the light over her
+breakfast tray and its unopened letters and her vow to remain always
+surrounded by beauty, always with flowers and fine fabrics, and space
+and a fresh clean air always close about her, playing their part that
+was so powerful.
+
+And this little wooden Swiss hotel with its baked air and philistine
+fittings was to provide thrown in with Switzerland, more than a
+continuation of Newlands—Newlands seen afresh with experienced eyes.
+
+The clipped, slurred words had no longer the charm of a foreign tongue.
+Though still they rang upon the air the preoccupations of the man at the
+wheel: the sound of “The Services” adapted. But clustered in this small
+space they seemed to be bringing with them another account of their
+origin, to be showing how they might come about of themselves and vary
+from group to group, from person to person—with one aim: to avoid
+disturbing the repose of the features. Expression might be animated or
+inanimate, but features must remain undisturbed.
+
+Then there is no place for clearly enunciated speech apart from oratory;
+platform and pulpit. Anywhere else it is bad form. Bad fawm.
+
+She felt she knew now why perfect speech, delightful in itself, always
+seemed insincere. Why women with clear musical voices undulating, and
+clean enunciation, are always cats; and the corresponding men,
+ingratiating and charming at first, turn out sooner or later to be
+charlatans.
+
+The nicest people have bad handwriting and bad delivery.
+
+But all this applied only to English, to Germanics; that was a queer
+exciting thing, that only these languages had the quality of aggressive
+disturbance of the speaking face: chin-jerking vowels and aspirates,
+throat-swelling gutturals ... force and strength and richness, qualities
+innumerable and more various than in any other language.
+
+Quelling an impulse to gaze at the speakers lit by discovery, she gazed
+instead at imagined faces, representative Englishmen, with eyes and
+brows serene above rapid slipshod speech.
+
+Here too of course was the explanation of the other spontaneous forms of
+garbling, the extraordinary pulpit speech of self-conscious and
+incompletely believing parsons, and the mincing speech of the genteel.
+It explained “nace.” Nice, correctly spoken, is a convulsion of the
+lower face—like a dog snapping at a gnat.
+
+She had a sudden vision of the English aspirate, all over the world,
+puff-puff-puffing like a steam-engine, and was wondering whether it were
+a waste or a source of energy, when she became acutely aware of being
+for those about her a fresh item in their grouping.
+
+It was a burden too heavy to be borne. The good Swiss soup had turned
+her bright fever of fatigue to a drowsiness that made every effort to
+sit decently upright end in a renewed abject drooping that if only she
+were alone could be the happy drooping of convalescence from the
+journey.
+
+Their talk had gone on. It was certain that always they would talk.
+Archipelagoes of talk, avoiding anything that could endanger continuous
+urbanity.
+
+In the midst of a stifled yawn the call to a fortnight’s continuous
+urbanity fell upon her like a whip. Dodging the blow she lolled
+resistant to the sound of bland voices. An onlooker, appreciative but
+resistant; that, socially, would be the story of her stay. A docile
+excursion, even if they should offer it, into this select little world,
+would come between her and her Switzerland. Refusal clamoured within her
+and it was only as an after-thought that she realised the impossibility
+of remaining for a fortnight without opinions.
+
+The next moment, hearing again the interwoven voices as a far-off unison
+of people sailing secure on smooth accustomed waters, she was bleakly
+lonely; suppliant. Nothing showed ahead but a return with her fatigue to
+sustain the silence and emptiness of a strange room. She was turning to
+glance at the woman on her left when the deep bass voice asked her
+casually if she had had a good journey. Casual cameraderie, as if
+already they had been talking and were now hiding an established
+relationship under conventionalities.
+
+The moment she had answered she heard the university voice across the
+way remark, in the tone of one exchanging notes with a friend after a
+day’s absence, that it was a vile journey, but all right from Berne
+onwards, and looked up. There he was, almost opposite, Cambridge, and
+either history or classics, the pleasant radiance of _lit. hum._ all
+about him, and turned her way bent a little, as if bowing, and as if
+waiting for her acknowledgment—with his smile, apology introduction and
+greeting beaming together from sea-blue eyes set only ever so little too
+closely together in a neatly tanned narrowly oval face—before regaining
+the upright.
+
+Her soft reply, lost in other sounds, made a long moment during which,
+undisturbed by not hearing, he held his attitude of listening that told
+her he was glad of her presence.
+
+The close-set eyes meant neither weakness nor deceit. Sectarian eyes,
+emancipated. But his strength was borrowed. His mental strength was not
+original. An uninteresting mind; also he was a little selfish, with the
+selfishness of the bachelor of thirty—but charming.
+
+The party was smaller than she had thought. The odd way they were all
+drawn up at one end of the table made them look numerous. Spread out in
+the English way they would have made a solemn dinner-party, with large
+cold gaps.
+
+Someone asked whether she had come right through and in a moment they
+were all amiably wrangling over the pros and cons of breaking the
+journey.
+
+Staring from across the table was a man alone, big oblong foreigner
+dwarfing his neighbours, and piteous, not to be looked at as the others
+could who fitted the scene; not so much sitting at table with the rest
+as set there filling a space. His eyes had turned towards a nasal voice
+suddenly prevailing; sombre brown, wistfully sulking below eyebrows
+lifted in a wide forehead that stopped unexpectedly soon at a straight
+fence of hair. Oblong beard reaching the top of stiff brown coat.
+Russian, probably the Chopin player.
+
+“Anyone’s a fool who passes Parrus without stopping off at least a few
+hours.”
+
+A small man at the end of the row, opaque blue eyes in a peaky face,
+little peaked beard, neat close-fitting dress clothes. Incongruous
+far-travelled guest of little Switzerland.
+
+He was next the window, with the nice man on his right. Then came the
+big Russian exactly opposite and again naïvely staring across, and
+beyond him a tall lady in a home-made silk blouse united by a fichu to
+the beginning of a dark skirt; coronet of soft, coiled white hair above
+a firmly padded face with polished skin, pink-flushed, glimmering into
+the talk, that was now a debate about to-morrow’s chances, into which
+sounded women’s voices from the table behind, smooth and clear, but
+clipped, free-masonish like the others. To the right of the coronetted
+lady an iron-grey man, her husband, gaunt and worn, with peevishly
+suffering eyes set towards the door on the far side of the room.
+Fastidious eyes, full of knowledge, turned away. He was the last in the
+row and beyond him the table stretched away to the end wall through
+whose door the servants came and went. His opponents were out of sight
+beyond the bass-voiced woman on the left, whose effect was so strangely
+large and small: a face horse-like and delicate, and below her length of
+face increased by the pyramid of hair above her pointed fringe, a
+meeting of old lace and good jewellery.
+
+To her own right the firm insensitive hand, that wore a signet ring and
+made pellets of its bread, belonged to just the man she had imagined,
+dark and liverish, but with an unexpectedly flattened profile whose
+moustache, dropping to sharp points, gave it an expression faintly
+Chinese; a man domestic but accustomed to expand in unrestricted
+statement, impatiently in leash to the surrounding equality of exchange.
+Beyond him his wife, sitting rather eagerly forward, fair and plump,
+with features grown expressionless in their long service of holding back
+her thoughts, but, betraying their secret in a brow, creased faintly by
+straining upwards as if in perpetual incredulity of an ever-present
+spectacle, and become now the open page of the story the mouth and eyes
+were not allowed to tell.
+
+At her side a further figure and beyond it the head of the table
+unoccupied, leaving the party to be its own host.
+
+The atmosphere incommoding the husband, who at a second glance seemed to
+call even pathetically for articulate opposition, was that of a
+successful house-party, its tone set by the only two in sight who were
+through and through of the authentic brand: the deep-voiced woman and
+the nice man. The invalid and his wife belonged to that inner circle.
+But they were a little shadowed by his malady.
+
+It was an atmosphere in which the American and the Russian were ill at
+ease, one an impatient watchfulness for simpler, more lively behaviour
+and the other a bored detachment, heavily anchored, not so much by
+thoughts as by hard clear images left by things seen according to the
+current formula of whatever group of the European intelligentsia he
+belonged to.
+
+He was speaking softly through the general conversation to the nice man,
+with slight deprecating gestures of eyebrows and shoulders, in his eyes
+a qualified gratitude. The nice man spoke carefully with head turned and
+bent, seeking his words. French, with English intonation. All these
+people, however fluently, would talk like that. All of them came from a
+world that counted mastery of a foreign tongue both wonderful and
+admirable—but ever so little _infra dig_.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+“Won’t you come in heah for a bit?”
+
+Drugged as she felt with weariness she turned joyfully into a room
+opening in the background of the hall whence the deep bass voice had
+sounded as she passed. A tiny salon, ugly; maroon and buff in a thick
+light. Plush sofa, plush cover on the round table in the centre, stiff
+buff-seated “drawing-room” chairs; a piano. It was from this dismal
+little room the Chopin had sounded out into the twilight.
+
+There she was, alone, standing very thin and tall in a good, rather
+drearily elderly black dress beside a cheerless radiator, one elbow
+resting on its rim and a slender foot held towards it from beneath the
+hem of a slightly hitched skirt: an Englishwoman at a fireside.
+
+“My name’s Harcourt, M’zz Harcourt,” she said at once.
+
+Books were set star-wise in small graded piles about the centre of the
+table, the uppermost carrying upon their covers scrolls and garlands of
+untarnished gilt. The one she opened revealed short-lined poems set
+within yet more garlands, appealing; leaves and buds and birds lively
+and sweet about the jingling verse. Swiss joy in deep quiet valleys
+guarded by sunlit mountains. Joy of people living in beauty all their
+lives; enclosed. Yet making rooms like this.
+
+But it held the woman at the radiator, knowing England and her sea, and
+whose smile looking up she met, watching, indulgent of her détour and,
+as too eagerly she moved forward, indulgent also of that. Here, if she
+would, was a friend, and, although middle-aged, a contemporary
+self-confessed by a note in her voice of impatience over waste of time
+in preliminaries.
+
+But Mrs. Harcourt did not know how nimbly she could move, might think it
+strange when presently her voice must betray that she was already
+rejoicing—defying the note of warning that sounded far away within
+her—in a well-known presence, singing recklessly to it the song of new
+joy and life begun anew that all the way from England had been gathering
+within her.
+
+The announcement of her own name made the woman again a stranger, so
+much was she a stranger to the life belonging to the name, and brought
+into sudden prominence the state of her gown, exposed now in its full
+length. She recounted the tragedy and saw Mrs. Harcourt’s smile change
+to real concern.
+
+Here they were, alone together, seeming to have leapt rather than passed
+through the early stages.
+
+Like love, but unobstructed. A balance of side-by-side, not of
+opposition. More open than love, yet as hidden and wonderful; rising
+from the same depth.
+
+“Hold it in front of the waydiator. Vat’ll take ’em out a bit. Such a
+poo’hy gown.” She moved a little back from the row of pipes.
+
+Going close to the radiator Miriam moved into a fathomless gentleness.
+
+But it was also a demand, so powerful that it was drawing all her being
+to a point. All that she had brought with her into the room would be
+absorbed and scattered, leaving her robbed of things not yet fully her
+own.
+
+The warning voice within was crying aloud now, urging her not only to
+escape before the treasures of arrival and of strangeness were lost
+beyond recovery, but to save also the past, disappeared round the corner
+yet not out of sight but drawn closely together in the distance, a
+swiftly moving adventure, lit from point to point by the light in which
+to-day she had bathed forgetful.
+
+Even a little talk, a little answering of questions, would falsify the
+past. Set in her own and in this woman’s mind in a mould of verbal
+summarisings it would hamper and stain the brightness of to-morrow.
+
+She found herself hardening, seeking generalisations that would cool and
+alienate, and was besieged by memories of women whom she had thus
+escaped. And of their swift revenge. But this woman was not of those who
+avenge themselves.
+
+Hesitating before the sound of her own voice, or the other which would
+sound if this second’s silence were prolonged, she was seized by revolt:
+the determination at all costs to avoid hearing in advance, in idle
+words above the ceaseless intercourse of their spirits, about Oberland;
+even from one whose seeing might leave her own untouched.
+
+To open the way for flight she remarked that it must be late.
+
+“About nine. You’re dead beat, I can see. Ought to go to bed.”
+
+“Not for worlds,” said Miriam involuntarily.
+
+Mrs. Harcourt’s face, immediately alight for speech, expressed as she
+once more took possession of the radiator and looked down at it as into
+a fire, willingness to stand indefinitely by.
+
+“Everyone’s gone to bed. Bein’ out all day in vis air makes you sleepy
+at night.”
+
+Remembering that of course she would speak without gaps, Miriam glanced
+at the possibility of pulling herself together for conversation.
+
+“I been pottering. My ski are at Zurbuchen’s bein’ repaired.”
+
+“But what a _perfect_ Swiss name. Like oak, like well-baked bread.”
+
+To get away now. Sufficient impression of the Alpenstock people
+perpetually strenuous, living for sport, and, redeeming its angularity,
+the rich Swiss background: Zurbuchen. But Mrs. Harcourt’s glance of
+surprised delight—there was amusement too, she didn’t think Swiss names
+worth considering—meant that she was entertained, anticipating further
+entertainment; to which she would not contribute.
+
+“No. I’m supposed to sit about and rest. Overwork.”
+
+“You won’t. Lots of people come out like vat. You’ll soon find resting a
+baw out heah.”
+
+“Should like a little sleep. I’ve had none for two nights.”
+
+“Stop in bed to-morrow. Have your meals up.”
+
+“Mm....”
+
+For a moment Mrs. Harcourt waited, silent, not making the movement of
+departure that would presently bring down the shadow of returning
+loneliness her words had drawn so near; keeping her leaning pose, her
+air of being indefinitely available.
+
+The deep bell of her voice dropped from its soft single note to a murmur
+rising and falling, a low narrative tone, hurrying.
+
+Through the sound still coming and going in her mind of the name Mrs.
+Harcourt had so casually spoken, bringing with it the sunlit mountains
+and the outer air waiting in to-morrow, Miriam heard that the people at
+the Alpenstock were all right—with the exception of the two sitting at
+dinner on Mrs. Harcourt’s left, “outsiders” of a kind now appearing in
+Oberland for the first time. Saddened by their exclusion, embarrassed by
+unconscious flattery, Miriam impulsively asked their name and glowed
+with a sudden vision of Mrs. Corrie, of how she would have embraced this
+opportunity for wicked mondaine wit. Mrs. Harcourt, for a moment
+obediently reflecting, said she had forgotten it but that it was
+somefing raver fwightful. Everyone else, introduced by name, received a
+few words of commendation—excepting the Russian and the American. The
+Russian would be just a foreigner, an unfortunate, but the American
+surely must be an outsider? Insincerely, as if in agreement with this
+division of humanity by exclusion, she put in a question, and while Mrs.
+Harcourt pulled up her discourse to say, as if sufficiently, that he was
+staying only a couple of days and passed on to summon other hotels to
+the tribunal, she was glad that the Russian had been left untouched.
+Harry Vereker, fine, a first-class sportsman and altogether nice chap,
+was already lessened, domesticated, general property in his niceness;
+but the Russian remained, wistfully alone: attractive.
+
+“.... hidjus big hotel only just built; all glass and glare. It’ll be
+the ruin of Oberland. No one’ll come here next year.”
+
+Though still immersed in her theme Mrs. Harcourt was aware, when next
+she glanced to punctuate a statement, if not exactly that instead of the
+object she offered it was herself and her glance that was being seen—the
+curious steeliness of its indignation—at least of divided attention, a
+sudden breach in their collaboration; and immediately she came to the
+surface, passing without pause to her full bell note, with an enquiry.
+Hoping to please. But why hoping to please?
+
+This abrupt stowing away of her chosen material might be a simple
+following of the rules of her world; it suggested also the humouring of
+a patient by a watchful nurse, and since she had the advantage of not
+being in the depths of fatigue this perhaps was its explanation; but
+much more clearly it spoke her years of marriage, of dealing with
+masculine selfishness. And she was so swift, so repentant of her long,
+enjoyable excursion, that it was clear she had suffered masculine
+selfishness gladly. Neither understanding nor condemning. It had not
+damaged her love and she had suffered bitterly when it was removed.
+
+Suffering was pleading now in her eyes off their guard in this
+to-and-fro of remarks that was a little shocking: the reverberation of a
+disaster.
+
+Now that it was clear that her charming behaviour from the first might
+be explained by the attraction there was for her in a mannish mental
+hardness, that she sought in its callousness both something it could
+never give, as well as entertainment, and rest from perpetual feeling,
+she ceased to be interesting. She herself made it so clear that she had
+nothing to give. Offering her best help, what in the way of her world
+would be most useful to one newly arrived, she was yet suppliant; and
+afraid of failure, haunted by the fear of a failure she did not
+understand and that was perhaps uniform in her experience.
+
+Miriam found her own voice growing heavy with the embarrassment of her
+discoveries and her longing to break this so eagerly woven entanglement.
+Trying again for cooling generalities she had the sense of pouring words
+into a void. The gentle presence hovered there, played its part,
+followed, answered, but without sharing the effort to swim into the
+refreshing tide of impersonality; without seeing the independent light
+on the scraps of reality she was being offered. No wonder perhaps: they
+were a little breathless. She was scenting apology and retreat. And did
+not know that it was retreat not at all from herself, but from her
+terrible alacrity and transparence: the way the whole of her was at once
+visible. All her thoughts, her way of thinking in words, in set phrases
+gathered from too enclosed an experience. Enclosed. To be with her was
+enclosure. The earlier feeling of being encompassed that was so welcome
+because it was so womanly, so exactly what a man needs in its character
+of kindly confessor and giver of absolution in advance, had lost value
+before the discovery of this absence of vistas, this frightful sense of
+being shut in with assumptions about life that admit of no question and
+no modification.
+
+Again the dead husband intruded; his years of life at this woman’s side,
+his first adoration of her, and then his weariness, fury of weariness
+whose beginnings she felt herself already tasting, so that for sheer
+pity she was kept in her place, effusive, unable to go.
+
+But at the moment of parting Mrs. Harcourt became again that one who had
+waited, impatient of wasting time in formalities. Her smile glanced out
+from the past, revealing the light upon her earlier days. It was a
+greeting for to-morrow rather than a good-night.
+
+Going up to the little bedroom that was now merely a refuge off-stage,
+she found it brightly lit in readiness for her coming, summery bright
+all over, the light curtains drawn and joining with the unvarnished wood
+to make an enclosure that seemed to emulate the brightness of the Swiss
+daylight. The extravagant illumination, the absence of glooms and
+shadows, recalled the outdoor scene and something of this afternoon’s
+bliss of arrival and the joy that had followed it, when music sounded up
+through the house, of home-coming from long exile. Switzerland waited
+outside—enriched by her successful début—with its promise that could not
+fail. Meanwhile there was the unfamiliar enchantment of moving
+comfortably in a warm bedroom, not having the wealth one brought
+upstairs instantly dispersed by the attack of cold and gloom. The
+temperature was lower than before, pleasant, no longer oppressive; and
+more hospitable than a fire whose glow was saddened by the certainty
+that in the morning it would be an ashy desolation.
+
+The moment the basket chair received her the downstairs world was about
+her again; circling, clamorous with the incidents of her passage from
+lonely exposure to the shelter of Mrs. Harcourt’s so swiftly offered
+wing, from beneath which, with its owner assured of the hardness of what
+it sheltered, she could move freely forth in any direction.
+
+The two Le Mesras—that was her pronunciation of Le Mesurier?—Three
+Chators. Mrs. Sneyde and Maud Something at the little table behind ...
+Hollebone. Maud Hollebone. The American, leaving. Interest hesitated
+between Harry Vereker already a little diminished, and the Russian: the
+reincarnated, attractive, ultimately unsatisfactory Tansley Street
+foreigner?
+
+Someone was tapping at the door. She opened it upon Mrs. Harcourt
+offering a small tray, transformed to motherliness by a voluminous
+dressing-gown.
+
+When she had gone she vanished utterly. There she was, actually in the
+next room, yet utterly forgettable. And yet she threw across the days
+ahead a strange deep light.
+
+The steaming chocolate and the little English biscuits disappeared too
+quickly, leaving hunger.
+
+The French window was made fast by a right-angle hand-piece, very stiff,
+that gave suddenly with a dreadfully audible clang. The door creaked
+open. Racing the advancing air she was beneath the downy billow before
+it reached her. It took her fevered face with its batallions of needles,
+stole up her nostrils to her brain, bore her down into the uttermost
+depths of sleep.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER III
+
+
+From which she awoke in light that seemed for a moment to be beyond the
+confines of earth. It was as if all her life she had travelled towards
+this radiance, and was now within it, clear of the past, at an ultimate
+destination.
+
+How long had it been there, quizzically patient, waiting for her to be
+aware of it?
+
+It was sound, that had wakened her and ceased now that she was looking
+and listening; become the inaudible edge of a sound infinitely far away.
+Brilliant light, urgently describing the outdoor scene. But she was
+unwilling to stir and break the radiant stillness.
+
+Close at hand a bell buzzed sharply. Another, and then a third far away
+down the corridor. People ringing their day into existence, free to ring
+their day into existence when they pleased. She was one of them; and for
+to-day she would wait awhile, give the bell-ringers time to be up and
+gone down to breakfast while she kept intact within this miracle of
+light the days ahead that with the sounding of her own bell would be
+already in process of spending.
+
+But perhaps there was a time-limit for breakfasts?
+
+Screwing round to locate the bell with the minimum of movement she
+paused in sheer surprise of well-being. Of the shattering journey there
+was not a trace. Nor of the morning weariness following social
+excitements.
+
+Sitting up to search more effectually she saw the source of her
+wakening, bright gold upon the mountain tops: a smiling challenge, as
+if, having put on their morning gold, the mountains watched its effect
+upon the onlookers.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+She was glad to be alone on the scene of last night’s dinner-party; to
+be in the company of the other breakfasters represented only by depleted
+butter-dishes and gaps in the piles of rolls, and free from the risk of
+hearing the opening day fretted by voices set going like incantations to
+exorcise the present as if it had no value, as if the speakers were not
+living in it but only in yesterday or to-morrow.
+
+And when there came a warning swift clumping of hob-nailed boots across
+the hall, across the room, she demanded Vereker, oddly certain that even
+at this late hour still somehow it would contrive to be he.
+
+And there he was, lightly clumping round the table-end to his place,
+into which he slipped smiling his greeting, boyishly. Not at all in the
+self-conscious Englishman’s manner of getting himself seated when others
+are already in their places: bent, just before sitting down, forward
+from the waist and in that pose—hitching his trousers the
+while—distributing his greetings, and so letting himself down into his
+chair either with immediate speech or a simulated air of preoccupation.
+Vereker flopped and beamed at the same moment, unfeignedly pleased to
+arrive. Knickerbockers; but that was not the whole difference. He was
+always unfeignedly pleased to arrive?
+
+He began at once collecting food and spoke with gentle suddenness into a
+butter-dish:
+
+“I hope you had a good night?”
+
+His talk made a little symphony with his movements which also were
+conversational, and he looked across each time he spoke, but only on the
+last word; a swift blue beam. In the morning light he seemed
+younger—perhaps a champion ski-er at the end of his day is as tired as a
+hard-worked navvy?—and a certain air of happy gravity and the very fair
+curly hair shining round its edges from recent splashings, gave him, in
+his very white, very woolly sweater, something of the look of a newly
+bathed babe in its matinée jacket—in spite of the stern presence, above
+the rolled top of his sweater, of an inch of stiff linen collar highly
+glazed.
+
+He was of a type and of a class, and also, in a way not quite clear, a
+tempered, thoroughly live human being; something more in him than fine
+sportsman and nice fellow, giving him weight. Presently she found its
+marks: a pleat between the brows and, far away within his eyes even when
+they smiled, a sadness; that sounded too in his cheerful voice, a
+puzzled, perpetual compassion.
+
+For the world? For himself?
+
+But these back premises were touched with sunlight. Some sense of things
+he had within him that made him utterly _kind_.
+
+“Isn’t it extraordinary,” she said, hoping to hide the fact that she had
+missed his last remark, “the way these people leave the lights switched
+on all the time, everywhere.”
+
+“Cheap electricity,” he said as if in parenthesis, and as if
+apologetically reminding her of what she already knew—“Water power. They
+pay a rate and use as much as they like.”
+
+In all his answers there was this manner of apologising for giving
+information. And his talk, even the perfect little story of the local
+barber and the newspapers, which he told at top pace as if grudging the
+moment it wasted, was like a shorthand annotation to essential unspoken
+things, shared interests and opinions taken for granted. Talking with
+him she no longer felt as she had done last night either that she was at
+a private view of an exclusive exhibition, or gathering fresh light on
+social problems. There was in him something unbounded, that enhanced the
+light reflected into the room from the sunlit snow. His affectionate
+allusion to his Cambridge brought to her mind complete in all its
+parts—together with gratitude for the peace he gave in which things
+could expand unhindered—her own so sparse possession: her week-ends
+there with the cousins, their blinkered, comfort-loving academic
+friends, the strange sense of at once creeping back into security and
+realising how far she had come away from it; their kindnesses, their
+secret hope of settling her for life in their enclosed world, and their
+vain efforts to mould her to its ways; and then the end, the growing
+engrossments in London breaking the link that held her to them and to
+the past they embodied—and Cambridge left lit by their sweet
+hospitality, by the light streaming on Sunday afternoons through King’s
+Chapel windows; the Backs in sunlight, and a memory of the halting
+little chime.
+
+When she told him of the things that Cambridge had left with her, she
+paused just in time to escape adding to them the gait of the
+undergraduates: the slovenly stride whose each footfall sent the chin
+forward with a hen-like jerk.
+
+He agreed at once with her choice, but hesitated over the little chime.
+
+“It might have been a new church. I never saw it. But if you had once
+heard it you _couldn’t_ forget it.”
+
+It was absurd to be holding to her solitary chime in face of his four
+years’ residence. But it seemed now desperately important to state
+exactly the quality she had felt and never put into words. She sat
+listening—aware of him waiting in a sympathetic stillness—to each note
+as it sounded out into the sky above the town, making it no longer
+Cambridge but a dream-city, subduing the graceless modern bricks and
+mortar to harmony with the ancient beauty of the colleges—until the
+whole was a loveliness beneath the evening sky—and presently found
+herself speaking with reckless enthusiasm.
+
+“_Don’t_ you remember the four little gentle tuneless phrases, of six
+and seven notes alternately, one for each quarter, and at the hour
+sounding one after the other with a little pause between each, seeming
+to ask you to look at what it saw, at the various life of the town made
+suddenly wonderful and strange; and the last phrase, beginning with a
+small high note that tapped the sky, and wandering down to the level and
+stopping without emphasis, leaving everything at peace and very
+beautiful.”
+
+“I think I _can’t_ have heard it,” he said wistfully and sat
+contemplative in a little pause during which it occurred to her,
+becoming aware of the two of them talking on and on into the morning
+that it rested with her to wind up the sitting; that he might perhaps,
+if not quite immediately, yet in intention be waiting for her to rise
+and spare him the apparent discourtesy of pleading an engagement. Even
+failing the engagement they could not sit here forever, and the
+convention of his world demanded that she should be the first to go.
+
+She had just time to note coming from far away within herself a defiance
+that would sooner inflict upon him the discomfort of breaking the rule
+than upon herself the annoyance of moving at its bidding, when he looked
+across and said with the bowing attitude he had held last night as he
+spoke and waited for her to become aware of him: “May I put you up for
+the ski-club?”
+
+It was, of course, his business to cultivate new people, and, if they
+seemed suitable, to collect them....
+
+She smiled acknowledgment and insincerely pleaded the shortness of her
+stay. All she could do, short of blurting out her poverty which he
+seemed not to have seen.
+
+But a fortnight was, he declared, the ideal time: time to learn and to
+get on well enough to want to come out again next year; and hurried on
+to promise a fellow sufferer, a friend coming up, for only a few days,
+from the South, who would be set immediately to work and on whose
+account he was committed to-day to trek down to the station.
+
+“We were,” he said, for the first time looking across almost before he
+spoke, and with the manner now of making a direct important
+communication, “at Cambridge together.”
+
+A valued friend, being introduced, recommended, put before himself.
+Warmth crept into his voice, and lively emphasis—compressed into a small
+note of distress. That note was his social utmost, for gravity and for
+joy; recalling Selina Holland—when she was deeply moved: a wailing tone,
+deprecating, but in his tone was more wistfulness, a suggestion too of
+anxiety. It had begun when he spoke of Pater’s Renaissance Studies, but
+had then merely sounded into the golden light, intensifying it. Now it
+seemed to flout the light, flout everything but his desire to express
+the absent friend.
+
+“That was some years ago. Since then he has been a very busy man, saying
+to this one go and he goeth ...” He smiled across as if asking her to
+share the strangeness of his friend’s metamorphosis.
+
+“You’ve not seen him since?”
+
+“Not since he bought his land.”
+
+“He’s a landowner,” she said, and fell into sadness.
+
+“He is indeed, on quite a big scale, and a very hardworking one.”
+
+“A farmer,” murmured Miriam, “that’s not so bad.”
+
+“It’s very arduous. He is always at his post. Never takes a holiday. For
+three winters I’ve tried to get him up here for a week.”
+
+“Absolute property in land,” she said to the sunlit snow, “is a crime.”
+
+Before her, side by side with a vision of Rent as a clutching monster
+astride upon civilisation, was a picture of herself, suddenly hitting
+out at these pleasant people, all, no doubt, landowners. It was only
+because the friend had been presented to her in the distance and with as
+it were all his land on his back that this one article of the Lycurgan
+faith of which she had no doubt, had at all reared itself in her mind.
+And as it came, dictating her words while she stood by counting the
+probable cost and wondering too over the great gulf between one’s most
+cherished opinions about life and one’s sense of life as it presents
+itself piecemeal embodied in people, she heard with relief his unchanged
+voice:
+
+“Oh, please tell me why?”
+
+And turned to see him flushed, smiling, pardoning her lapse, apologising
+for pardoning it, and altogether interested.
+
+“It’s a whole immense subject and I’m not a specialist. But the theory
+of Rent has been worked out by those who are, by people sincerely trying
+to discover where it is that temporarily useful parts of the machinery
+of civilisation have got out of gear and become harmful. _No_ one ought
+to have to pay for the right to sit down on the earth. _No_ one ought to
+be so helplessly expropriated that another can _buy_ him and use him up
+as he would never dream of using up more costly material—horses for
+instance.”
+
+“You are a socialist?”
+
+Into her answer came the sound of a child’s voice in plaintive
+recitative approaching from the hall.
+
+“Daphne in trouble,” he said, “you’ll tell me more, I _hope_,”—and
+turned his pleading smile to meet people coming in at the door. They
+clumped to the small table nearer the further window and she caught a
+sideways glimpse before they sat down: a slender woman with red-gold
+hair carrying a bunchy little girl whose long legs dangled against her
+skirt—Mrs. Sneyde, the grass-widow, and, making for the far side of the
+table a big buoyant girlish young woman—uninteresting—the sister-in-law,
+Maud Hollebone.
+
+The child’s “so bitter, _bitter_ cold,” sounded clear through the
+morning greetings in which she took no part. Her voice was strange, low
+and clear, and full of a meditative sincerity. Amidst the interchange of
+talk between Vereker and the two women it prevailed again: a plaintive
+monologue addressed to the universe.
+
+The grating of a chair and there she was confronting the talking
+Vereker, who was on his feet and just about to go. She stood gazing up,
+with her hands behind her back. A rounded face and head, cleanly
+revealed by the way the fine silky brown hair was strained back across
+the skull; bunchy serge dress and stiff white pinafore. Pausing, Vereker
+looked down at her.
+
+“You going out, Vereker?”
+
+“Not yet.”
+
+“Your friend coming? Not telegraphed or anything?”
+
+“He’s coming all right, Daphne. He’ll be here to-night. You’ll see him
+in the morning.”
+
+“You’ll be writing your letters till you start?”
+
+“I may.”
+
+“Then I’ll come and sit in your room till my beecely walk.”
+
+She rapped out her statements—immediately upon his replies, making him
+sound gentle and slow—from the childish, rounded face that was serenely
+thinking, full of quick, calm thought. Regardless talk was going forward
+at the other table to which, her business settled, she briskly returned.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+The little wooden hall was like a summer-house that was also a
+sports-pavilion. Against the wall that backed the dining-room stood
+bamboo chairs uncertain, as if, belonging elsewhere and having been told
+not to block the gangway by moving into the open, they did not know what
+they were for. The table to which they belonged stood boldly in the
+centre and held an ash-tray. Between it and the front door from above
+which the antlered head of a chamois gazed down upon the small scene,
+the way was clear, but the rest of the floor space was invaded on all
+sides by toboggans propped against the wall or standing clear with boots
+lying upon them, slender boots gleaming with polish and fitted with
+skates that appeared to be nothing but a single brilliant blade. Against
+one wall was a pair of things like oars. Ski? But thought of as attached
+to a human foot they were impossibly long.
+
+From a hidden region away beyond the angle of the staircase came
+servants’ voices in staccato, and abrupt sounds: the sounds of their
+morning campaign, giving an air of callous oblivion to the waiting
+implements of sport, and quenching, with the way they had of seeming to
+urge the residents forth upon their proper business outdoors, the
+hesitant invitation of the chairs.
+
+Beyond the dining-room and this little hall, whose stillness murmured
+incessantly of activities, there was no refuge but the dejected little
+salon.
+
+Filled with morning light it seemed larger, a little important and quite
+self-sufficient, giving out its secret strangeness of a Swiss room, old;
+pre-existing English visitors, proof, with its way of being, set long
+ago and unaltered, against their travelled hilarity. The little parlour
+piano, precious in chosen wood highly polished, with faded yellow keys
+and faded silk behind its trellis, was full of old music, seemed to
+brood over the carollings of an ancient simplicity unknown to the modern
+piano whose brilliant black and white makes it sound in a room all the
+time, a ringing accompaniment to the life of to-day.
+
+But into this averted solitude there came to her again the sense of time
+pouring from an inexhaustible source: gentle, marvellous, unutterably
+_kind_. It came in through the window whose screened light, filling the
+small room and halting meditatively there, seemed to wait for song.
+
+Drawing back the flimsy curtain from the window, she found it a door
+giving on a covered balcony through whose panes she saw wan sunless
+snowfields and beyond them slopes, patched with black pinewoods and
+rising in the distance to a high ridge, a smooth bulging thickness of
+snow against deep blue sky. The dense pinewoods thinned and as they
+climbed into small straggling groups with here and there a single file
+of trees, small and sharp-pointed, marching towards the top of the
+ridge.
+
+Beautiful this sharp etching far-off of keen black pines upon the
+sunless snow and strange the clear deep blue of the sky. But mournful;
+remote and self-sufficient. Switzerland averted and a little
+discouraging.
+
+The balcony extended right and left and a glimpse away to the left of
+mats hanging out into the open and a maid pouncing forth upon them with
+a beater sent her to the right, where the distance was obscured by a
+building standing at right angles to the house, a battered barn-like
+place, unbalconied, but pierced symmetrically by little windows; châlet,
+warm rich brown, darkened above by its sheltering, steeply jutting roof
+... beautiful. Its kindliness extended all about it, lending a warmth
+even to the far-off desolate slopes.
+
+A door at her side revealed the dining-room lengthwise and deserted, and
+then she was round the angle of the house and free of its secret: its
+face towards the valley that was now a vast splendour of sunlight.
+
+Every day, through these windows that framed the view in strips this
+light would be visible in all its changings. Standing at the one that
+glazed the great mountain whose gold had wakened her she discovered that
+the balcony was a verandah, had in front of it a railed-in space set
+with chairs and tables. In a moment she was out in the open light, upon
+a shelf, within the landscape that seemed now to be the whole delight of
+Switzerland outspread before her eyes.
+
+Far away below, cleft along its centre by the irregular black line of
+its frozen river was the wide white floor of the valley, measuring the
+mountains that rose upon its hither side.
+
+Those high, high summits, beetling variously up into the top of the sky,
+with bright patches of tawny rock breaking through their smooth
+whiteness against its darkest blue, knew nothing of the world below
+where their mountains went downward in a great whiteness of broadening
+irregular slopes that presently bore pines in single file upwards
+advancing from the dense clumps upon the lower ridges, and met in an
+extended mass along the edge of the valley floor.
+
+Here and there, clear of the pinewoods, and looking perilously high and
+desolate, a single châlet made a triangular warm brown blot upon the
+dazzling snow.
+
+In this crystal stillness the smallest sound went easily up to the high
+peaks; to the high pure blue.
+
+Turning to bless the well-placed little hotel she met a frontage of
+blank windows, each with its sharply jutting balcony, jaws, dropped
+beneath the blind stare of the windows set forever upon a single scene.
+Hotel; queer uncherished thing. No one to share its life and make it
+live.
+
+On a near table was a folded newspaper, thin, heavily printed,
+continental. Switzerland radiant all about her and the Swiss world
+within her hands—a reprieve from further seeing and a tour, into the
+daily life of this country whose living went on within a setting that
+made even the advertisements look lyrical.
+
+The simple text was enthralling. For years she had not so delighted in
+any reading. In the mere fact of the written word, in the building of
+the sentences, the movement of phrases linking part with part. It was
+all quite undistinguished, a little crude and hard; demanding, seeming
+to assume a sunny hardness in mankind. And there was something missing
+whose absence was a relief, like the absence of heaviness in the air.
+Everything she had read stood clear in her mind that yet, insufficiently
+occupied with the narrative and its strange emanations, caught up single
+words and phrases and went off independently touring, climbing to fresh
+arrangements and interpretations of familiar thought.
+
+And this miracle of renewal was the work of a single night.
+
+The need for expression grew burdensome in the presence of the empty
+sun-blistered tables. Perhaps these lively clarities would survive a
+return journey through the hotel?
+
+Voices sounded up from below, from the invisible roadway. English
+laughter, of people actively diverting themselves in the winter
+landscape. Far away within each one was the uncommunicating English
+spirit, heedless, but not always unaware, filling its day with habitual,
+lively-seeming activities. The laughter sounded insincere; as if defying
+a gloom it refused to face.
+
+They passed out of hearing and the vast stillness, restored, made her
+look forth: at a scene grown familiar, driving her off to fresh seeking
+while it went its way towards the day when she would see it for the last
+time, giving her even now as she surveyed its irrevocably known beauty,
+a foretaste of the nostalgia that must rend her when once more she was
+down upon the plains.
+
+But that time was infinitely far away beyond the days during which she
+was to live perpetually with this scene that clamoured now to be
+communicated in its first freshness.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+The writing at top-speed of half-a-dozen letters left arrival and
+beginning in the past, the great doorway of the enchantments she had
+tried to describe safely closed behind her, and herself going forward
+within them. With letters to post she must now go forth, secretly, as it
+were behind her own back, into Oberland; into the scene that had seemed
+full experience and was but its overture.
+
+The letters were disappointing. Only in one of them had she escaped
+expressing yesterday’s excited achievements and set down instead the
+living joy of to-day. And this for the one to whom such joy was
+incredible. But all were warm with affection newly felt. The long
+distance not only made people very dear—in a surprising way it
+re-arranged them. Foremost amongst the men was Densley of the warm heart
+and wooden head wildly hailed. His letter, the last and shortest, wrote
+itself in one sentence, descriptive, laughing, affectionate. How it
+would surprise him....
+
+Life, she told herself as she crossed the hall trying to drown the
+kitchen sounds by recalling what had flashed across her mind as she
+wrote to Densley, is eternal because joy is. “Future life” is a
+contradiction in terms. The deadly trap of the adjective. _Pourquoi
+dater?_ Even science insists on indestructibility—yet marks for
+destruction the very thing that enables it to recognise
+indestructibility. But it had come nearer and clearer than that.
+
+Fawn-coloured woolly puppies, romping in the thick snow at the side of
+the steps as though it were grass, huge, as big as lion cubs, with large
+snub faces, and dense short bushy coats trying to curl, evenly all over
+their tubby tumbling bodies ... St. Bernards, at home in their snow.
+They flung themselves at her hands, mumbling her gloves, rolling over
+with the smallest shove, weak and big and beautiful and with absurd
+miniature barkings.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+The hotel was at the higher end of the village and from its steps she
+could see down the narrow street to where the little church and its
+white cloaked sugar-loaf spire obscured the view and away to the right
+set clear of the village and each on the crest of a gentle slope, the
+hotels, four, five, big buildings, not unbeautiful with their peaked
+roofs and balconies and the brilliance of green shutters on their white
+faces. And even the largest, Mrs. Harcourt’s ‘hidjus big place’
+recognisable by its difference, a huge square plaster box, patterned
+with rows and rows of uniform windows above which on its flat roof a
+high pole flaunted a flag limp in the motionless air, looked small and
+harmless, a dolls’ house dumped casually, lost in the waste of snow.
+
+If these hotels were full, there were in the village more visitors than
+natives. But where were they? The vast landscape was empty. From its
+thickly mantled fields came the smell of snow.
+
+Lost when she went down the street in a maze of fugitive scents within
+one pervading, and that seemed to compose the very air: the sweet deep
+smell of burning pinewood. Moving within it as the crowded little shop
+windows went by on either hand were the smells of dried apples and straw
+and a curious blending of faint odours that revealed themselves—when
+presently summoning an excuse for the excitement of shopping, at the
+cost of but a few of the multitude of small coins representing an
+English sovereign, she gained the inside of the third general store
+between the hotel and the church—as the familiar smell of mixed
+groceries; with a difference: clean smells, baked dry. No prevailing
+odour of moist bacon and mouldering cheese; of spilt paraffin and musty
+sacking, and things left undisturbed in corners. No dinginess. And
+though shelves and counter were crowded, every single thing gleamed and
+displayed itself with an air.
+
+But there were no Swiss biscuits. Only a double row of the familiar
+square tins from Reading, triumphantly displayed by the gaunt
+sallow-faced woman whose ringing voice was as disconcertingly at
+variance with her appearance as was her charmed manner with the eager
+cunning that sat in her eyes. She asked for soap and the woman set wide
+the door of an upright glass case in which were invitingly set forth
+little packets bearing names that in England were household words.
+
+She glanced back at the biscuits. Petit-Beurre were after all foreign
+and brought with them always the sight of Dinant and its rock coming
+into view, ending the squabble about the pronunciation of _grenouille_,
+as the Meuse steamer rounded the last bend. But catching sight above the
+biscuits of a box of English nightlights she chose a piece of soap at
+random and fought while she responded to the voluble chantings
+accompanying the packing of her parcel, with the nightmare vision of
+bedrooms _never_ bathed in darkness, of people _never_ getting away into
+the night, people insisting, even in rooms where brilliance can be
+switched on at will, on the perpetual presence of the teasing little
+glimmer; people who travel in groups and bring with them so much of
+their home surroundings that they destroy daily, piecemeal, the sense of
+being abroad.
+
+Regaining the street in possession of a replica of the tablet she had
+unpacked last night, she found that the busy midst of the village lay
+just ahead where the way widened to encircle the little church. Many
+shops, some of them new-built, with roomy windows, and the lifeless
+impersonal appearance of successful provincial stores. There were more
+people here, more women in those heavy black dresses and head-shawls,
+more bloused and bearded men, crossing the snowy road with swift
+slouching stride. A post-office, offering universal hospitality.
+
+As if from the bright intense sunlight all about her, a ray of thought
+had fallen upon the mystery of her passion for soap, making it so clear
+in her mind that the little ray and the lit images waiting for words
+could be put aside in favour of the strange dingy building breaking the
+line of shops, looking like a warehouse, its small battered door, high
+up, approached by a flight of steps leading from either side whose
+meeting made a little platform before the door. Rough sleds were drawn
+up round about the entrance, making it central in the little open space
+about the church, the perpetual head-tossings of the horses filling the
+bright air with showers of tinkles. It could hardly be a café; yet two
+men had just clattered down the steps flushed and garrulous. Strange
+dark-looking hostelry within which shone the midday sun of these rough
+men living in far-away châlets among the snow.
+
+It was not only the appeal of varying shape and colour or even of the
+many perfumes each with its power of evoking images: the heavy
+voluptuous scents suggesting brunette adventuresses, Turkish cigarettes
+and luxurious idleness; the elusive, delicate, that could bring
+spring-time into a winter bedroom darkened by snow-clouds. The secret of
+its power was in the way it pervaded one’s best realisations of everyday
+life. No wonder Beethoven worked at his themes washing and re-washing
+his hands. And even in merely washing with an empty mind there is a
+_charm_; though it is an empty charm, the illusion of beginning, as soon
+as you have finished, all over again as a different person. But all
+great days had soap, impressing its qualities upon you, during your most
+intense moments of anticipation, as a prelude. And the realisation of a
+good day past, coming with the early morning hour, is accompanied by
+soap. Soap is with you when you are in that state of feeling life at
+first hand that makes even the best things that can happen important not
+so much in themselves as in the way they make you conscious of life, and
+of yourself living. Every day, even those that are called ordinary days,
+with its miracle of return from sleep, is heralded by soap, summoning
+its retinue of companion days.
+
+To buy a new cake of soap is to buy a fresh stretch of days. Its little
+weight, treasure, minutely heavy in the hand, is life, past present and
+future compactly welded.
+
+Post-office offering universal hospitality more vitally than the little
+church. A beggar could perhaps find help in a church more easily than in
+a post-office. Yet the mere atmosphere of a post-office offered
+something a church could never give. Even to enter it and come away
+without transactions was to have been in the midst of life. And to
+handle stamps, and especially foreign stamps, was to be aware of just
+those very distances the post had abolished.
+
+The priced goods in the windows were discouragingly high. One window
+behind whose thick plate glass were set forth just a few things very
+tastefully arranged, showed no prices at all and had the ominous note of
+a west-end shop. Next door was a windowful that might have been
+transplanted from Holborn so much steel was there, such an array of
+rectangular labels and announcements. Skates and skates and skates. Then
+a chemist’s and an inspiration, though the window showed nothing but a
+perforated screen and the usual coloured bottles bulging on a shelf
+above.
+
+The counter was stacked with wares from Wigmore Street. Even the
+tooth-brushes were those of the new shape devised in Cavendish Square.
+The chemist was a bald preoccupied man speaking English abruptly. She
+came away with a jar of Smith’s cream, her shopping done and the face of
+the clock sticking out above the watchmaker’s telling her it was nearly
+noon. The little clock on the church said a quarter past eleven and
+glancing back at the watchmaker’s, now in the rear, she saw the reverse
+dial of the outstanding clock marking half past eleven. And Switzerland
+was the land of watchmakers.... Her own watch said one o’clock, English
+time. Then it was noon. But this far world was not three minutes
+distance from the Alpenstock. There was still half-an-hour.
+
+The post-office was a sumptuous hall. Little tables stood about
+invitingly set with pens and ink. No railed counter; a wooden partition
+extending to the ceiling; a row of arched pigeon-holes, all closed. Like
+a railway booking-office on Sunday, between trains—blankly indifferent
+to the announcement of the presence of a customer made by the clumping
+of her boots upon the wooden floor. And when presently—having gone the
+round of the posters, brilliant against the white-washed walls, all so
+much brighter and so much less bright than reality, all resounding with
+a single deep charm, bringing assurance of possessing, in one journey
+and one locality, the being of the whole—she tapped at a little shutter,
+it flew up impatiently, revealing an affronted young man in a blue
+cotton overall, glaring reproachfully through spectacles. The stamps
+handed over, the little door shot back into place with a bang, as if
+cursing an intruder.
+
+The open spaces called for a first view before the sense of its being no
+longer morning should have robbed them of intensity. But where the
+street joined the roadway there was a little shop, full sunlight falling
+on its window, whose contents were a clustered delight and each separate
+thing more charming than its neighbour.
+
+Two women approaching along the road preceded by English voices
+distracted her, for a moment, with the strangeness of their headdress—a
+sort of cowl. In a moment they passed with dangling clinking skates, and
+her intention of getting a good view from behind was diverted back to
+the shop window, by “tourist-trap” interpolated in a tone meant to be
+inaudible, in the dissertation of the one holding forth in a voice not
+unlike Mrs. Harcourt’s, about a hotel “packed like a bee-hive and
+swarming with influenza.”
+
+It was true. The shop was full of Swiss brummagem. She fastened on it
+the more eagerly. Little expensive cheap things whose charm was beyond
+price. Small clumsy earthenware, appealingly dumpy, flower patterned
+upon a warm creamy background; painted wooden spoons. Little brooches
+and trinkets innumerable. Cow-bells. Some small thing for everybody and
+a problem solved at the cost of a few marks.
+
+Turning away she caught sight of an old woman amazingly wrapped up,
+peering at her from inside a little booth set down in the snow on the
+other side of the way. A shelf laden with small things in carved wood
+protruded in front. She crossed to look at them. Silently with slow
+fumbling movements the old woman displayed her wares. Bears. Bears on
+ski, on toboggans, bears in every kind of unbearlike attitude. Intricate
+model châlets, useless and suggesting, imagined in England, nothing but
+the accumulation of dust. But there was an owl, with owlish dignity,
+very simply and beautifully carved. Her eyes returned to it and the old
+woman put forth an aged freckled hand and grasped its head, which went
+easily back upon a hinge and left revealed a clean white china inkwell.
+
+“Kipsake,” said the old woman huskily.
+
+“_Danke schön. Ich komme wieder_,” smiled Miriam escaping, followed by
+hoarse cacklings of praise.
+
+Out upon the roadway fenced between dazzling snowfields, the end of the
+valley came into sight, new, but faintly reproachful, having waited too
+long, and complaining now about the lateness of the hour. Certainly it
+was worthy of a whole self, undistracted. But there was to-morrow, many
+to-morrows. She had done with the street and the shops save as a
+corridor, growing each day more dear, to daily fulfilment of the promise
+of this prospect whose beauty she was clearly recognising. And more than
+its beauty. Its great, great power of assertion, veiled for the moment
+by distractions, but there. Wonderfully beautiful was the speech and
+movement of the far-off smooth pure ridge of snow, rising high against
+the deepest blue of the sky, linking twin peaks.
+
+Some of the near slopes were dotted with people, tiny figurines
+mitigating the snowfields and the towering mountains: the sounds of
+English voices ringing out infinitesimal in the wide space, yet filling
+it. Shutting out the scene, yet intensifying it; bringing gratitude for
+their presence.
+
+That remained even after the quaint peaked hoods of brilliant white or
+mauve, the effective skirts and jerseys of a group of women passing in
+the roadway had rebuked with their colours, clean and sharp against the
+snow, her tweed that in London had seemed a good choice, and her London
+felt hat.
+
+But though the clever clothes of these people brought a sense of exile
+they were powerless to rouse envy or any desire. Envy was impossible in
+this air that seemed, so sharp was every outline, to be no longer
+earth’s atmosphere but open space, electric.
+
+Perhaps even this morning there was time to get clear, to be if only for
+a few moments, along some side track alone with the landscape, walking
+lightly clad in midsummer sun through this intensity of winter.
+
+The road was dropping and growing harder. No longer crunching under her
+feet, the snow beaten flat showed here and there dark streaks of ice,
+and her puttee-bandaged legs, flexible only at the knees, felt like
+sticks above her feet lost and helpless in the thick boots that seemed
+to walk of themselves.
+
+The dropping road took a sharp turn towards the valley, showing ahead a
+short empty stretch and another sharp turn, revealing it as the winding
+trail up which she had come last night. On the right it was joined by a
+long track running steeply down into a wilderness of snow in the midst
+of whose far distances appeared high up a little bridge half hidden
+amongst pines. The track was dotted with pigmy forms.
+
+“_Ash_-tongue!” A fierce hoarse voice just behind, and joining it
+another, clear and ringing: “_Ach_-tooooong.”
+
+Plunging into the roadside drift she turned in time to see a toboggan
+bearing upon it a boy prone, face foremost eagerly out-thrust, shoot
+down the slanting road, take the bend at an angle that just cleared the
+fence and dart at a terrific pace down the slope towards the wilderness;
+followed by the girl with the ringing voice, lightly seated, her
+toboggan throwing her up as it bumped skimming from ridge to ridge down
+the uneven road. She took the bend smoothly with space to spare and flew
+on down the slope with lifted chin and streaming hair. Both mad.
+Children of the reckless English who had discovered the Swiss winter.
+
+This terrific scooting was not the tobogganing of which she had heard in
+London. Two more figures were coming, giving her excuse to wait lest
+they were coming her way and watch their passing from the drift that was
+like warm wool, knee-deep. They were women, coming slowly, paddling
+themselves along with little sticks. They took the bend with ironic
+caution and went on down the slope, still furiously stabbing the snow
+with their little sticks, their high, peaked cowls making them look like
+seated gnomes.
+
+Aware of intense cold invading her feet, she plunged out into the road
+and was beating her snow-caked puttees when an intermittent grinding
+sound approaching brought her upright: an aged couple side by side,
+white-haired and immensely muffled, sitting very grave and stern behind
+the legs protruding stiffly on either side the heads of their toboggans
+and set from moment to moment heels downwards upon the road to check a
+possible increase of their slow triumphant pace. Triumph. Behind the
+sternness that defied the onlooker to find their pose lacking in dignity
+was triumph. Young joy; for these who might well be patrolling in
+bath-chairs the streets of a cathedral town.
+
+And they left the joyous message: that this sport, since pace could so
+easily be controlled, might be tested at once, alone, without
+instruction, this very afternoon. A subtle change came over the
+landscape, making it less and more; retiring a little as who should say:
+then I am to be henceforth a background, already a mere accessory, it
+yet challenged her vow, an intimidating witness.
+
+Along the empty stretch towards the valley the blazing sun blotted out
+the distance so that it was pleasant to turn the next corner and be
+going again towards the expanse that ended at the white high-hung
+collar. The fresh stretch of gently sloping road was longer than the one
+above it and walking freely here she found that her gait had changed,
+that she was planking along in a lounging stride which brought ease to
+her bandaged legs and made more manageable her inflexible feet. With a
+little practice, walking could be a joy. Walking in this scene, through
+this air, was an occupation in itself. And she was being assailed by the
+pangs of a piercing hunger. Obtrusive; insistent as the hunger of
+childhood.
+
+It would take a little longer to go back. It would be wise to turn now.
+At the corner ending this stretch. Suddenly it seemed immensely
+important to discover what there was round the corner. From the angle of
+the turning she could see the little bridge far away to the right, in
+profile, with pines stretching along the bank of what it spanned, that
+showed a little further on as a thin straight line steeply descending to
+join the serpentine that cut the white floor of the valley. Away to the
+right of the bridge straggling leafless trees stood in a curve. Behind
+them something moved; coming and going across the gaps between their
+trunks. Skaters.
+
+Then for the girl and boy that reckless rush was just a transit; a means
+of getting to the rink, as one might take a bus to a tennis-court.
+
+A voice greeted her from behind, surprising in its level familiarity
+until the finished phrase revealed the American, to whom, turning to
+find him standing before her, his toboggan drawn to heel by its rope,
+she gave the smile, not for him, the lover’s smile reviewing, as they
+passed her in inverse rotation while she made the long unwelcome journey
+into his world of an American in Europe, her morning’s gatherings.
+
+But he had received it, was telling her that already she looked
+splendid, adding that when folks first came up they looked, seen beside
+those already there, just gass’ly. And for a moment the miscarriage was
+painful: to have appeared to drop even below his own level of
+undiscriminating hail-fellow-well-met. And for a fraction of a second as
+he stood before her in his correct garb she transformed him into an
+Englishman condemning her foolish grin—but there was his queer little
+American smile, that came to her from a whole continent and seemed to
+demand a larger face and form, a little smile dryly sweet, as
+misdirected as her own and during which they seemed to pour out in
+unison their independent appreciations and to recognise and greet in
+each other, in relation to the English world out here, fellow voyagers
+in a strange element.
+
+It healed her self-given stripes that were, she reflected as they went
+on together up the hill, needless, since to him, as an American, her
+greeting would seem neither naïve nor bourgeois. For all Americans are
+either undisturbedly naïve and bourgeois or in a state of merely having
+learned, via Europe, to be neither. And this man, now launched in speech
+revealed himself by the way he had of handling his statements, as so far
+very much what he had always been.
+
+Strange that it was always queer people, floating mysterious and
+intangible in an alien element who gathered up, not wanting them,
+testimonies that came from her of themselves.
+
+All the way back to the Alpenstock he pursued his monologue,
+information, and in an unbroken flow that by reason of its temperature,
+its innocence of either personal interest or benevolent intention, left
+her free to wander. There was in his narrow, unresonant voice only one
+shape of tone: a discouraged, argumentative rise and fall, very slight,
+almost on two adjacent notes, colourless; as of one speaking almost
+unawares at the bidding of an endless uniform perception. She heard it
+now as statement, now merely as sound and for a moment as the voice of a
+friend while after informing her that he had done the valley run and
+climb each morning and taken to-day a last turn to add yet one more
+layer to his week’s sunburn, he remarked that the long zig-zag was
+commonly deserted in the forenoon, folks mostly taking the other track,
+either to the rink, or further to the made run, or way beyond that to
+the ski-ing slopes.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+When she was clear of the shop and crossing the road with the toboggan
+slithering meekly behind, the invisible distant slopes seemed lonely and
+her plan for getting immediately away to them postponed itself in favour
+of enjoying for a while the thrilled equilibrium with everything about
+her that was the gift of the slight pull on the cord she was trying to
+hold with an air of preoccupied negligence. Turning leisurely back from
+the short length of street ahead that too soon would show the open
+country, she came once more into the heart of the village and paid an
+unnecessary visit to the post-office, heard the toboggan pull up against
+the kerb and knew as she turned to abandon the cord that she had tasted
+the utmost of this new joy, and that when once more the cord was in her
+hands she must go forth and venture.
+
+Out on the road beyond the village the pleasant even slithering
+alternated with little silent weightless runs, that at first made her
+glance back to see if the toboggan were still there. These little runs,
+increasing as the road began to slope came like reminders of its
+character, assertions of its small willingness for its task, enhancing
+its charm, calling her to turn and survey as she went its entrancing
+behaviour of a little toboggan.
+
+But presently, and as if grown weary of gentle hints and feeling the
+necessity of stating more forcibly the meaning of its presence out here
+in the glittering stillness, it took a sudden run at her heels. Moving
+sideways ahead she reduced it to its proper place in the procession
+until the distance between them set it once more in motion. Overtaking
+her it made a half turn, slid a little way broadside and pulled up,
+facing her, in a small hollow, indignant. In the mercifully empty yet
+not altogether unobservant landscape it assumed the proportions of a
+living thing and seemed to say as she approached: “You _can’t_ bring me
+out here and make a fool of me.” And indeed, even with no one in sight,
+she could not allow herself to walk down the slope with the toboggan
+ahead and pulling like a dog.
+
+She might go back, make a détour on the level round about the village,
+turn the afternoon into a walk and postpone until to-morrow the
+adventure for which now she had neither courage nor desire. In choosing
+the time when there would be fewest people abroad she had forgotten that
+it was also the lowest point of the day. Even this first day had a
+lowest point. And belated prudence, reminding her that she had come away
+to rest, cast a chill over the empty landscape, changing it from reality
+to a picture of a reality seen long ago. At the sight of it she turned
+and went a few paces up the gradient and perched and gathered up the
+length of cord, and life came back into the wastes of snow, the
+mountains were real again, quiet in the motionless afternoon light, and
+the absurd little toboggan a foe about to be vanquished.
+
+It slid off at once, took a small hummock askew, righted itself, to a
+movement made too instinctively to be instructive, and slid onwards
+gathering pace.
+
+But ecstasy passed too swiftly into awareness of the bend in the road
+now rushing up to meet her ignorance. Ramming her heels into the snow
+she recovered too late with a jolting pang in both ankles and a headlong
+dive into this morning’s drift, a memory of what she should have done
+and stood up tingling with joy in the midst of the joyous landscape
+stilled again that had flown with her and swooped up as she plunged, and
+was now receiving her exciting news.
+
+The backward slope invited her to return and go solemnly, braking all
+the way and testing the half-found secret of steering. But the bend
+tempted her forward. A single dig on the left when she reached it and
+she would be round in face of the long run down to the level.
+
+But the dig was too heavy and too soon and landed her with her feet in
+the drift and the toboggan swung broadside and all but careering with
+her backwards along the steepness that lay, when once more she faced it,
+a headlong peril before the levels leading on and up to the little
+bridge could come to bring rescue and peace.
+
+Pushing carefully off, sliding with bated breath and uncomfortably
+rasping heels, down and down, making no experiments and thankful only to
+feel the track slowly ascending behind her she remained clenched until
+only a few yards were left down which with feet up she slithered
+deliriously and came to rest.
+
+It was done. She had tobogganed herself away from Oberland into the
+wilderness, the unknown valley waiting now to be explored, with the
+conquered steed trailing once more meek and unprotesting in the
+background. The afternoon was hers for happiness until hunger, already
+beginning its apparently almost continuous onslaught, should make
+welcome the triumphant climb back to Oberland and tea upon the
+promontory.
+
+The high bridge that in the distance looked so small and seemed to span
+smallness was still small, a single sturdy arch; but beneath it dropped
+a gorge whose pines led down to a torrent, frozen; strange shapes of
+leaping water arrested, strangely coloured: grey in shadow, black in
+deep shadow, and here and there, caught by the light, a half-transparent
+green.
+
+There was a great fellowship of pines clustered on either bank and
+spreading beyond the bridge to a wood that sent out a rising arm
+blocking the view of the valley and the pass. They made a solitude down
+here above the silenced waters. The backward view was closed by the
+perilous slope whose top was now the sky-line, leaving Oberland far away
+out of sight in another world.
+
+The track through the wood, wide and level for a while with pointed
+pines marching symmetrically by, narrowed to a winding path that took
+her in amongst them, into their strange close fellowship that left each
+one a perfect thing apart. Not lonely, nor, for all the high-bulging
+smoothness of snow in which it stood, cold. It was their secret,
+pine-breath, that brought a sense of warm life, and their
+close-clustered needles. Out on the mountain-sides they looked black and
+bleak, striving towards the sun until they were stayed by the upper
+cold. Seen close they were a happy company bearing light upon the green
+burnish of their needles and the dull live tints of their rough stems.
+And very secret; here thought was sheltered as in a quiet room.
+
+Out in the immense landscape, in the down-pouring brilliance of pure
+light, thought was visible. Transparent to the mountains who took its
+measure and judged, yet without wounding, and even while they made it
+seem of no account, a small intricate buzzing in the presence of mighty,
+simple statement sounding just out of reach within the air, and invited
+thoughtless submission to their influence as to a final infinite good
+that would remain when they were no more seen, there was pathos in their
+magnificence; as if they were glad even of one small observing speck,
+and displayed gently the death they could deal, and smiled in their
+terrifying power as if over an open secret.
+
+And to walk and walk on and on amongst them, along their sunlit
+corridors with thought shut off and being changed, coming back refreshed
+and changed and indifferent, was what most deeply she now wanted of
+them.
+
+The track climbed a ridge and there below were the American’s wide
+snowfields.
+
+Before she was assured by the doffed cap outheld while he made his
+salutation—the sweeping foreign _coup de chapeau_ that was so decisive a
+politesse compared to the Englishman’s meagre small lift; and yet also
+insolent—she was rejoicing in the certainty that the bearded figure in
+spite of the English Norfolk suit and tweed cap, was the big Russian. He
+alone, at this moment, of all the people in the hotel would be welcome.
+Remote, near and friendly as the deepest of her thoughts, and so far
+away from social conventions and the assumptions behind conventions, as
+to leave all the loveliness about her unchanged—and yet trailing an
+absurd little toboggan, smaller, and, in contrast with his height, more
+ridiculous an appendage than her own. He plunged down the ridge in the
+English style, by weight and rather clumsily, and in a moment was by her
+side at the head of the run that went, pure white and evenly flattened,
+switch-backing away across the field out of sight.
+
+In a slow mournful voice that gave his excellent French a melancholy
+music he asked her if she had already tested the run and became when he
+had heard the short tale of her adventure impatiently active. Her
+toboggan, he said, and raised its fore-part and bent scanning, was too
+large, too heavy and with runners not quite true. It would be better for
+the moment to exchange. Try, Try, he chanted with the true Russian
+nonchalance and, abandoning his own went off down the gentle slope on
+the discredited mount that she might now blame for her mysterious swerve
+at the bend.
+
+After the gentle drop, carrying him over the first small rise as if it
+were not there, he flew ahead gathering swiftness with each drop, away
+and away until at last he appeared a small upright figure far away on
+the waste of snow.
+
+The run compared with what she had already attempted seemed nothing at
+all. The drops so slight that once or twice she was stranded on a ridge
+and obliged to push off afresh. And the light little toboggan,
+responding to the slightest heel-tap upon the hard pressed snow, taught
+her at once the secret of steering. And when at last full of the joy of
+fresh conquest she was pulled up by the loose snow at the end of the
+run, she was eager only to tramp back and begin again. But tramping at
+her side he tore her triumph to shreds. Silently she tried to imagine
+the toboggan having its own way uncontrolled for the whole of that
+sweeping trek, for the two quite steep drops towards the end.
+
+The second time he started her in advance and remained behind shouting,
+his voice rising to a crescendo at the first steepness: “_Il n’y a pas
+de danger!_” With an immense effort she restrained her feet and entered
+paradise.
+
+“_Ça ira, ça ira_,” he admitted smiling when once more they were side by
+side. They tramped back in silence, under the eyes as they approached
+the ridge of a group newly appeared upon its crest and from which when
+they drew near a voice came down in greeting. She looked up to see the
+Croydon family, all very trim in sporting garb and carrying skates,
+gathered in a bunch, at once collectively domestic and singly restive.
+They smiled eagerly down at her and she read in the father’s twinkling
+gaze that she was providing material for Croydon humour, so distinctly
+and approvingly, was it saying in the Croydon way: “You’ve not lost much
+time,” and so swiftly, having told her in response to her own greeting
+that the rink was within five minutes easy walking, did he turn and
+disappear with his family in tow down the far side of the ridge.
+
+The third run left her weary and satisfied. Again they were tramping
+back side by side, and although her experience of Russians had taught
+her that gratitude was out of place and enthusiasm over simple joys a
+matter for half-envious contempt, her thankfulness and felicity,
+involuntarily eloquent, treated him, marching tall and sombre at her
+side upon feet that in spite of the enormous boots showed themselves
+slender and shapely terminations of a well-hung frame, as if he had been
+of her own English stock; let him see the value, to herself, of his
+kindly gift. All she lived for now, she told him, was to rush,
+safe-guarded by a properly-mastered technique, at the utmost possible
+speed through this indescribable air, down slopes from which the
+landscape flew back and up. He smiled down, of course, the half
+incredulous smile. Of course bored, giving only part of a dreamy
+attention to all this raving.
+
+“_C’est bon pour la santé_,” he murmured as she paused.
+
+What did he know of santé, unless perhaps he had been in prison? He
+might be a refugee; an anarchist living in Switzerland.
+
+When he, too, turned out to be now returning in search of tea and they
+were climbing the slope towards Oberland, their toboggans colliding and
+bumping along as best they might at the ends of cords twisted together
+round the wrist of his gloveless hand, she remarked by way of relieving
+a silence he did not seem to think it necessary to break, that the Swiss
+winter must be less surprisingly beautiful to Russians than to the
+people of the misty north. He agreed that doubtless this was so and
+gloomily asked her if she had been in Russia. He agreed with everything
+she said about his country as seen from a distance, but without interest
+and presently, as if to change the subject, declared that he knew
+nothing of Russia and Russians.
+
+His voice sounded again too soon to give her time to select a
+nationality that should soften the disappointment of losing him as a
+Russian, and in a moment he was talking of Italy, and the Italy she knew
+by so many proxies dead and living was stricken out of her mind, to give
+place to the unknown Italy who had produced this man, simple and
+sincere, gloomy and harsh-minded, playing Chopin with all his heart. But
+when presently she learned that he was a business man on holiday from
+Milan, her Italy returned to her. He was from a world that everywhere
+was the same, a world that existed even within Italy.
+
+And at dinner again he sat apart wrapped in his gloom until again
+Vereker was rescuing him with speech and he was responding in the
+withheld, disclaiming Russian way.
+
+A Latin consciousness was, in this group, something far more remote than
+a Russian would have been, and she wondered what it was that behind
+Vereker’s unchanging manner was making his half of the bridge upon which
+they met. Music perhaps, if Vereker, with eyes candid and not profound
+and not deep-set, were musical. She caught a few words. It was the
+weather. Do Italians discuss the weather? Was Guerini, behind his
+gratitude in being rescued from isolation, wondering at the Englishman’s
+naïveté? Vereker was not showing off his French. He was being courteous,
+being himself. No one, except when he could seize a chance the American,
+made any sort of parade. Nor was it that they made a parade of not
+making a parade. Talk with them was easy because it was quite naturally
+serene. No emphasis. No controversy. The emergence of even a small
+difference of opinion produced at once, on both sides, a smiling
+retreat. Deep in his soul the American must certainly be smiling at this
+baffling urbanity. English correctness and hypocrisy. Here was the
+original stuff from which the world-wide caricatures were made.
+
+And talk with these people always ended in a light and lively farewell,
+a manner of dropping things that handed a note of credit for future
+meetings. A retreat, as from royalty, backwards. A retreat from the
+royal game of continuous courtesy.
+
+And together with the surprise of discovering—when having departed
+upstairs she was drawn down to the little salon by the sound of the
+Chopin ballade—not the Italian but Vereker at the piano in the empty
+room, was the boon of his composure. Of his being and continuing to be
+after she had slipped into the room and reached a chair from which she
+could just see him in profile, so quietly engrossed. A little strung, as
+though still the phrases that yesterday he had so carefully recaptured
+might again elude him; but listening. Led on, and listening and in the
+hands of Chopin altogether.
+
+Seated thus exposed he was slender, delicate, musicianly; only the line
+of his jaw gave him an appearance of strength; and perhaps the close
+cropping of his hair so that of what would have been a flamboyant mass
+only crisp ridges were left, close against a small skull, like Cæsar’s.
+His spruceness and neatness made stranger than ever the strange variance
+between the stiff, magpie black and white of dress clothes, and the
+depth and colour of music.
+
+He played the whole ballade; sketchily where the technical difficulties
+came thick and fast, but keeping the shape, never losing the swinging
+rhythm.
+
+Its concluding phrases were dimmed by the need of finding something to
+say that should convey her right to say anything at all; but when the
+last chord stood upon the air, the performance seemed to have been a
+collaboration before which they now sat equally committed. And when his
+face came round, its smile was an acknowledgment of this.
+
+For an instant she felt that nothing could fit but a gratefully
+affectionate salute and then a “How’s old So-and-So in these days?”
+after the manner of men of his type drifting happily about upon the
+surfaces of life. And when she said: “You got the whole of it this
+time,” it was as if the unexpressed remainder had indeed passed across
+to him, as if she were the newly-arrived friend whose presence somewhere
+upstairs had made him so radiant during dinner and afterwards sent him
+to pour out his happiness in the deserted little salon.
+
+“After a fashion,” he said with the little flicker of the eyelids that
+was his way, from sixth-form or from undergraduate days, of sustaining
+for further speech the pose of his turned head and smiling face:
+“There’s no one like him, is there?”
+
+“You were playing last evening just after I came. For a moment I
+couldn’t believe that ballade was actually here. I heard it long ago,
+and never since, and I’ve never been able to recall the theme.”
+
+“I’m _so_ glad,” he said with his little note of distress. “I’ve been
+trying for _days_ to get it all back.”
+
+For him, too, it came out of a past, and brought that past into this
+little Swiss room, spread it across whatever was current in his life,
+showed him himself unchanged. And in that past they had lived in the
+same world, seen and felt in the same terms the things that are there
+forever before life has moved. So far they were kindred. But since then
+she had been flung out into another world; belonged to the one in which
+he had gone forward only through an appreciative understanding of its
+code, of what it was that created its self-operating exclusiveness. He
+did not yet know that she stood outside the charmed circle, had been
+only an occasional visitor, and that now, visiting again after years of
+absence, she was hovering between the desire to mask and remain within
+it and her proper business as a Lycurgan: to make him aware of the
+worlds outside his own, let him see that his innocent happiness was kept
+going by his innocent mental oblivion.
+
+And whilst they called up cherished names and collided in agreement she
+wondered what these people who lived in exile from reality could find in
+their music beyond escape into the self for whom in their state of
+continuous urbane association there was so little space; and presently
+became aware of lively peace filling the intervals between their to and
+fro of words, distracting attention from them, abolishing everything but
+itself and its sure meaning: so that into this Swiss stillness of frost
+without and electricity within nothing had been present of the
+Switzerland that had brought them both here, and now suddenly came back,
+enhanced, a single unbounded impression that came and was gone, that was
+the face of its life now begun in her as memory.
+
+She read her blissful truancy in his eyes, his recognition of their
+having fallen apart, but not of its cause, which he thought was perhaps
+the monotony of their continuous agreement, and was now swiftly seeking
+a fresh bridge that in an instant, since clearly he intended to prolong
+the sitting, he would, deferentially flickering his eyelids, take
+courage to fling.
+
+But into the little pause came the sound of footsteps approaching
+through the hall, and an intensity of listening that was their common
+confession of well-being and was filling them with a wealth of eager
+communication that must now be postponed until to-morrow. But to-morrow
+the college friend would be in possession; there was only this evening,
+a solitary incident. Perhaps the door would open upon someone who would
+straightway withdraw, leaving the way open for the waiting conversation.
+And the college friend had come only for a few days ...
+
+But this falling from grace was rebuked by the reminder of Vereker’s
+all-round niceness. He would, of course, retain the intruder. If it were
+a man there would be three-cornered talk enlivened by what was being
+sacrificed to it. But with the opening of the door, as she raised her
+eyes towards it and caught in passing a glimpse of him upon his music
+stool, out of action and alone, she saw that dear and nice as he was,
+had always been, he could not fully engage her, was real to her on a
+level just short of reaching down to the forces of her nature; was
+pathetically, or culpably, a stranded man; subsisting.
+
+Guerini: huge, filling the doorway, hesitating for a moment and
+retreating, quietly closing the door, but not before Vereker wheeling
+round on his music-stool, had seen his departing form.
+
+It was his unexpectedness, the having forgotten him so that he came like
+an apparition, that had sent him away. Even so, a woman of the world
+would have promptly become a smiling blank and suitably vocal; or
+withdrawn and expressionless in the manner of a hotel guest only partly
+in possession of a room now to be partly taken over by another. But she
+had left her thoughts standing in her face, leaving Vereker, who had
+turned just too late, to be hostess.
+
+Wheeling back to face her, he was again the gentle companion from the
+past. In his elegant sunny voice he was recalling their morning’s talk,
+begging at once with his despairing little frown, for more light on the
+subject of property in land. It was clear that these things had never
+come his way. It was after all not his fault that his education had held
+his eyes closed, that they had since been kept closed by wealth and ease
+taken for granted. And in his way he had kept fine. His adoration for
+his gods of art and literature was alive and genuine—and he was a
+sportsman. It was difficult face to face with his gentle elegance to
+remember that he was distinguishing himself in an exacting sport.
+Repentant of her condemnation she set forth the steps of the reasoning
+and the groups of facts, saw him eagerly intent—not upon herself but
+upon this new picture of life, wrestling step by step with what he saw
+far off—and presently had the joy of seeing him see how economic
+problems stood rooted in the holding of land at rent. But he was only
+one; there were thousands of men, nice men, needing only hints, as
+blinkered as he.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER IV
+
+
+Hurrying through her dressing to keep the appointment that had not been
+made and whose certainty in her own mind was challenged in vain by all
+the probabilities, she opened her door upon the silent corridor;
+stillness and silence as if everyone else in the hotel had been spirited
+away leaving clear, within the strange surroundings in which for a while
+she was set down, the familiar pathway of her life. And when she reached
+the dining-room the sight of them there, side by side at breakfast in
+the brilliant morning light with no one else in the room save herself
+approaching, had for a moment the hard unreality of things deliberately
+arranged. She saw them very clearly and it was as if neither of them
+were there; as if they were elsewhere each on his own path from which
+this tacit meeting was a digression.
+
+But before she was half-way to the table they were rising. Their
+breakfast over, they were going off into their day. She was too late;
+her haste was justified of its wisdom. Reaching her place, she murmuring
+a casual greeting, turned away towards the spaces of her own day
+opening, beyond this already vanishing small disappointment, as brightly
+as the light shining in from the sunlit snow.
+
+They halted a moment while Vereker introduced his friend to whose
+height, as she sat down to the table, she glanced up to meet the intent
+dark gaze of a man on guard. She was already far away, and in the
+instant of her hurried astonished return to face for the first and
+perhaps the last time this man who was challenging her, the eyes were
+averted and the two men sat down: to freshly broken rolls and steaming
+cups.
+
+The little self-arranged party was secure in the morning stillness that
+was the divine invisible host equally dear to all three. Happy in this
+fulfilment of premonition, she sat silent, delighting in the challenge
+left, miscarried and superfluous upon the empty air, wickedly delighting
+in the friend’s discomfort in following the dictates of the code
+forbidding him again to look across until she should have spoken, and
+confining his large gaze within the range of his small immediate
+surroundings. Refusing rescue, she busied herself with breakfast,
+enjoying his large absurdity, free, while he paid the well-deserved
+penalty of his innocently thwarted attack, to observe to her heart’s
+content.
+
+He sat taking sanctuary with Vereker—who at his sunny best was making
+conversation about the trials in store—slightly turned towards him and
+away from the barred vista across which no doubt, before she came in,
+his large gaze had comfortably extended; responding now and again with
+thoughtful groans.
+
+Beside Vereker’s sunburned fairness he was an oiled bronze; heavy good
+features, heavy well-knit frame. Lethargic, or just a very tired man on
+a holiday, bemused by his sudden translation. Superficially he was
+formidable, “strong and silent.” His few remarks, thrown into the talk
+that Vereker kept up while he waited for his two friends to fraternise
+and admire each other, came forth upon a voice deliberately cultivated
+since his undergraduate days, a ponderous monotone, the voice of a man
+infallible, scorning argument, permanently in the right. Its sound was
+accompanied by a swaying movement from side to side of his body bent
+forward from the hips: suggesting some big bovine creature making up its
+mind to charge.
+
+She recalled other meetings with his kind, instant mutual dislike and
+avoidance. This time there was no escape. She was linked to him by
+Vereker, obliged by Vereker to tolerate his presence, sit out his
+portentousness and be aware, since Vereker found him so very fine, of
+the qualities hidden within. Courage of course, tenacity, strength to
+adventure in strange places. Were such things enough to justify this
+pose of omniscience? With that pose it was forever impossible to make
+terms; and if this were not a single occasion, if there were further
+meetings, there would sooner or later be a crossing of swords. She
+considered his armoury.
+
+Mentally it was a flimsy array; a set of generalisations, born of the
+experience that had matured him and become now his whole philosophy,
+simple and tested, immovable; never suspected of holding good only for
+the way of living upon which it was based.
+
+The fact of the existence of life had either never entered his head or
+been left behind in the days before he crystallised. He had now become
+one of those who say “our first parents” and see a happy protégé of an
+entirely masculine Jehovah duped into age-long misery by the first of
+the charmers. Homage and contempt for women came equally forth from him,
+the manifest faces of his fundamental ignorance. The feminine world
+existed for him as something apart from life as he knew it, and to be
+kept apart. Within that world “charm” and “wit” drew him like magnets
+and he never guessed their source; knew nothing of the hinterlands in
+the minds of women who assumed masks, put him at his ease, appeared not
+to criticize. And such women were the sum of his social knowledge. One
+day he would be a wise old man “with an eye for a pretty face,” wise
+with the wisdom that already was cheating him of life.
+
+There was no hope for him. His youth had left him Vereker, his chum
+whose sunny simplicity had always disarmed him, who did not resent his
+portentous manner. From women he would have, till old age, flattery for
+his strength. From his workers nothing but work, and respect for his
+English justice and honesty. It was inconceivable that anyone should
+ever pierce his armour; the ultimate male density backed by “means” and
+“position.”
+
+His pose had found its bourne in his present position of authority, his
+state of being bound to present a god-like serenity; and it had become
+so habitual that even when it was put out of action he could not
+disencumber himself of it. At this moment, for lack of proper feminine
+response from across the table, it was actually embarrassing him. To
+proper feminine response, charming chatter or charming adoring silence
+he would pay tribute, the half respectful, half condescending interest
+of the giant in his hours of ease.
+
+Unable any longer to endure silently, she rode across him with speech;
+pictures, for Vereker, of her yesterday’s adventure. Lively and shapely,
+inspired by the passage of wrath. Her voice had a bright hard tone,
+recognisable as the tone of the lively talker.
+
+She was aware of the friend accepting her as the bright hard mondaine;
+at once attentive, his pose relaxed so far as to be represented only by
+the eyebrows left a little lifted and still knitting his deliberately
+contemplative brow. He was looking, poor dear, at the pictures, enjoying
+them, their mechanism, their allusions. And she, for a weary empty
+interval, was being a social success. It was a victory for the friend, a
+bid for his approval.
+
+Vereker was puzzled, meeting a stranger; a little taken aback. But when
+grown weary of the game of brightly arranged exaggerations, she relapsed
+into simplicity, he recovered at once and again brought forth his
+ski-club. The friend sat by while one after another the persuasive
+arguments came forth, smiling with the slightly lifted brow that was now
+his apology for smiling at all.
+
+And suddenly he was grave, intent as he had been at the first moment;
+this time towards the door, outside which sounded Daphne’s eager
+breathless voice and ceased in the doorway. Her swift slight footsteps
+crossed the room and brought her to a standstill just in sight, gazing
+at the stranger.
+
+He remained grave, darkly gazing. Vereker, half-risen, eager to be off,
+was looking at him in the manner of a hostess arrested in giving the
+signal for departure. For a moment the man and the child stared at each
+other, and then she moved stealthily, rounding the table-end. A light
+came into his unsmiling face. With a rush she was upon him, mouth set,
+eyes blazing, clenched fists beating upon his breast.
+
+“_Eaden_,” she panted, “evil, _evil_ Eaden.”
+
+There was no defence, no display of comic fear, no wrist-catching
+dominance. And when she desisted and stood back still searching him with
+grave face a little thrust forward in her eagerly-thinking way, he
+turned more sideways from the table, to attend while hurriedly with the
+air of one having other business on hand and no time to waste, she
+catechised him. He answered simply, with just her manner of one cumbered
+with affairs and eager nevertheless to contrive meetings; devouring all
+the time with his eyes the strange hurried little face, the round wide
+eyes set upon something seen afar.
+
+They had recognised each other. To the rest of the party she was a
+quaint, precocious child. This man saw the strange power and beauty of
+the spirit shining in those eyes almost round, almost protruding, and,
+if there had been in the blue of them, that toned so gently into the
+pearly blue surrounding, a shade more intensity of colour, merely
+brilliant.
+
+“You _must_,” she said, her lips closing firmly on her ultimatum, head a
+little out-thrust, hands behind back. “You’d better go now,” with a
+glance at the group that had gathered round. She pattered swiftly away
+to her table in the background.
+
+“Daphnee’ll always get what she wants with her nagging,” said the Skerry
+youth standing by.
+
+“She will get what she wants with her beaux yeux,” said Miriam warmly,
+and saw the little form panting along its ardent way up through life,
+seeking and testing and never finding, in any living soul.
+
+“_Yes_,” groaned Eaden and impatiently sighed away the wrath in his eyes
+set upon the departing figure of the youth. Again they were lit and
+gentle and as if still gazing upon Daphne. He sat for a moment, paying
+tribute to a suddenly found agreement before joining Vereker held up at
+the door in the little crowd of newly-arriving breakfasters.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was something like cycling in traffic, only that this scattered
+procession making for the rink seemed all one party. The _achtungs_ of
+those starting on their journey from the top of the slope rising behind
+her rang out like greetings, and the agonised shrieks coming up from
+below as one and another neared the gap visible now in the distance as
+an all-too-swiftly approaching confusion of narrowly avoided disasters,
+were full of friendly laughter: the fearless laughter of those
+experienced in collisions. For a moment she was tempted to steer into
+the snow and wait until the road should be clear. But the sudden
+sideways swerve of a toboggan just ahead called forth unawares her first
+_achtung_. It rang, through the moment which somehow manœuvred her clear
+of the obstacle, most joyously upon the air and hailed her—seeming to be
+her very life sounding out into the far distances of this paradise,
+claiming them as long ago it had claimed the far distances surrounding
+outdoor games—and sent her forward one of the glad fellowship of
+reckless tobogganners whom now unashamed she could leave to go along her
+chosen way.
+
+Ignoring yells from behind she slowed to pass the gap and its glimpse of
+the descending track dotted with swiftly gliding humanity, took the
+sharp bend beyond it and was out of sight careering down the first slope
+of the valley run with sky and landscape sweeping upwards, mountains
+gigantically sweeping upwards to the movement of her downward rush.
+
+The dreaded bends arrived each too swiftly with its threat of revealing
+upon the smooth length of the next slope an upward-coming sleigh or
+village children steering down at large. Slope after slope showed clear
+and empty, each steeper than the last, and here and there a patch of ice
+sent her headlong, sent the landscape racing upwards until her heels
+could find purchase for a steadying dig and bring back the joy of
+steering forward forever through this moving radiance.
+
+The fencing was growing lower, almost buried in deep snow. A sweeping
+turn and ahead, at the end of a long smooth slope, the floor of the
+valley, the end. From a drive of both heels she leaned back and shot
+forward and flew, feet up, down and down through the crystal air become
+a rushing wind, until the runners slurred into the soft snow, drove it
+in wreaths about her, and slowed and stopped dead leaving her thrown
+forward with the cord slack in her hands, feet down, elbows on knees
+come up to meet them, a motionless triumphantly throbbing atom of
+humanity in a stillness that at once kept her as motionless as itself to
+listen to its unexpected voice: the clear silvery tinkle, very far away,
+of water upon rock; some little mountain stream freed to movement by the
+sun, making its way down into the valley. She listened for a while to
+the perfect little sound, the way it filled the vast scene, and
+presently turned to search the snowy levels, longing to locate it and
+catch a glimpse, defying distance, of the sunlit runnel. The mountains
+were cliffs upon the hither side, their shoulders and summits invisible
+until one looked up to find them remote in the ascended sky.
+
+Down here at their feet was _terra firma_, broad levels on either side
+the windings of the frozen river that was trimmed here and there with
+bare trees sparse and straggling, their gnarled roots protruding through
+the snow that bulged its rim. A bird-cry sounded from a tree at the
+roadside; on silent wings a magpie, brilliant in sunlit black and white
+sailed forth and away across the wastes of snow. Birds and the tinkling
+runnel, the sole inhabitants of this morning solitude.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Whose magic survived the long backward climb and the run down to the
+rink amidst the sociable echoes of the morning’s tumult, survived the
+knowledge that in the minds of these busy skaters it was merely the
+bottom of the hill; nothing to do down there unless you were going on
+down to the station to meet and sleigh up with someone newly arrived.
+
+Here on their tree-encircled rink they were together all day as in a
+room. Passing and re-passing each other all day long. Held together by
+the enchantment of this continuous gliding. Everyone seemed to be
+gliding easily about. Only here and there a beginner shuffled along with
+outstretched jerking arms and anxious face. It was skating escaped from
+the niggardly opportunities of England and grown perfect. Long sweeping
+curves; dreaming eyes seraphic, even the sternest betrayed by the
+enchantment in their eyes. There were many of these in this English
+crowd. Many who knew there was absurdity in the picture of grown persons
+sweeping gravely about for hours on end. Only a great enchantment could
+keep them in countenance and keep them going on. Envy approached and
+stared her in the face. But only for a moment. She could skate, rather
+better than the beginners. In a day or two she could be sweeping
+enchantedly about. It was a temptation answered before it presented
+itself, only presenting itself because it could move more quickly than
+thought: to be racing about on a sled was a reckless flouting of the
+prescribed programme, but innocent, begun in forgetfulness. To have come
+and seen, to sit and stroll about each day just seeing, would have been
+joy enough.
+
+But when she looked across from the grey crowded rink and its belt of
+ragged bare trees to the mountains standing in full sunlight and filling
+half the opposite sky and saw away above the pinewoods ascending beyond
+the little bridge the distant high white saddle of the pass with its
+twin peaks rising on either side—they startled her with their heightened
+beauty. These enchanted skaters, cooped upon their sunk enclosure had
+enlivened the surrounding scene not only by bringing forgetfulness of
+it, but because she knew the secret of their bliss, had shared long ago
+the experience that kept them confined here all day.
+
+Gliding, as if forever; the feeling, coming even with the first
+uncertain balance, of breaking through into an eternal way of being. In
+all games it was there, changing the aspect of life, making friends
+dearer, making even those actually disliked dear, as long as they were
+within the rhythm of the game. In dancing it was there. But most
+strongly that sense of being in an eternal way of living had come with
+skating in the foggy English frost. And this it must be that kept all
+these English eagerly and shamelessly fooling about on bladed feet;
+eternal life.
+
+It might be wrong. Wells might be right. Golf. There must be a secret
+too in golf. The mighty swipe, the swirl of the landscape about the
+curving swing of the body, the onward march? All these must count even
+if the players think only of the science of the game, only of excelling
+an opponent. Even in safe and easy games there is an element of
+eternity, something of the quality there must be in sports that include
+the thrill of the life-risk. Savage sports. Fitness, the sense of
+well-being of the healthy animal? But what _is_ health? What _is_ the
+sense of well-being?
+
+“We know _nothing_. That at least you must admit: that we walk in
+darkness.”
+
+“And proclaim ourselves enlightened by awareness of the fact.”
+
+A figure swinging swiftly up the rink, a different movement cutting
+across the maze of familiar movements, drawing her eyes to follow it
+until it was lost and watch until again it came by: clothed in uniform
+purplish brown close-fitting, a belted jerkin, trousers, slenderly
+baggy, tapering down into flexibly fitting boots. A strong lissome body
+that beautifully shaped its clothing and moved in long easy rushes,
+untroubled by shackled feet.
+
+He was not perhaps doing anything very wonderful, just rushing easily
+about, in the manner of a native of some land of ice and snow. But he
+transformed the English skaters to jerking marionettes, clumsily
+clothed, stiff-jointed. Visibly jointed at neck and waist, at knees and
+ankles and elbows. Their skating seemed now to be nicely calculated
+mechanical balancing of jointed limbs, each limb trying to be
+autonomous, their unity, such as it was, achieved only by methods
+thought out and carefully acquired. They seemed to be giving exhibitions
+of style, with minds and bodies precariously in tune. He was style
+spontaneously alive. His whole soul was in his movements.
+
+She made her way to a near bench under the trees to watch for him.
+Sitting there with her feet upon the ice she became one with the
+skaters, felt their efforts and controls, the demand of the thin hard
+blade for the perpetual movements of loss and recovery. Not all were
+English, skating with reservations. Here a little Frenchman with arms
+folded on his breast came by as if dancing, so elegantly pointed were
+the swinging feet above which gracefully he leaned now forward now back.
+Effortlessly. In his stroke there was no jerk of a heavy-muscular drive,
+yet he covered as much space as the English, and more quickly. Behind
+him an Englishwoman with a bird’s-wing pointing back along the side of
+her little seal cap, going perfectly gracefully in smooth slight sweeps;
+serene.
+
+Near at hand two men practised trick skating, keeping clear the space
+about them with their whirling limbs. They swept about with eyes intent,
+and suddenly one or other would twirl, describe a circle with an
+outflung leg and recover, with an absurd hop. Clever and difficult no
+doubt, but so very ugly that it seemed not worth doing. The stout man’s
+hop seemed as though it must smash the ice. Between their dervish whirls
+they talked. They were arguing. Amiably quarrelling; the occasional
+hysterical squeal in the voice of the stout man revealing “politics.”
+They were at loggerheads over the housekeeping, the lime-lit, well-paid,
+public housekeeping, “affairs,” the difficult responsible important
+business that was “beyond the powers of women,” that was also “dirty
+work for which women were too good”; wrangling. The stout man executed a
+terrific twirl and brought up facing his opponent who had just spoken.
+He advanced upon him bent and sliding, arms dangling low: “Just _so_,”
+he chanted amiably and, recovering the upright, presented a face really
+foolish, a full-moon foolishness, kindly perfection of inability to see
+further than his good British nose: “We’re back at what I told Hammond
+this morning: we _can’t afford_ to ignore the _Trades Union
+Secretaries_.” With a swift turn he was off before the other man could
+respond, skating away beyond their enclosure, smiling his delight,
+staring ahead, with wise eyes, at nothing at all but the spectacle of
+his opponent caught out and squashed.
+
+The spectacle of his complacency was profoundly disquieting. He was the
+typical kindly good-natured John Bull. Gently nurtured, well-educated,
+“intelligent,” ready to take any amount of time and trouble in “getting
+at facts” and “thinking things out.” And he was a towering bully.
+Somewhere within his naïve pugnacity was the guilty consciousness of
+being more pleased in downing an opponent than concerned for human
+welfare. There was no peace of certainty in him. He had scored and was
+flushed with victory. And all over English politics was this perpetual
+prize-fighting. The power of life and death was in the hands of men
+playing for victory; for their own side.
+
+Morning and evening in some hotel that big man’s voice boomed
+incessantly. Behind it a kindly disposition and a set of fixed ideas. No
+mind.
+
+“Don’t you skeete?”
+
+Making for the bench, bent forward to reach it hands first was the
+younger Croydon girl; behind her the other, rallentando, balancing to a
+standstill.
+
+She had greeted them, ere she was aware, with the utmost enthusiasm.
+Smiling in their way, a gentle relaxation of the features that left them
+composed, they stood about her, pleased to see and greet a stranger who
+was also an old friend, renewing their great adventure. At the same time
+they were innocently rebuking her outbreak.
+
+In her suburban past she had instinctively avoided their kind, scented a
+snare in their refined gentility, liked them only for the way, in the
+distance, going decorously in pretty clothes along tree-lined roadways,
+they contributed to the brightness of spring. Meeting them out here,
+representative of England, the middle-class counterparts, in their
+ardent composure, of the hotel people who so strangely had received her
+as a relative, she wanted in some way to put forth her claim as one who
+knew of old their world of villa and garden, their gentle enclosed
+world.
+
+“It’s glorious; we’re having a lovely tame,” said the younger, looking
+away down the rink: an English rose, thoroughly pretty in the
+characterless English way, shapely sullen little face, frowning under
+the compulsion of direct statements. Her hair, that in the train had
+been a neat bun, hung now in a broad golden plait to her waist where its
+ends disappeared behind a large black bow like a bird with wings
+outspread.
+
+And now with one seated close on each side of her it was with difficulty
+that she attended to their talk so clearly did it exhibit their world as
+a replica of the one just above it: as a state of perpetual urbane
+association; conformity to a code in circumstances more restricted, upon
+a background more uniform, and searched by the light of a public opinion
+that was sterner than the one prevailing above. All the bourgeois
+philistine in her came forth to sun itself in their presence, zestfully
+living their lives, loving their friends and relatives, ignoring
+everyone who lived outside the charmed circle.
+
+One against the other, they joyously relived the short time whose
+sunburn had so becomingly accentuated their Blair Leighton fairness.
+Their stories centred round the success or breakdown of the practical
+jokes that seemed to be the fabric of life at their hotel ... all the
+old practical jokes: even apple-pie beds. In and out of these stories
+went Mr. Parry who was presently pointed out upon the ice; a stout
+little dark man skating about at random, his movements visibly hampered
+by the burden of his sociability, his eyes turning, to the detriment of
+his steering, towards everyone he passed in his search for prey.
+
+“He makes us all _roar_; every evening.”
+
+There were others, some whose names and their rôles, as assistants or
+willing victims of the schemes of Mr. Parry seemed sufficiently to
+describe them, and, as central decoration in the picture, these two
+girls newly arrived and certainly Mr. Parry’s most adored recruits,
+ready trained by a brother in the science of practical joking, yet not
+hoydenish; demure and sweet and, to his loneliness, the loneliness of an
+undignified little man, not quite grotesque, and incapable of inspiring
+romantic affection, figures of romance.
+
+Growing weary of their inexhaustible theme—of waiting for the emergence
+of some sign of consciousness of the passing moment, a dropping of
+references backwards or forwards, that would leave them in league
+together, there as individuals—she pressed them for personal impressions
+of the adventure in its own right, the movement into strangeness, the
+being off the chain of accustomed things. They grew vague, lost interest
+and fell presently into a silence from which she pulled them by an
+enquiry about the plait.
+
+In the midst of the story of the plait and just as some people were
+being pointed out who still thought them three sisters, two with their
+hair up, and one with a plait who did not appear at dinner, came a
+longing to escape, the sense of a rendez-vous being missed, with the
+scene and the time of day. But her preparations for flight were stayed
+by their payment for her interest in the plait. They plied her with
+questions; presently they were offering to lend her skating-boots, and
+choosing from amongst the guests at their hotel, people she would like.
+They were pitying her, thinking that she must be having a poor time and
+determined at once that she should do more than just stand upon the
+edge, sunning herself in the glow of the life they were finding so
+entrancing.
+
+But her contemplation of the desert that must be, from their point of
+view, the life of a woman obviously poor and apparently isolated, took
+her for a moment far away, and when she returned the link between them
+was snapped. Her silence had embarrassed their habit of rapid give and
+take. Making vague promises, she took leave, rescued by their immediate
+reversion to the forms of speech set for such occasions, from holding
+forth upon the subject of the dead level of happiness existing all over
+the world independent of circumstances. They would have thought her both
+pious and insane.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+All the afternoon they had been in harmony, strolling and standing about
+together in the snow until there seemed nothing more to say; and after
+each run there had been something more to say. Till Italy lost all
+strangeness but its beauty and he had seemed a simpler Michael free from
+Michael’s certainty that everyone in the world was marching to
+annihilation. It was the discovery of a shared sense of life at first
+hand that had made them not fear saying the very small things.
+
+And suddenly there was a wall, dividing. No more communication possible;
+the mountains grown small and bleak and sad and even now, in being alone
+upon the promontory there was no peace, in all the wide prospect no
+beauty.
+
+Why was it so much a matter of life and death, for men as for women? Why
+did each always gather all its forces for the conflict?
+
+If all he said were a part of the light by which he lived he should have
+been able to remain calm. But he had not remained calm. He had been
+first uneasy, then angry, and then sorry for the destruction of their
+friendship.
+
+“The thing most needed is for men to _recognise_ their illusion, to
+leave off while there is yet time their newest illusion of life as only
+process. Leave off trying to fit into their mechanical scheme a being
+who lives all the time in a world they have never entered. They seem
+incapable of unthinking the suggestions coming to them from centuries of
+masculine attempts to represent women only in relation to the world as
+known to men.”
+
+It was then he was angry.
+
+“How else shall they be represented?”
+
+“They _can’t_ be represented by men. Because by every word they use men
+and women mean different things.”
+
+Probably Italian women led men by the nose in the old way, the way of
+letting them imagine themselves the whole creation. And indeed the
+problem presently will be: how to save men from collapsing under their
+loss of prestige. Their awakening, when it comes, will make them
+pitiful. At present they are surrounded out in the world by women who
+are trying to be as much like them as possible. That will cease when
+commerce and politics are socialised.
+
+“Art,” “literature,” systems of thought, religions, all the fine
+products of masculine leisure that are so lightly called “immortal.” Who
+makes them immortal? A few men in each generation who are in the same
+attitude of spirit as the creators, and loudly claim them as humanity’s
+highest spiritual achievement, condoning in those who produce them any
+failure, any sacrifice of the lives about them to the production of
+these crumbling monuments. Who has decreed that “works of art” are
+humanity’s highest achievement?
+
+Daphne, preceded by her hurried voice; followed by her maid carrying a
+tray. She came swiftly in her manner of a small panting tug, eyes
+surveying ahead with gaze too wide for detail.
+
+“Put it there; near the lady.”
+
+Hitching herself into a chair, she sighed deeply, but not to attract
+attention, nor in the manner of a conversational opening. She had,
+without self-consciousness, the preoccupied air of one who snatches a
+tiresome necessary meal, grudging the expense of time. All her compact
+stillness was the stillness of energy momentarily marking time. Her
+face, distorted by efforts, mouth firmly closed, with a goodly bite of
+the stout little roll, was busily thinking and talking. Continuous.
+There was no cessation in her way of being, no dependence, none of the
+tricks of appeal and demand that make most children so quickly
+wearisome. Yet she was a baby sitting there; a lonely infant, rotund.
+
+Her face came round, so perfectly impersonal in its gravity that Miriam
+knew the irrepressible smile with which she met it for an affront, felt
+herself given up to the child’s judgment, ready to be snubbed.
+
+For a moment the round eyes surveyed her, deep and clear, a summer sea
+in shadow, and then, with her head a little butted forward in the way
+she had of holding it during her breathless sentences, she hurriedly
+swallowed her mouthful and cried:
+
+“You’re _nice_! I didn’t know!” Condemnation and approval together.
+Scarcely daring to breathe she waited while the child drew near,
+shouting for her maid who came grumbling and departed smiling when the
+tables were drawn side by side.
+
+“That’s-my-beecely-German-nurse-I-hate-her.”
+
+“She talks German with you?”
+
+“She talks. I don’t listen. She has a beecely voice. Vicky Vereker says
+she can’t helper voice, can’t help being a silly stupid and Evil Eaden
+didn’t say anything and Vicky said show him how she speaks.”
+
+“And did you?”
+
+“I should have been _sick_. Evil Eaden’s gone ski-ing again. Evil Eaden
+likes Napoleon and Vicky doesn’t; he wouldn’t.”
+
+“Why do you like Napoleon so much?”
+
+“Because I like him because he’s the good dear little big one. Everybody
+is the big silly small one almost.”
+
+Meditating on Napoleon as a pattern for womanhood, Miriam heard the
+returned ski-ers arrive upon the platform and watched the eager calm
+little face that was still busily talking, for a sign.
+
+“When I’ve done my beecely edjacation, when I go back to Indja,” it was
+saying, looking out with blind eyes across the bright intolerable
+valley.
+
+Vereker’s voice, gently vibrant and sunny, sounded near by, and a deep
+groan from Eaden just visible, collapsed in one of the small green
+chairs.
+
+“I’ve got to go now,” said Daphne, relinquishing her second roll and
+sliding to the floor. Covering the small space with her little
+quick-march, she pulled up in front of Eaden and stood surveying, hands
+behind back, feet a little apart, head thrust forward. Napoleon in a
+pinafore.
+
+“You’re dead beat, that’s what you are.”
+
+“Daphne, I am. I’m a broken man. Don’t pound me. But you may stroke me
+if you like.”
+
+On a table at his side stood a large brown bear on ski, his gift to her,
+bought on his way home from the old woman at the corner and that now
+they were surveying together. She had approached it with two little
+eager steps and pulled up just short with her arms at her sides, volubly
+talking just out of hearing but to his delight who heard and watched
+her. Between her sallies she sought his face, to bring him to
+contemplate and agree. Did it please her? She had not yet handled it.
+Could anything please her? The giver and the giving were calling forth
+her best, that moved him and Vereker as men are moved at the sight of
+life in eager operation, spontaneous as they never seem to be,
+commanding and leading them. Vereker was amused. Eaden disarmed and
+delighted, protective of a splendour. Suddenly she seized the bear in
+her arms and held it while she talked and put it carefully down and
+looked back at it as she turned with her little quick-march to someone
+calling from the house.
+
+“It’s all right, Daphne.” Eaden’s voice eager, free of its drawl, crying
+out in pity and wrath. He had leapt from his chair and was gathering and
+fixing together the detached parts, bear and ski and pole found by
+Daphne returned, lying as if broken upon the table at his side. She
+stood speechless, a little forlorn child red-cheeked and tearful in
+dismay. A little way off stood the Skerry youth with his grin.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER V
+
+
+What had brought this wakening so near to the edge of night? The
+mountains were still wan against a cold sky, whitening the morning
+twilight with their snow.
+
+How long to wait, with sleep gone that left no borderland of drowsiness,
+until the coming of their gold?
+
+And in a moment she had seen forever the ruby gleaming impossibly from
+the topmost peak: stillness of joy held still for breathless watching of
+the dark ruby set suddenly like a signal upon the desolate high crag.
+
+It could not last, would soon be plain sunlight.
+
+Already it was swelling, growing brighter, clearing to crimson. In a
+moment it became a star with piercing rays that spread and slowly tilted
+over the upper snow a flood of rose.
+
+Each morning this miracle of light had happened before her sleeping
+eyes. It might not again find her awake. But it had found her awake,
+carried her away in a moment of pure delight that surely was absolution?
+And when presently the rose had turned to the familiar gold creeping
+down to the valley it was more than the gold of yesterday. In watching
+its birth she had regained the first day’s sense of endless time. To-day
+was set in advance to the rhythm of endless light.
+
+To-day was an unfathomable loop within the time that remained before the
+end of Eaden’s visit, his short allowance that added, by being set
+within it, to her own longer portion. His coming had brought the earlier
+time to an end; made it a past, expanding in the distance. And beyond
+his far-off departure was a group of days with features yet unseen.
+Looking back upon that distant past it seemed impossible that the crest
+of her first week was not yet reached.
+
+Yet the few days that seemed so many had already fallen into a shape.
+Morning blessedness of leisure smiled down upon by the mountains again
+tawny in their sunlight, witnessed to by every part of the house
+wandered through; rich sense of strength unspent; joy of mere going out
+again into the wide scene, into the embrace of the crystal air; the
+first breath of its piny scent, of the scent of snow and presently the
+dry various scents confined within the little street, messengers of
+strange life being lived close at hand; the morning dive into the baking
+warmth of the post-office to find amongst the English vehement at their
+pigeon-holes the sharpest sense of being out in the world of the free;
+then the great event, the wild flight down to the valley’s sudden
+stillness.
+
+The afternoon with Guerini; but, after yesterday, there might be no
+afternoon with Guerini: freedom instead, for fresh discovery until
+tea-time, on the promontory in the midst of unpredictable groupings.
+Sunset and afterglow, high day moving away without torment or regret;
+the mountains, turning to a darkness in the sky; telling only of the
+sure approach of the deep bright world of evening.
+
+The gold-lit evening feast was still momentous, still under the spell of
+the setting, the silent host who kept the party always new.
+
+And it was in part the setting, the feeling of being out of the world
+and irresponsible, that last night had kept Eaden a docile listener. He
+had heard a little of the truth, at least something to balance the
+misrepresentations of socialism in the Tory press. But he had heard in a
+dream, outside life. Sitting on the stairs, huge in his meek correctness
+of evening dress. There was, to be sure, in face of Vereker’s
+determination, nothing else for him to do. But it was with one consent
+that they had all three subsided on the wide stairs, secure from the
+intrusions that menaced the little salon.
+
+And it was only for a moment she had sunned herself in the triumph of
+being claimed, forcibly enthroned in the sustaining blue gown upon the
+red-carpeted stairs with the best of the hotel’s male guests a little
+below on each side of her. After that moment there was only effort, the
+effort to make things clear, to find convincing answers to Vereker’s
+questions.
+
+And there were no witnesses, only Guerini, coming from the salon and
+apologetically past them up the stairs; and the maids, passing to and
+fro.
+
+There is no evening social centre in this hotel, no large room. That is
+why these sports-people like it. The day is concentrated within the
+daylight. The falling away after dinner is a turning towards the next
+day’s work.
+
+That Grindelsteig hotel must be rather fascinating. She thought I shared
+her disapproval of people “running up and down balconies and in and out
+of each other’s rooms all night long.” I did. Yet they are only carrying
+out my principles....
+
+She despises even those who come out for sport unless all day they are
+risking life and limb. So fragile and brittle-looking, so Victorian and
+lacy, yet living for her ski-parties with picked people from the other
+hotels; going off at dawn, swallowed up until dinner-time and then,
+straight to bed.
+
+The social promise of the first evening has miscarried. The social
+centre is the Oberland Ski-club; the rest, a mere putting in of time. I
+am living on the outskirts, looking for developments in the wrong place;
+have seen all there will be to see until the end of my stay.
+
+Into the golden sunlight fell the clashing of morning sleighbells
+describing the outdoor world. Listening to them she felt the vast
+surroundings that lately had become a setting, owing part of its
+entrancement to the delightful sense of success in a charming social
+atmosphere, re-asserting themselves in their own right, accusing her of
+neglect, showing the days winding themselves off to an end that would
+leave her in possession only of the valley road and the fields beyond
+the bridge.
+
+The dawn had wakened to remind her. Watching the coming of the light she
+had been restored to her first communion with it, back in the time when
+the people downstairs had seemed superfluity, thrown in with the rest.
+When all was over they would appear in the distance: bright figures of a
+momentary widening of her social horizon, unforgotten, but withdrawn
+into their own element; not going forward into her life as this winter
+paradise would go forward, brightening her days with the possibility of
+reunion.
+
+This morning she would break the snare, be a claimant for a lunch
+packet, an absentee for the whole day. With the coming of the far-off
+afternoon, Guerini, looking down from his window on to the promontory
+either to escape or to claim her company, would find no one there.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Even in terror there was gladness of swift movement that left her
+pressed like a niched effigy into the wall of the drift as the beast
+pranced by, revealing in its wake a slouching peasant; clear brilliant
+eyes brooding amidst unkempt shagginess, pipe at an angle of jaunty
+defiance to the steep his heedless tramping brought so near.
+
+She was honourably plastered with snow and the precious package that had
+leapt and might have hurled itself into the void was still safely on its
+string about her neck, but the narrow rising path bereft of its secrecy
+by evidence of homely levels above of field and farm was perhaps only a
+highway for humiliating perils. More cows might be coming round the
+bend; a whole herd. There might be—it would harmonise with the way life
+always seemed to respond to deliberate activity with a personal
+challenge—on this very day the dawn had drawn her away from beaten
+tracks, a general turning out of cattle for an airing; mountain cattle,
+prancing like colts.
+
+Man and cow were now upon the widening path, approaching the sloping
+field with the barn at the end, the cow trotting swiftly ahead, through
+the half buried posts beside the sunken open gate, and now careering
+hither and thither with flying tail, the powdery snow flung in wreaths
+about its course. It was half mad of course, poor thing, with the joy of
+release from one of those noisome steamy sheds whose reek polluted the
+air surrounding them and saddened the landscape with reminder of the
+price of happiness: oblivion of hidden, helpless suffering.
+
+But in summer-time this air-intoxicated captive would stand knee-deep in
+rich pasture; mild. Its colouring was mild, soft tan and creamy white,
+in ill-arranged large blots; and with its short legs, huge bony mass of
+head and shoulders from which the spine curved down as if sagging
+beneath the weight of the clumsy body, it missed the look of breeding,
+the even shape and colouring of lowland cattle. Its horns, too, had no
+style, rose small and sharp from the disproportionate mass of skull.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Almost without warning, so slight in the dense pinewood was the sound of
+its muffled gliding, the sled was upon her, heavy with piled logs and a
+ruffian perched upon them: slithering headlong, fitting and filling the
+banked path from side to side. Somehow she flung herself upon the
+root-encumbered bank, somehow hitched her feet clear of the sled as it
+rushed by. The villain, unmoved and placidly smoking, had not even
+shouted.
+
+No time to shout, no use _shouting_ she murmured breathless, smiling at
+the absurd scene, a treasure now that danger was past, a glimpse into
+local reality. But danger was past only for the moment. This pleasant
+wide path she had mistaken for a woodland walk winding and mounting
+safely amidst the peace of the pinewoods was a stern highway, almost a
+railway; formed like a railway to the exact dimensions of its traffic.
+
+Intently listening, going swiftly where the sides of the track were too
+high for an escaping sprawl, she toiled on and up and came presently to
+a gap and a view of the small hut seated clear of the pines, high
+against the pure blue upon its curve of unblemished snow, come down now
+nearly to her level and revealed as a châlet with burnished face,
+inhabited: above its chimney the air quivered in the heat of a
+clear-burning fire.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+The hotel lunch, opened upon the trestle table, looked pert, a stray
+intruder from the cheap sophisticated world of to-day into these rich
+and ancient shadows. The old woman, but for her bell-like, mountainy
+voice, was a gnarled witch moving amongst them, unattained by the cold
+light from the small low windows that struck so short a way into the
+warmly varnished interior.
+
+And it seemed by magic that she produced the marvellous coffee in whose
+subtle brewing was a sadness, the sadness of her lonely permanence above
+the waste of snow and woods—old grandmother, a living past, her world
+disappeared, leaving only the circling of the seasons about her emptied
+being.
+
+In this haunting presence the triumph of distance accomplished, the
+delicious sense of known worlds waiting far below, world behind world in
+a chain whose end was the far-off London she represented here in this
+high remoteness, could not perfectly flourish, came in full only when
+the silence had had time to fill itself with joy that was too strong to
+be oppressed by the departed ancient voice that was like the echo of a
+sound falling elsewhere.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Again, recalling the far-off morning, a dark barn-like room. But the
+woman opened a door at the end of it, led the way through a passage
+still darker: another door and she was out upon the edge of the world,
+upon a dilapidated little grey balcony jutting over an abyss. As far as
+sight could reach were sunlit mountain tops range beyond range till they
+grew far and faint.
+
+Faced alone, the scene, after the first moment’s blissfully ranging
+perception, was saddened in its grandeur through the absence there of
+someone else perceiving. Thousands, of course, had seen it from this
+perch in the centre of the row of slummy little balconies. But so
+splendid was the triumph of the unexpected mountains ranged and lit that
+no company, even exclamatory, could break their onslaught. Alone, there
+was too heavy a burden of feeling in the speechless company of this
+suddenly revealed magnificence.
+
+The woman coming out with the tea that one day she must take here
+accompanied, was brisk about the view: an adjunct, thrown in gratis with
+her refreshments which were good and which presently caused the
+mountains, turned away from, to be felt preparing a friendliness;
+becoming the last, best reward of her day’s accomplishments.
+
+The way home down and down and across the levels to the rink and up the
+little homely slope into Oberland would be a jog-trot taken half asleep
+to the haven of things small and known amidst which she would sit
+renewed, to-day’s long life-time stilled to a happy throbbing of the
+nerves, a bemused beaming in the midst of friends. Its incidents blurred
+that would come back one day clearer, more shining than all the rest?
+
+Warned by a growing chill she turned to face the mountains in farewell
+and found them lit by the first of the afterglow. Far away in the haze
+beyond the visible distance a group of slender peaks showed faintly,
+rose-misted pinnacles of a dream-city from whose spires would presently
+gleam the rubies of farewell.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER VI
+
+
+The solitary excursion had made a gap in the sequence of days. Those
+standing behind it were now far away, and yesterday had failed to bridge
+the gap and join itself to their serenity. To-day looked shallow and
+hurried, with short hours beyond it rushing ahead to pause in the
+sunlight of the ski-fest and then to fly, helter-skelter towards the
+end.
+
+Eaden’s departure was helping time to hurry. In the distance it had
+promised to leave things as they were before he came. But now that it
+was at hand it seemed a sliding away of everything.
+
+There was no depth in the morning light.
+
+She turned to survey the scene on which it fell and saw the early gold
+stealing faithfully towards the valley. Once Eaden had gone this
+thinned-out urgency of time would cease. For everyone but Vereker his
+going was only a removal of something grown familiar; a reminder, soon
+forgotten, of the movement of time. Slight reminder. He reflected only
+surfaces and was going away, unchanged, to reflect the surfaces of
+another shape of life.
+
+Yet last night he had talked. Had been less a passenger unable to take
+root. It was he who had been the first to subside on the stairs—with a
+groan for his hard day’s work. Perhaps the approach of his known life
+had given him a moment of clairvoyance, showing its strangeness, the
+strange fact of its existence.
+
+Last night had been good, was showing now how very good it had been:
+three friends glad to sit down together and presently talking, each
+voice transformed, by the approach of the separation that would make it
+cease to sound, to the strange marvel of a human voice. Everything said
+had seemed important in its kindliness, and though there had been no
+socialism he had talked at last of his peasants and his ceaseless
+fighting with their ancient ways as though he wished to excuse himself
+from accepting socialism, to point out its irrelevance to the life of
+peasant and soil.
+
+Industrial socialism had bored him. He thought its problems irrelevant,
+raised by clever doctrinaires who had nothing to lose. She had failed
+him by standing too much in one camp. The proper message for him came
+from the people who saw land as the fundamental unit.
+
+Tell him to look away from capital and wages. And read George. And the
+Jewish land-laws, never surpassed.
+
+“Good-bye. Please remember that work is an unlimited quantity.”
+
+Then she remembered that this morning there would be a meeting at
+breakfast. He and Vereker would be there together as on the first
+morning; with time to spare.
+
+But going into the dining-room she found his departure already in full
+swing. He was talking, smiling across at Mrs. Sneyde and Miss Hollebone
+with the eagerness of one who finds at the last moment the ice broken
+and communication flowing the more easily for having been dammed up and
+accumulating.
+
+Sitting down unnoticed except by Vereker she presently heard Maud
+Hollebone, to whom he had scarcely spoken, arranging, across the width
+of the room, to hasten her departure.
+
+They were going down to Italy together; as casually as guests leaving a
+party and finding that their way home lies in the same direction will
+share a hansom across London. To travelled people a journey to Italy was
+as simple as crossing London. Was even a bore, a tiresome experience to
+be got through as pleasantly as possible. Behind her manner of soncy,
+quietly boisterous school-girl indifference Maud was pleased, but still
+kept her poise, her oblivious independence—of what? On what, all the
+time going about with Mrs. Sneyde, neglecting all opportunities for
+recognising the existence of the house-party, aloof without being
+stand-offish, was she feeding her so strongly-rooted life?
+
+She was pleased of course to be carrying off as her escort the imposing
+oiled bronze, now almost animated as he crossed to the little table to
+discuss details and stood, a pillar of strength, at the disposal of the
+two ladies now looking so small and Mrs. Sneyde, as she fired remarks at
+him, so scintillating. She, no doubt, had her ideas and thought it an
+excellent plan. But the sister already knew too late that it was not.
+Had felt the project change during his approach with his week’s
+happiness all about him, and realised now that she represented a
+reprieve, was to be, by keeping Oberland before his eyes during part of
+his long journeying, an extension of his holiday.
+
+Standing at close quarters, already accustomed to her companionship, he
+was aware, behind his animation, of sacrificing for the sake of it the
+precious silent interval between his strenuous idling and the arduous
+work ahead; was paying the price always paid for tumult half-consciously
+insincere. The finding of Maud also immersed in the business of
+departure and therefore seen in a flash of time as a comrade, had
+enlivened him as one is enlivened by a greeting without regard to the
+giver of it. That enlivening glow had already departed and he was left
+reduced, with its results upon his hands.
+
+It was settled. The elopement arranged and he, with his instructions,
+moving off to clear her path. Perhaps secretly he was pleased after all.
+Perhaps his life in the south was not a flight from society and he was
+glad to be ever so slightly back again in its conspiracy to avoid
+solitude. Glad to be walking again on those sunny levels where there is
+never a complete break-off and departure. Never a void. Where even
+sorrow and suffering are softened by beautiful surroundings.
+
+Their windows, she reflected as Eaden, meeting the le Mesuriers at the
+door was halted for farewells, even their hotel windows, give on to
+beauty. And they can always move on. And soul-sickness, the suffering of
+mind so often a result of fatigue and poor food and ugly surroundings,
+was rare amongst them. They were cheerful and amused. If bored they
+shift on and begin again. If bored by the life of society itself they
+remain within it and cut figures as cynics.
+
+“It’s only fair to warn you,” Maud was crying from her table, “that I’m
+a vile fellow-traveller. Hate travelling.”
+
+She rose and wandered to the window behind her table.
+
+“You’re going to take away our property?”
+
+Here she was, the unknown Miss Hollebone, close at hand, flopped in a
+chair, school-girlish.
+
+“Rather!”
+
+Here in this warm circle was the old freemasonry of school-fellows, two
+profiles slightly turned, abrupt remarks, punctuated by jabbings at
+ink-stained desks, the sense of power and complete difference in
+relation to a stuffy old world; sudden glances, perfect happiness.
+Happiness that kept both quite still; hearing, feeling, seeing, in a
+circle of light suddenly created, making possible only slight swift
+words in whose echo one forgot which had spoken, which was which.
+
+“What are we to do?” They faced each other to laugh delight.
+
+“Don’t know. What we really want is _your_ socialism in _our_ world. The
+socialist ways you have in your world without knowing it, because you
+know no other ways.”
+
+“You don’t object to us?”
+
+“Good Lord, no! But just to cultivate you would be to go to sleep as you
+are all asleep.”
+
+“You a Londoner?”
+
+“Till death us do part.”
+
+“Lucky dog!”
+
+Eaden was at her elbow to whom she turned with a guarded brightness,
+slipped back into her own world, into the half-conscious conspiracy of
+avoidance. Orderly world. A pattern world, life flowing in bright set
+patterns under a slowly gathering cloud.
+
+Its echoes followed Miriam into the deserted little salon. Through the
+open door she heard a coming and going in the hall that at this hour
+should be empty and eloquent of people spread far and wide in the
+landscape. The bright pattern was flowing into a fresh shape, flowing
+forward in its way, heedless of clouds, heedless of the rising tide. On
+the little table was Daphne’s bear on ski, immortal.
+
+And now in the hall the sound of her, demanding. Drawn to the door
+Miriam saw Vereker taking the stairs two at a time, immersed in
+friendship. And Eaden arrested in the middle of the hall by Daphne
+up-gazing with white determined face.
+
+“Look at me,” she was saying, and his down-bent face lost its smile.
+
+“You’re not to go,” she said swiftly, in casual tone, and then
+breathlessly, still searching his unmoved face, “You’re not to go.”
+
+“That’s right, Daphne,” cried Vereker pausing on the stairs. “Make him
+stay for the Fest, he wants to.”
+
+Eaden watched her while she waited for Vereker’s footsteps to die away,
+watched her in frowning concentration while her voice came again, the
+voice of one who tells another’s woe: “Not for the Fest, but because if
+you go away I shall die.”
+
+Miriam turned swiftly back into the room, but she had seen the pain in
+his face, seen him wince. Daphne on her last words had taken a little
+impatient step and stood averted with clenched fists, and now their
+voices were going together up the stairs, hers eagerly talking.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+She made ready to go out amongst the mountains standing there in their
+places as for countless ages they had stood, desolate, looking down upon
+nothing.
+
+A door opened at the far end of the corridor and Vereker’s footsteps
+came swiftly trotting, went by and paused at a door further down: Maud
+Hollebone’s, at which now he was urgently tapping. A few words at the
+opened door and he had returned. A moment later came Maud, swishing
+along at a run: for more discussion.
+
+Her thoughts turned to the promontory within easy reach. But it would be
+absurd to sit about visibly hung up by the bustle of events that were
+not even remotely her events. It was too late to do the valley run and
+walk back before lunch.
+
+“I shall _die_.” Who was comforting Daphne? No one. No one could.
+Somewhere outside she was disposed of, walking with her nurse,
+uncomforted.
+
+She peered into Daphne’s future, into the years waiting ahead, unworthy
+of her.
+
+Vereker’s door opened again, letting out the returning Maud; coming back
+to go on with her packing, to talk to Mrs. Sneyde. The two of them,
+surrounded by the opulence of wealthy packing, talking, skipping about
+in talk: family affairs, and in both their minds Maud’s journey to Milan
+with the mild and foolish bronze.
+
+When the footsteps had passed she went out into the corridor and across
+the space of sunlight streaming through Mrs. Harcourt’s door open upon
+its empty room. Far away in the landscape, with those people from the
+Kursaal, Mrs. Harcourt was forgetfully ski-ing, knowing nothing of all
+this bustle.
+
+But Maud’s door too was set wide. Her room deserted, neat and calm as
+Mrs. Harcourt’s ... Where was Maud?
+
+From the room beyond came Mrs. Sneyde, dressed for outdoors, brilliant
+in green and gold, turning, coming forward with laughter and an
+outstretched restraining hand, suppressing her laughter to speak in the
+manner of one continuing a confidential talk; laughter remaining in her
+eyes that looked, not at the stranger she addressed for the first time,
+but away down the passage.
+
+“I’ve just,” she whispered, “been in their room tyin’ up Daphne’s
+finger. Cut it on one of their razors. The poor things were terrified.
+Had her sittin’ on the table with her finger in a glass of water!
+
+“No. It’s nothing; but those two great fellows were jibberin’ with
+fright. She’s a little demon. Two towels on the floor. One all over
+chocolate and the other bright with gore. They wanted to fetch old
+stick-in-the-mud.”
+
+“What a tragedy for Mr. Eaden’s last hours.”
+
+“He’s not goin’; stayin’ for the Fest. Nobody’s goin’ but the dear
+Skerrys.”
+
+“Didn’t know they were going.”
+
+“Nor nobody else. Till Ma suddenly began about her luggage. Wants to
+save the sleigh fare. Vereker’s arranged it; the luggage is goin’ by the
+Post and they’re toboggannin’; can’t you see them? ‘Whee don’t ye see
+goodbee to Daphnee,’ says she to Tammas.”
+
+Cruel, a little cruel.
+
+“They found out a good deal about the peasants.”
+
+“The _peasants_? The village desperadoes? _Is_ there anything to find
+out about them?”
+
+“The lives they lead.”
+
+“Tammas been tryin’ to convert them? With his weak eyes? Through his
+smoked glasses?”
+
+“You know he smashed his glasses?”
+
+“He would.”
+
+“Yes. I heard his mother scolding him on the balcony and he slowly
+trying to explain; all in that low tone, as if they were conspiring.”
+
+“In an enemy camp. They were like that if you spoke to them. We all
+tried; but by the time they’d thought and begun to answer you’d
+forgotten what you said.”
+
+“I suddenly remembered some glasses I’d been advised to bring. They
+seemed astonished and suspicious and yet eager. ‘Try them on, Thomas,’
+she said.”
+
+“Tree them on, Tammas. I hear her.”
+
+“And yesterday he handed them back jammy round the edges. I thought he
+was tired of them. They said nothing about going. But he told me about
+the peasants.”
+
+“They had jam teas, on their own, upstairs.”
+
+“Anyhow, they got in touch with the natives.”
+
+“I ain’t surprised. Natives themselves.”
+
+“With the people in the châlet behind.”
+
+“Old Methuselah? Not difficult if you smash things. The old boy mended
+Daphne’s watch. Of course she went in to see him do it. Went in
+jabberin’ German which she _won’t_ talk with Frederika. Was there an
+hour till I went to fish her out. Couldn’t see her, my dear—couldn’t see
+_anything_; smoke, like a fog, couldn’t _breathe_. Made her out at last
+squatting close up to the filthy old villain on his bench. Lost, in the
+insides of watches. She’s goin’ to be a watchmaker now.”
+
+“It must be his son.”
+
+“Who must?”
+
+“The one Thomas told me of. A woodcutter. Terrible. In the snow. It’s
+only on snow they can bring the wood down from the higher places.
+Someone bought a high copse, cheaply, because the higher——”
+
+“Higher you go, the fewer—now I know what that means.”
+
+“The cheaper. Over two hours climb from here; somewhere across the
+valley. And the men and sleds must be there by daylight.”
+
+“Poor devils!”
+
+“Yes. And the horses for the climbing must be fed two hours before the
+start. Sometimes they have to feed them before three in the morning. One
+lot of men was caught up there by an avalanche and were there four days
+before they could be got down.”
+
+“Ai-_eee_; don’t tell us.”
+
+“At the best it’s dangerous work. They get maimed; lose their lives. All
+the winter this is going on. We don’t read their papers, don’t know the
+people and don’t hear of it.”
+
+“Isn’t it just as well? _We_ can’t help it.”
+
+“It ought to be done some other way. Men’s lives ought not to be so
+cheap.”
+
+“How did Tammas get all this learning?”
+
+“Speaks German.”
+
+“Jee-roozlum!”
+
+“And French.”
+
+“And Scotch. And having no one to talk Scotch to, talks to the peasants,
+about their trees. Daphne _hates_ the trees.”
+
+“_Hates_ them?”
+
+“Would like to make a big bonfire and burn’m all up.”
+
+Miriam was silent, searching the green eyes for Daphne.
+
+“Yes, that’s Daphne. She’s mad about Napoleon. Reads all the books.
+Has’m in her room. I have to expound when she gets stuck. Won’t say her
+prayers till we’ve read a bit of Bony. Won’t say ‘make me a good girl.’
+Says ‘make me a man and a sojer.’ She and Eaden are as thick as thieves.
+He’s an angel to her. I’ve got to be _hoff_. Goin’ to the Curse-all for
+lunch. Maud’s there. She’s goin’ south to-morrow with the Chisholmes.”
+
+“Before the Fest?”
+
+“Chisholmes have got to pick up their kid somewhere. Maud’s had enough
+of Switzerland for this year.”
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VII
+
+
+The clouds were a rebuke; for being spell-bound into imagining this
+bright paradise inaccessible. The world’s weather cannot be arranged as
+a conversation with one small person. Then how did the rebuke manage to
+arrive punctually at the serenest moment of self-congratulation? As if
+someone were watching ...
+
+She looked levelly across the sunny landscape and the clouds were out of
+sight. But there was a movement in the air, a breeze softly at work
+ousting the motionless Oberland air.
+
+She walked ahead, further and further into the disconcerting change.
+Everything was changed, the whole scene, reduced to homeliness. She
+caught herself drooping, took counsel and stiffened into acquiescence:
+“I might have known. I’m accustomed to this. It removes only what I
+thought I couldn’t give up. Something is left behind that can’t be taken
+away”—and heard at once within the high stillness the familiar sound of
+life, felt the sense of it flowing warmly in along the old channels, and
+heard from the past in various tones, amused, impatient, contemptuous:
+“You _are_ philosophical.” Always a surprise. What did they mean with
+their “philosophical”? The alternative was their way of going on
+cursing, missing everything but the unfavourable surface.
+
+Someone has said that there is nothing meaner than making the best of
+things.
+
+The clouds made soft patches of shadow upon the higher snow. Beside the
+angular sharp shadows growing upon the northern slopes they were
+blemishes, smudgy and vague. But free, able to move and flow while the
+mountains stood crumbling in their places.
+
+The clouds were beautiful, slowly drifting, leaving torn shreds upon the
+higher peaks.
+
+Upon the ridge beyond the cloaked silence of the little wood the breeze
+blew steadily from across the levels—that were strangely empty; no sign
+of moving specks making for the further ridge. Hurrying along the track
+she recalled too late the slightness of the information upon which she
+had built her idea of the golden scene; the gay throng, herself happily
+in the midst.
+
+Without a single clear idea of the direction she had trusted to the
+bright magic to draw her to itself.
+
+The subtly changed air and the melancholy clouds re-stated themselves,
+became the prelude to disaster. The increasing wind and the cloud-bank
+hiding the distant mountains were proclaiming the certainty of
+punishment well-deserved: to wander at a loss and miss the Fest.
+
+She glanced at her afternoon in retrospect: aimless walking in a world
+fallen into greyness and gloom, into familiarity that was already
+opening the door to the old friend, at whose heart lived a radiance
+out-doing the beams shed by anticipation over unknown things.
+
+But all the time the ski-ing which now she was not to see would be going
+forward, mocking her until she could forget it; until the hours it
+filled should have passed into others bright enough to melt regret.
+
+Climbing the rise beyond the levels she was at once climbing up to find
+the Fest, would plod the landscape until she found it, late, but still
+in time to share and remember. She reached the crest beyond the
+rise—there it was: a small shape, like an elongated horseshoe, upon a
+distant slope. Black dots close-clustered in a strange little shape upon
+the wastes of snow, defying the wastes of snow.
+
+There was plenty of space. Gaps on each side of the track and even
+towards the top of the rise where people were grouped more closely about
+the comforting, the only festal sign, looking like an altar with its
+gold-embroidered, red velvet frontal. Nothing could be seen behind its
+shelf but a small hut upon the levels that extended backwards until the
+pinewoods began with the rising mountain-side.
+
+Where to stand? Up amongst the connoisseurs to see the start, half-way
+down with a view of the ski-ers coming, or at the bottom of the row
+amongst the black-clothed natives standing about in scattered groups in
+the loose snow.
+
+Choosing a place half-way down she became one of the gathered crowd of
+Oberland visitors lining the smoothed and steeply sloping course. They
+were all there. The black and distant dots had become people in every
+fashion of sport’s-clothes, standing on skis, sitting on toboggans,
+stamping about in the snow, walking up and down; and all waiting, all
+looking betweenwhiles expectantly up the track towards the deserted
+altar. There was a good deal of talking. Here and there the incessant
+voices of men who make a hobby of talking. But most of them talked
+intermittently, in the way of these leisured English who veil their
+eagerness as they wait half apologetically and wholly self-consciously
+for a show. There patiently they would wait, good-humoured, not deigning
+to be disturbed, not suffering anything to disturb their pose of amused
+independence that looked so like indifference and masked a warmth.
+
+Just across the way was a stout lady in a seal-skin coat and curiously
+different snow-boots. She sat sturdily bunched on her toboggan and they
+stuck out in front of her, close-fitting, the rubber soles curving
+sharply to the instep and neatly down again into the shape of a heel.
+She clasped a camera and her sallow heavy face was drawn into a frown
+that remained there while she turned towards a voice sounding from over
+the way:
+
+“.... and we’ll just be _here_ till judgment _day_.”
+
+“I was told,” she answered at large with face upraised, deep furrows
+from nose to chin giving strength to her hanging cheeks, “I was to see
+sky-jumping, but I see no men on their skys to jump.”
+
+American continuousness held up in Europe, brought to despair by the
+spectacle of tolerance.
+
+Sunlight had gone and on the slope of the breeze small snowflakes
+drifted down to the snow. For a while it seemed as though the gathering
+in the white wilderness were there in vain.
+
+From the group of black figures at the top of the rise a deep Swiss
+voice sang out an English name. Heads were craned forward, but the altar
+remained empty. The confronted rows were transformed. Each life, risen
+to gazing eyes, waited in a stillness upon the edge of time.
+
+The knickerbockered tweed-clad form arrived upon the shelf from nowhere,
+leaped, knees bent and arms outspread, forward through the air upon the
+long blades that looked so like thin oars flattened out, came down, arms
+in upward-straining arches, with a resounding whack upon the slope and
+slid half-crouching, gaining the upright, fully upright with hooked arms
+swinging, at full speed to the bottom of the hill, went off in a wide
+curve and was stopped, swaying, just not falling, in wreaths of whirling
+snow.
+
+Achievement. Thrilling and chastening. Long ago someone had done this
+difficult thing for the first time, alone, perhaps driven by necessity.
+Now it was a sport, a deliberate movement into eternity, shared by all
+who looked on. She felt she could watch forever. Cold had withdrawn from
+the snow and from the drifting flakes. One after another the figures
+appeared at the top of the rise and leapt, making the gliding race to
+the sound of cheers that now broke forth each time the forward rush
+followed the desperate dive. For those who crashed and rolled, slanting
+ski and sloping helpless body rolling over and over down the slope,
+there was comment of laughter silly and cruel. Yet one man sliced his
+face with a ski-point and one had lain stunned at the bottom of the
+slope ...
+
+Vereker came at last, looking very young and lightly built, leaping
+neatly and far, and gliding easily upright, to the accompaniment of
+frantic cheering, at a splendid pace down the slope and far on into the
+loose snow and round in a sweeping curve that encircled a distant
+sapling and left him facing up the track half-hidden in a cloud of
+churned-up snow.
+
+He was the best. Length of jump, pace, style. The best of the English.
+And kind life had led her to him for speech, for the recovery of shared
+things; and was making now more memories that fitted with the rest.
+
+Skied onlookers were planking sideways up and down the course,
+flattening it. Snow still fell thinly. The distant mountains were lost
+in mist. The forgotten scene was utterly desolate. Warmth flowing forth
+from within made a summer in its midst.
+
+“Tsoor-_boo_-chn!” The strong spell-binding peasant name filled out the
+ringing cry. Switzerland was coming, bringing its so different life of
+mountain and pinewood, its hardy strength, perhaps to outdo the English
+in this brave game.
+
+Here he came, in black against his snow, deep velvety black against the
+snow, gliding past the little hut with a powerful different gait. It was
+partly his clothes, the way they seemed all of one piece, closely
+fitting, without angles. And his size, huge. From the edge of the shelf
+he leapt high into the air and seemed to stand there against the sky, in
+a dream. Down he swooped, sailing, dreaming, to the track, rose smoothly
+from the terrific impact and smoothly went his way.
+
+What could be more beautiful? He was heavy and solid, thickly built. But
+with his shapely clothing and smooth rhythmic movement he made the
+English graceless and their clothes deliberately absurd.
+
+All the Swiss, though some were rough and ungainly, moved with that
+strong and steady grace. But Zurbuchen was the best. It was he who would
+live in her memory, poised against the sky like a great bird.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+“You took photographs?”
+
+“For him,” smiled Vereker with his quizzical affectionate glance. “To
+remind him of what he has to do next year. But we’ll share them. Yours
+will remind you that next year you won’t be let off.” Eaden remained
+silent and expressionless.
+
+“They will look strange amongst your cypress groves.”
+
+“They will look passing strange.”
+
+“You will come out again?” She wanted neither to know nor to seem to
+want to know, but Vereker had left him there for a moment on her hands.
+She was caught in the social trap. Expected, being a woman, not to walk
+off alone, but to wait and provide, while she waited, suitable
+entertainment, some kind of parlour trick. For a moment it seemed as
+though he would not answer. He was silent and used to stillness, yet
+embarrassed now by stillness in the presence of a perceiving witness.
+Another woman would not seem to perceive. Would have given her question
+the semblance of sincerity.
+
+“No,” he said suddenly. “If I go away at all next year I shall go east.”
+
+“When you’ve ’eard the East a-callin’....” She turned to look towards
+the returning Vereker. Eaden gazed away towards the snowy distances. He
+was taking his farewell. To-morrow he would be gone back to his chosen
+isolation, uninfluenced. Tender-hearted lover of brave souls, of Daphne,
+and who yet would bring so little to his love-making. He stood in his
+heavy silence, heavy man’s silence of waiting for recognisable things.
+
+“Yes, that man knew what he was talking about.” Suddenly his friendly
+beam and a forward approaching step, a turning away, at the first hint
+of something he had heard before, from his formal preoccupation,
+preoccupation with a glimpse of the next break in his unknown southern
+life. She had nothing more to say. Vereker was at hand who had held them
+at truce together. But now without Vereker they were at truce, the only
+kind of truce he could understand.
+
+For a moment she was aware, far away in the future, of one of whom he
+was the forerunner, coming into her life for mortal combat.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+In spite of her contempt for tobogganing she was going warily, slowing
+up a little at the bends, a gnome in an extinguishing cowl, Mrs.
+Harcourt, carelessly carrying her long past and the short future that so
+strangely she regarded as indefinite, looking forward, making plans for
+next winter with eager school-girl eyes; carelessly bringing the life
+she carried about with her down to the valley this afternoon with
+brusque cameraderie, her day-time manner.
+
+Her company added something to the joy of flying through the
+backward-flowing landscape. But it was shortening the run and fitting it
+within reduced surroundings—making it show as it showed to her within
+her larger scale of movement.
+
+Here already was the steepest bend of the run, with the patch of black
+ice across its middle. Mrs. Harcourt had passed it safely and
+disappeared. It was past and a group of people came into sight midway
+down the next slope: two figures pushing off and Mrs. Harcourt at the
+side of the track, dismounted, beating her skirt. She had collided,
+managed to run into them; a collision and a humiliating smash ...
+
+“Fools! Fooling all over v’place. Had to slam into v’side.”
+
+“A blessing the fence is broken just here.”
+
+“Not their fault I’m not smashed up. I was yellin’ for all I was worth.”
+
+“It’s _really_ dangerous when you can’t see what’s ahead. Someone said
+tobogganing accounts for more accidents than any other sport.”
+
+“Don’t wonder, with so many idjuts about. Where’s Daphne?”
+
+“Held up, poor little soul. A broken cord, just as they were starting;
+the maid went in for another.”
+
+“Paw kid. She’ll be too late. No good waiting.”
+
+They mounted and sped off one behind the other through a scene that was
+now the child’s vast desolation. In place of joyous flight, selfish, in
+which Daphne had been forgotten, came now this absurd urgency to arrive.
+Mrs. Harcourt felt it. She was sorry, in her kindliness, for Daphne’s
+disappointment, but saw nothing of the uselessness of arriving without
+her. Thought of nothing but herself, her determination, her hatred of
+being beaten. This made a shelter. Under the shelter of Mrs. Harcourt’s
+determination to be there because she had said she would be there it was
+possible to be seen rushing uselessly to the last farewell.
+
+Another bend. Beyond it a sleigh coming up and Mrs. Harcourt carefully
+passing it and the other tobogganers drawn up in the snow. It was safely
+past. Mrs. Harcourt was getting ahead. Going recklessly. Even for her
+there was something more in this desperate urgency than the mere
+determination to arrive.
+
+If she too were to arrive it was now or never. Now, at once, in the
+midst of this winding ice-patched roadway, she must give herself up to
+what she had learned on the safe snowfields and never yet dared to try
+here until the last clear slope was reached. Lifting her feet to the
+bar, leaning back to swing free and steer by weight she let herself go.
+The joy of flight returned, singing joy of the inaccessible world to
+which in flight one was translated, bringing forgetfulness of everything
+but itself. Bend after bend appeared and of itself her body swayed now
+right now left in unconscious rhythm. The landscape flew by,
+sideways-upwards, its features indistinguishable. She was movement,
+increasing, cleaving the backward rushing air.
+
+At the last slope she was level with Mrs. Harcourt, safely, triumphantly
+returned to the known world, passing her, flying down so blissfully that
+arrival would now be nothing but an end to joy. Flying down towards two
+small figures standing on the level, turned this way, watching up the
+incline down which speeded, superfluously, absurdly, just these two
+women.
+
+“Where’s Daphne?” said Eaden in his rich, indolent voice; looking over
+their heads, staring up the slope.
+
+While Mrs. Harcourt’s deep bass, still staccato with her anger, told the
+brief tale, she watched the pain and wrath in his face, strong man’s
+sympathy of pain with this child to whose spirit he gave homage, anger
+with those who had deserted her. Her useless explanation flickered about
+him unspoken, silenced by the pain she shared.
+
+“It’s no good, old man,” said Vereker gently, watch in hand: “we must be
+off.”
+
+Formal hand-shaking. To Mrs. Harcourt’s padding of sociable remarks he
+paid no heed, keeping his eyes still above her on the bend at the head
+of the slope until he turned to tramp off with Vereker, to the sound of
+Vereker’s kindly, sunny voice.
+
+“Paw kid. Eaden was frightfully wrath. Thought we ought to have brought
+her.”
+
+“I couldn’t have dared, down those slopes, on a small single,” said
+Miriam wearily. But the judge within stood firm. She had not thought of
+trying.
+
+The now distant men were marching swiftly, reaching the point where the
+road sloped downwards; had reached it and were settling on their
+toboggans. A face came round. Miriam looked back up the slope still
+cruelly empty, and round again to see the men seated, gliding off,
+lessening. Their caps vanished below the level of the ridge. And now the
+upward slope held a single small toboggan coming headlong. Daphne had
+made the run alone.
+
+“How _dare_ you let him go?”
+
+Miriam moved forward surprised by her own approach. Her mind was filled
+with the simple selfish truth. The wrath-blazing eyes saw it, recognised
+her for what she was and turned away to the wastes of snow:
+
+“Eaden, my Eaden ... I shall _never_ see him again.” Tears flowed from
+the wide eyes and swiftly down the face so little convulsed by grief
+that bent her, standing there with arms sideways out as if to save her
+from falling, to keep her upright, facing her loss, fists clenched to
+fight her woe. Of themselves Miriam’s arms reached forth to stay the
+torment.
+
+Incredibly Daphne was clinging, sobbing with hidden face: “Do you love
+me—do you love me?” She held her without speaking, silenced while still
+the broken voice went on, by the sense of being carried forward into a
+world known only by hearsay and that now was giving forth all about them
+in the stillness its ethereal sounds—sounds she had sometimes felt
+within a gentle wind.
+
+Daphne’s head was raised and her flushed face busy in eager speech as
+they went forward together over the snow. When presently she assured her
+that one day Eaden would come back, the child pulled upon her arm and
+spoke in a new way of her new love. She spoke no more of Eaden, walking
+sturdily uphill, eagerly talking, sunned for a while in humble helpless
+love that soon must be removed.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+With Eaden’s departure holding Vereker away until to-morrow and Mrs.
+Harcourt disappeared upstairs with all those who sought sleep and early
+rising, the hotel was empty, strange again and going its independent way
+as on the day of her arrival. The presence of Guerini hidden away in the
+little salon where daily he had spent his unimaginable evening of a
+Milan business man on holiday, increased its emptiness, made it as
+desolate as the world of his thoughts.
+
+He must have learned something in seeing her evening after evening—not
+in the least goloshy in her blue gown of many colours—seated on the
+crimson stairs between the two Englishmen, in seeing discussion prevail
+over personalities; new world for him of men seeking, without
+sentimental emotion, without polite contempt, conversation with a woman.
+Had any light dawned in him? Would he show any grace of dawning light?
+
+She went into the little salon and there he was, rising to greet her,
+with the look of a man penned within an office, the look upon his low
+Italian brow of worry left over from his daily life. He looked common
+too, common and ordinary—she wondered now that she could ever have
+mistaken him for a musician wandered from Russia. But beside the
+pathetic appeal of his commonness, supporting it, was the appeal of his
+disarray, his obvious gladness and relief, like Michael coming back
+after a last, final explanation and dismissal, saying impenitently: “You
+whipped me yesterday, to-day you must not whip.” He was extraordinarily
+like Michael in his belief in the essential irrelevance of anything a
+woman may say.
+
+It was his last evening in Oberland and the first time they had found
+themselves alone together since the afternoons in the snowfields that
+were now so clearly in his mind as he stood still turning over those
+hopeless little old Swiss books, but turned towards her as she ensconced
+herself in the chair from which so long ago she had watched Vereker at
+the piano. Yet their life together had gone on. The grim little room was
+full of it.
+
+Again she had that haunting sense of being a collection of persons
+living in a world of people always single and the same. Mrs. Harcourt,
+she reflected as she said the books were like faded flowers, was
+fastidiously selective and always one person, one unfaltering aspect.
+Vereker, Eaden, all the others. Yet the lives she lived with each one
+were sharply separated lives, separable parts of herself, incompatible.
+The life she lived with Guerini, beginning unconsciously that first
+evening when he had turned upon her throughout dinner his brown stare,
+hurrying forward during their afternoons in the snow, ending with their
+quarrel, begun again with the reproachful gaze he had sent across the
+table on the evening of her truancy, had persisted during the
+intervening time and was now marching off afresh on its separate way.
+
+It was clear that these close questionings held not only the remains of
+his surprise over the nature of the things that had separated them but
+also his determination to try to see these things as she saw them. They
+revealed much pondering, not over the things in themselves but over
+their power with her, and presently it was clear that he meant to see
+her again. She sat ensconced, considering him, measuring the slow
+movement of his thoughts, the swiftness of the impressions he was
+drawing from his attention to every inflection of her voice.
+
+She knew she ought to go, that she was building up with every moment she
+stayed in the room a false relationship. The cordiality of her voice,
+its dreamy animation, was not for him nor made by him. It told its tale
+to her alone. His talk of London had taken her thoughts there and she
+saw it afar, vivid with charmed and charming people. For the first time
+she was seeing London as people whose secret had revealed itself during
+this last two weeks, and was at this moment beginning consistently to
+live her life there as in future it would be lived, as she had lived it,
+but unconsciously and only intermittently, during the past year.
+
+This man appealed, she realised it now, from the first to a person who
+no longer existed, to a loneliness that during the past years had been
+moving away from her life. It was only in its moving that she had
+realised its existence. This man saw her still as lonely and
+resourceless; and also as interesting, something new in his narrow
+experience. He too was lonely, had an empty life, in the busy business
+man’s way of having an empty life: no centre and a lonely leisure. And
+he was more than half bent on offering her the chance that so often in
+the past had been at her elbow, of pretending herself into a single
+settled existence, a single world, safe. Even now it was a temptation.
+But it was the Italian background that was the real temptation. As soon
+as he talked of settling himself in London he was lessened, and the
+temptation disappeared. Life as a single conversation in a single place
+with the rest of the world going by might seem possible when thought of
+in all the newness of Italy. In London it at once fell into proportion
+and became absurd.
+
+In London was Hypo, held up, at any rate saying he was held up, and not
+now so much awaiting her decision as taking it for granted. A big
+shadow, that might turn into sunshine. A gleaming shadow that lost its
+brightness as she faced it. And, behind it, a world that perhaps took
+most of its glamour from this uncertain shadow.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER IX
+
+
+It was an urgent tapping on the wall from Mrs. Harcourt’s side, and she
+was speaking as she tapped. With half-opened eyes Miriam grew aware of
+darkness, half-darkness of early morning, and listened through the
+companion darkness within her of the knowledge that this was her last
+whole day, to this strange clamour from the lady whose nightly presence
+at her side had been for so long forgotten.
+
+“Look out of ve window!”
+
+Sitting up in bed she saw hanging in mid-air just outside the window a
+huge crimson lamp, circular in a blue darkness. Sleepily she cried her
+thanks and leaped awake to dwell with the strange spectacle, the gently
+startling picture, in its sudden huge nearness, of the loveliness of
+space. The little distant moon, enormous and rosy in blue mist, seemed
+to float in the blue as in blue water, seemed to have floated close in
+sheer unearthly kindliness, to comfort her thoughts on this last day
+with something new and strange.
+
+The day passed with heartless swiftness, savourless. Full of charms
+whose spell failed under the coming loss.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER X
+
+
+And for the last morning again a strange surprise. Mountains and valley
+were hidden behind impenetrable mist, even the nearest objects were
+screened by the thickly falling snow. Alpine winter tremendously at
+work, holding her fascinated at windows downstairs, upstairs; mighty
+preparation for the beauty of days she would not see, robbing her of
+farewell, putting farewell back into yesterday’s superficial seeing
+which had not known it was the last.
+
+But when she was forced to turn away to her packing she found, within
+the light of this veiled world that cast within doors a strange dark
+brilliance, something of the London gloom, and the enjoyment of a
+concentrated activity that had always been one of the gifts of a London
+fog. It was as if already she were translated, good-byes said and the
+journey begun. The hours ahead became a superfluous time, to be spent in
+a Switzerland whose charm, since London had reached forth and touched
+her, had fallen into its future place as part of life: an embellishment,
+a golden joy to which she would return.
+
+And when she saw the guests assembled at lunch in full strength it was
+as though having left them for good she returned for a moment to find
+them immersed in a life to which she was a stranger. Confined by the
+weather, they had produced the pile of letters waiting in the lounge and
+were now rejoicing in unison over the snowfall. In speech and silence
+each one revealed himself, but as a dream-revival of someone known long
+ago; and in the dream it was again as on that first evening when she had
+sat a listening outsider, fearing and hoping to be drawn in, and again
+it was Mrs. Harcourt who, when her association with these people was
+seeming to be a vain thing cancelled, drew her in with a question.
+
+The short hour expanded. Once more she was caught into the medium of
+their social vision, into the radiance that would shine unchanged when
+she was gone and was the secret of English social life and could, if it
+were revealed to every human soul, be the steering light of human life
+throughout the world. These people were the fore-runners, free to be
+almost as nice as they desired.
+
+And then, with the suddenness of a rapid river, her coming freedom
+flowed in upon her, carrying her outside this pleasant enclosure towards
+all that could be felt to the full only in solitude amongst things whose
+being was complete, towards that reality of life that withdrew at the
+sounding of a human voice.
+
+It was already from a far distance that, alone with her upon the
+landing, she promised Mrs. Harcourt remembrance and letters, said
+good-bye and saw once more her first diffident eagerness; felt that it
+was she, withdrawn since the first days, who had yet lived her life with
+her, transferred something of her being into the gathered memories and
+would keep them alive, keep the mountain scene in sight near at hand.
+
+Alone in her room still thinking of Mrs. Harcourt, she remembered from
+“Ships that Pass in the Night” how on the last day all but one person
+had forgotten the departing guest.
+
+Then in getting up from lunch she had seen them all, unknowing, for the
+last time—as yesterday the mountains. For all these people hidden away
+in their rooms, immersed in their own affairs, she was already a figure
+slid away and forgotten. With the paying of Frau Knigge’s bill her last
+link with the Alpenstock had been snapped.
+
+But when the coach-horn sounded and she went down into the hall, there
+they all were, gathering round, seeing her off. Hurriedly, with the door
+open upon the falling snow and the clashing of sleighbells, she clasped
+for the first time strange and friendly hands, saw, in eyes met full and
+near, welcome from worlds she had not entered. Beside the door she met
+Daphne forgotten, who clutched and drew her back into the window space
+for desperate clinging, and entreaties sounding lest for this new
+slow-witted lover the searching gaze should not be enough.
+
+It was not until she was inside the dark coach and its occupants had
+thanked heaven she was English and let down a window, that she
+remembered Vereker. He alone had made no farewell.
+
+The coach pulled up outside the post-office and there he stood in the
+driving snow, and all the way down the valley she saw them one by one
+and saw him standing in great-coat and woollen helmet, heard his elegant
+light distressful voice begging her to come out next year.
+
+And brighter now than the setting they had charmed was the glow these
+people had left in her heart. They had changed the aspect of life, given
+it the promise of their gentle humanity, given her a frail link with
+themselves and their kind.
+
+She climbed into a carriage whose four corners were occupied and sat
+down to the great journeying.
+
+“History repeats itself.”
+
+Looking up she found all about her the family from Croydon, met the
+father’s quizzical brown eyes.
+
+“Had a farewell kick-up at our place last night. We’re feeling the
+effects. _You_ look very fit. Enjoyed yourself?”
+
+“I’ve had a splendid time.”
+
+“You collared the handsomest man in Oberland anyhow—that young giant of
+a Russian.”
+
+“Italian.”
+
+“Bless my soul! Hear that, Doris?”
+
+“We were up till _fave_ this morning,” said Doris.
+
+The train moved off, but only Doris, once more grown-up with her hair in
+a staid bun under her English winter hat, turned to watch the station
+disappear.
+
+“Want to go back, Doris?”
+
+“Ah love,” she breathed devoutly, “could thou and aye with feete
+conspire——”
+
+Miriam joined the sister in intoning the rest of the lines.
+
+“Ah Moon——” began Doris, and the brother leaned forward holding towards
+her a gloved hand whose thumb protruded through a fraying gap:
+
+“A little job for you in Paris.”
+
+She regarded it undisturbed and turned away the scornful sweetness of
+her face towards the window and the snowflakes falling thickly upon the
+shroud of snow.
+
+
+
+
+                          Transcriber’s Notes
+
+
+The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical
+errors were silently corrected. Further careful corrections, some after
+consulting other editions, are listed here (before/after):
+
+   [p. 46]:
+   ... “Schön, die letzte Gluh,” he said quietly. ...
+   ... “Schön, die letzte Glüh,” he said quietly. ...
+
+   [p. 57]:
+   ... “Man soll sich des Leben’s freuen, im Berg ...
+   ... “Man soll sich des Lebens freuen, im Berg ...
+
+   [p. 57]:
+   ... und Thal. In so wass kann sich ein’ Engländerin ...
+   ... und Thal. In so was kann sich ein’ Engländerin ...
+
+   [p. 148]:
+   ... his own path from which his tacit meeting ...
+   ... his own path from which this tacit meeting ...
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77646 ***
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+<title>Oberland: Pilgrimage, Volume 9 | Project Gutenberg</title>
+   <link rel="coverpage" href="images/cover.jpg"  type="image/x-cover">
+   <!-- TITLE="Oberland: Pilgrimage, Volume 9" -->
+   <!-- AUTHOR="Dorothy M. Richardson" -->
+   <!-- LANGUAGE="en" -->
+   <!-- PUBLISHER="Duckworth & Co., London" -->
+   <!-- DATE="1927" -->
+   <!-- COVER="images/cover.jpg" -->
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+
+<body>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77646 ***</div>
+
+<div class="frontmatter chapter">
+<p class="halftitle">
+OBERLAND
+</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class="frontmatter chapter">
+  <div class="volumes">
+<p class="hdr">
+VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES
+</p>
+
+<p class="list">
+POINTED ROOFS<br>
+BACKWATER<br>
+HONEYCOMB<br>
+THE TUNNEL<br>
+INTERIM<br>
+DEADLOCK<br>
+REVOLVING LIGHTS<br>
+THE TRAP<br>
+OBERLAND<br>
+(The next volume is in preparation)
+</p>
+
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="frontmatter chapter">
+<h1 class="title">
+OBERLAND
+</h1>
+
+<p class="aut">
+<span class="line1">BY</span><br>
+<span class="line2">DOROTHY M. RICHARDSON</span><br>
+<span class="line3">AUTHOR OF “POINTED ROOFS,” ETC.</span>
+</p>
+
+<p class="pub">
+<span class="line1">DUCKWORTH</span><br>
+<span class="line2">3 HENRIETTA STREET, LONDON</span>
+</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class="frontmatter chapter">
+<p class="cop">
+First published 1927<br>
+(All rights reserved)
+</p>
+
+<p class="printer">
+Printed in Great Britain by Ebenezer Baylis &amp; Son, Ltd., The Trinity Press,
+Worcester.
+</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class="frontmatter chapter">
+<p class="ded">
+<span class="line1">TO</span><br>
+<span class="line2">J. H. B.</span>
+</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<a id="page-7" class="pagenum" title="7"></a>
+<p class="tit">
+OBERLAND
+</p>
+
+<h2 class="chapter1" id="chapter-0-1">
+CHAPTER I
+</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="first">
+<span class="firstchar">T</span><span class="postfirstchar">he</span> sight of a third porter, this time a
+gentle-looking man carrying a pile of
+pillows and coming slowly, filled her with
+hope. But he passed on his way as heedless
+as the others. It seemed incredible that
+not one of these men should answer. She
+wasted a precious moment seeing again the
+three brutishly preoccupied forms as figures
+moving in an evil dream. If only she
+were without the miserable handbags she
+might run alongside one of these villains,
+with a tip in an outstretched hand and buy
+the simple yes or no that was all she needed.
+But she could not bring herself to abandon her
+belongings to the mercy of this ill-mannered
+wilderness where not a soul would care if she
+wandered helpless until the undiscovered
+<a id="page-8" class="pagenum" title="8"></a>
+train had moved off into the night. She
+knew this would not be and that what she
+was resenting was not the human selfishness
+about her of which she had her own full
+share, but this turning of her weariness into
+exhaustion ruining the rest of the journey that
+already had held suffering enough.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There must be several minutes left of the ten
+the big clock had marked as she neared the platforms.
+Recalling its friendly face she saw also
+that of the little waiter at the buffet who had
+tried to persuade her to take wine and murmured
+too late that there was no extra charge for it,
+very gently. Rallying the remainder of her
+strength she dropped her things on the platform
+with a decisiveness she tried just in vain
+to scorn, and stood still and looked about
+amongst the hurrying passengers and saw
+passing by and going ahead to the movement
+of an English stride the familiar, blessed outlines
+of a Burberry. Ignoring the near train
+the man was crossing a pool of lamplight and
+making for the dark unlikely platform over
+the way. She caught up her bags and followed
+and in a moment was at peace within
+<a id="page-9" class="pagenum" title="9"></a>
+the semi-darkness of the further platform
+amongst people she had seen this morning
+at Victoria, and the clangorous station was
+reduced to an enchanting background for
+confident behaviour.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All these people were serene; had come in
+groups, unscathed, knowing their way, knowing
+how to quell the bloused fiends into helpfulness.
+But then, also, the journey to them
+was uniform grey, a tiresome business to be
+got through; not black and sudden gold.
+Yet even they were relieved to find themselves
+safely through the tangle. They strode unnecessarily
+about, shouted needlessly to each
+other; expressing travellers’ joy in the English
+way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There seemed to be plenty of time and for
+awhile she strolled delighting in them, until
+the sight of an excited weary child, in a
+weatherproof that trailed at its heels, marching
+sturdily about adream with pride and joy
+perfectly caricaturing the rest of the assembly,
+made her turn away content to see no more, to
+hoist up her baggage and clamber after it
+into cover, into the company of her own joy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-10" class="pagenum" title="10"></a>
+Into a compartment whose blinds were
+snugly drawn upon soft diffused light falling
+on the elegance of dove-grey repp and white
+lace that had been the surprise and refreshment
+of this morning’s crowded train, but that
+now, evening-lit and enclosed, gave the empty
+carriage the air of a little salon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Installed here, with fatigue suddenly banished
+and the large P.L.M. weaving within the
+mesh of the lace its thrilling assurance of
+being launched on long continental distances,
+it was easy to forgive the coercion that had
+imposed the longer sea-route for its cheapness
+and the first-class ticket for the chance of
+securing solitude on the night journey.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And indeed this steaming off into the night,
+that just now had seemed to be the inaccessible
+goal and end of the journey, was only the
+beginning of its longest stretch; but demanding
+only endurance. With hurry and uncertainty
+at an end there could be nothing
+to compare with what lay behind; nothing
+that could compare with the state of being a
+helpless projectile that had spoiled Dieppe
+and made Paris a nightmare.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-11" class="pagenum" title="11"></a>
+Yet Dieppe and Paris and the landscape in
+between, now that they were set, by this
+sudden haven, far away in the past, were
+already coming before her eyes transformed,
+lit by the joy that, hovering all the time in the
+background, had seen and felt. France, for
+whose sake at once she had longed to cease
+being a hurrying traveller robbed right and
+left of things passing too swiftly, had been
+seen. Within her now, an irrevocable extension
+of being, was France.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+France that had spoken from its coast the
+moment she came up from the prison of the
+battened-down saloon; the moment before
+the shouting fiends charged up the gangway;
+spoken from the quay, from the lounging blue-bloused
+figures, the buildings, the way the
+frontage of the town met the sky and blended
+with the air, softly, yet clear in its softness,
+and with serenity that was vivacious, unlike
+the stolid English peace.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And later those slender trees along the high
+bank of a river, the way they had of sailing-by,
+mannered, <em>coquettish</em>; awakening affection
+for the being of France.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-12" class="pagenum" title="12"></a>
+And Paris barely glimpsed and shrouded
+with the glare of night ... the emanation
+even of Paris was peace. An emanation as
+powerful as that of London, more lively and
+yet more serene. Serene where gracious buildings
+presided over the large flaring thoroughfares,
+serene even in the dreadful by-streets.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And that woman at the station. Black-robed
+figure, coming diagonally across the
+clear space yellow in gaslight against the
+background of barriered platforms, seeming
+with her swift assured gait, bust first, head
+reared and a little tilted back on the neck, so
+insolently feminine, and then, as she swept by,
+suddenly beautiful; from head to foot all
+gracefully moving rhythm. <em>Style</em>, of course,
+redeeming ugliness and cruelty. She was the
+secret of France. France concentrated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Michael, staying in Paris, said that the
+French are indescribably evil and their children
+like monkeys. He had fled eagerly to England.
+But Michael’s perceptions are moral. France,
+within his framework, falls back into shadow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The train carrying her through beloved
+France and away from it to a bourne that had
+<a id="page-13" class="pagenum" title="13"></a>
+now ceased to be an imagined place, and become
+an idea, useless, to be lost on arrival as
+her idea of France had been lost, was so quiet
+amidst its loud rattling that the whole of it
+might be asleep. No sound came from the
+corridor. No one passed. There was nothing
+but the continuous rattling and the clatter of
+gear. The world deserting her just when she
+would have welcomed, for wordless communication
+of the joy of achievement, the sight
+and sound of human kind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Twelve hours away, and now only a promise
+of daylight and of food, lay Berne. Beyond
+Berne, somewhere in the far future of to-morrow
+afternoon, the terminus, the business
+of finding and bargaining for a sleigh—the last
+effort.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A muffled figure filled the doorway, entered
+the carriage, deposited bags. A middle-aged
+Frenchman, dark, with sallow cheeks bulging
+above a little pointed beard. Thinking her
+asleep he moved quietly, arranging his belongings
+with deft, maturely sociable hands.
+From one of them a ring gleamed in the gaslight.
+He showed no sign of relief in escaping
+<a id="page-14" class="pagenum" title="14"></a>
+into silence, no sign of being alone. Conversation
+radiated from him. Where, on the
+train, could he have been so recently talking
+that at this moment he was almost making
+remarks into his bag?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She closed her eyes, listening to his sounds
+that sent to a distance the sounds of the train.
+He had driven away also the outer spaces.
+The grey and white interior spoke no longer
+of the strange wide distances of France. He
+was France at home in a railway carriage,
+preparing to sleep until, at the end of a definite
+short space of hours, the Swiss dawn
+appeared at the windows. Before he came
+the night had stretched ahead, timeless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A moment’s stillness, and then a sound like
+the pumping of nitrous-oxide into a bag. She
+opened her eyes upon him seated opposite
+with cheeks distended and eyes strained wide
+above indeed a bag, held to his lips and limply
+flopping. Bracing herself to the presence
+either of a lunatic or a pitiful invalid believing
+himself unobserved, she watched while slowly
+the bag swelled up and took, obedient to an
+effort that seemed about to make his eyeballs
+<a id="page-15" class="pagenum" title="15"></a>
+start from his head, the shape of a cushion,
+circular about a flattened centre. Setting it
+down in the corner corresponding to that where
+lay her own head, he took off his boots,
+pulled on slippers and pattered out into the
+corridor where he became audible struggling
+with a near ventilator that presently gave and
+clattered home. Tiptoeing back into the
+carriage where already it seemed that the air
+grew close, he stood under the light, peering
+upwards with raised arm. A gentle click, and
+two little veils slid down over the globe and
+met, leaving the light quenched to a soft
+glimmer: beautiful, shrouding hard outlines,
+keeping watch through the night, speaking of
+night and travel, yet promising day and the
+end of travel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But he had not done. He was battling
+now with the sliding door. It was closing,
+closed, and the carriage converted into a box
+almost in darkness and suddenly improper.
+With a groaning sigh he flung himself down and
+drew his rug to the margin of the pale disc that
+was his face and that turned sharply as she
+rose and passed it to reach the door, and still
+<a id="page-16" class="pagenum" title="16"></a>
+showed, when the corridor light flowed in
+through the opened door, a perfect astonishment.
+His inactivity, while she struggled out
+with her baggage into the inhospitable corridor
+checked the words with which she would have
+explained her inability to remain sealed for
+the night in a small box. As she pushed the
+door to she thought she heard a small sound, a
+sniggering expletive, mirth at the spectacle
+of British prudery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was alone in the corridor of the sleeping
+train, in a cold air that reeked of rusting metal
+and resounded with the clangour of machinery.
+Exploring in both directions she found no sign
+of an attendant, nothing but closely shrouded
+carriages telling of travellers outstretched and
+slumbering. Into either of these she felt it
+impossible to break. There was nothing for
+it but to abandon the hope of a night’s rest
+and drop to a class whose passengers would be
+numerous and seated. The train had gathered
+a speed that flung her from side to side as she
+went. In two journeys she got her belongings
+across the metal bridge that swayed above the
+couplings, and arrived with bruised arms
+<a id="page-17" class="pagenum" title="17"></a>
+and shoulders in another length of corridor, a
+duplicate in noise and cold emptiness of the
+one she had left. Everywhere shrouded carriages.
+But something had changed, there was
+something even in the pitiless clangour that
+seemed to announce a change of class.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The door she pushed open revealed huddled
+shapes whose dim faces, propped this way and
+that, were all relaxed in slumber. There was
+no visible vacant place, but as she hesitated
+within the emerging reek a form stirred and
+sat forward as if to enquire; and when she
+struggled in with her bags and her apology the
+carriage came to life in heavily draped movement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was seated, shivering in a fog of smells,
+but at rest, escaped from nightmare voyaging
+amongst swaying shadows. The familiar
+world was about her again and she sat blessing
+the human kindliness of these sleeping forms,
+blessing the man who had first moved, even
+though his rousing had proved to be anxiety
+about the open door which, the moment she was
+inside, he had closed with the gusty blowings
+of one who takes refuge from a blizzard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-18" class="pagenum" title="18"></a>
+But the sense of home-coming began presently
+to fade under the pressure of suffering
+that promised only to increase. She had long
+ceased to wonder what made it possible for
+these people to add wraps and rugs to the thick
+layers of the stifling atmosphere and remain
+serene. The effort was no longer possible
+that had carried her through appearances into
+a sense of the reality beneath. She saw them
+now as repellent mysteries, pitiless aliens
+dowered with an unfathomable faculty for
+dispensing with air. With each breath the
+smells that had greeted her, no longer separately
+apparent, advanced in waves whose
+predominant flavour was the odour of burnt
+rubber rising from the grating that ran along
+the middle of the floor and seemed to sear the
+soles of her feet. Getting beneath them her
+rolled rug she abandoned all but the sense of
+survival and sank into herself, into a coma in
+which everything but the green-veiled oscillating
+light was motionless forever. Forever
+the night would go on and her head turn
+now this way now that against the harsh
+upholstery.
+</p>
+
+<p class="tb">
+<a id="page-19" class="pagenum" title="19"></a>
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+The train was slowing, stopping. Its rumbling
+clatter subsided to a prolonged squeak
+that ended on a stillness within which sounded
+one against the other the rapid ticking of a
+watch and a steady rhythmic snore. No one
+stirred, and for a moment there was nothing
+but these sounds to witness that life went on.
+Then faintly and as if from very far away she
+heard the metallic clangours of a large high
+station and amidst them a thin clarion voice
+singing out an indistinguishable name. Some
+large sleeping provincial town signalling its
+importance; a milestone, marking off hours
+passed through that need not be braved again.
+Yet when the train moved on it seemed impossible
+even to imagine the ending of the
+night. She had no idea of how long she had
+sat hemmed and suffering, with nothing in her
+mind but snatches of song that would not be
+dismissed, with aching brow and burning
+eyeballs and a ceaselessly on-coming stupor
+that would not turn to sleep. And at the
+next stop with its echoing clangour and faintness
+<a id="page-20" class="pagenum" title="20"></a>
+of clarion voices she no longer desired
+somehow to get across the encumbered carriage
+and taste from a corridor window the
+sweet fresh air of the railway station so freely
+breathed by those who were crying in the
+night.
+</p>
+
+<p class="tb">
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+A numbness had crept into the movement
+of the train, as though, wearying it had ceased
+to clatter and were dropping into a doze. It
+was moving so quietly that the ticking of the
+watch again became audible. The wheels
+under the carriage seemed to be muffled and to
+labour, pushing heavily forward ... <em>Snow</em>.
+The journey across France ending on the
+heights along its eastern edge. Her drugged
+senses awoke bewailing Paris, gleaming now
+out of reach far away in the north, challenging
+with the memory of its glimpsed beauty whatever
+loveliness might be approaching through
+the night.
+</p>
+
+<p class="tb">
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<a id="page-21" class="pagenum" title="21"></a>
+Again outside the stopping train a far-off
+voice but this time a jocund sound, ringing
+echoless in open air. In a moment through
+a lifted window it became a rousing summons.
+Blinds went up, and on the huddled forms
+emerging serene and bright-eyed from their
+hibernation a blueish light came in. The
+opened door admitted crisp sounds close at
+hand and air, advancing up the carriage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Upon the platform the air was motionless
+and yet, walked through, an intensity of movement—movement
+upon her face of millions of
+infinitesimal needles attacking. Mountain air
+“like wine,” but this effervescence was solid,
+holding one up, feeding every nerve.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A little way down the platform she came
+upon the luggage, a few trunks set side by side
+on a counter, and saw at once that her portmanteau
+was not there. Anxiety dogging her
+steps. But this air, that reached, it seemed, to
+her very spirit, would not let her feel anxious.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The movements of the people leaving the
+train were leisurely, promising a long wait.
+Most of the passengers were the English set
+free, strolling happily about in fur-coats and
+<a id="page-22" class="pagenum" title="22"></a>
+creased Burberrys. English voices took possession
+of the air. Filled it with the sense of
+the incorrigible English confidence. And upon
+a table beyond the counter stood rows and
+rows of steaming cups. Coffee. Café, mon
+dieu! Offered casually, the normal beverage
+of these happy continentals.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The only visible official stood at ease beyond
+the table answering questions, making no
+move towards the ranged luggage. He looked
+very mild, had a little blue-black beard. She
+thought of long-forgotten Emmerich, the heavy
+responsible pimpled face of the German
+official who plunged great hands in amongst
+her belongings. Perhaps the customs’ officers
+were yet to appear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Fortified by coffee she strolled up and made
+her enquiry in French, but carefully in the
+slipshod English manner. For a moment her
+demand seemed to embarrass him. Then,
+very politely:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“<span class="lang" lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Vous arrivez, madame?</span>”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“<span class="lang" lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">De Londres.</span>”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“<span class="lang" lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Et vous allez?</span>”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“<span class="lang" lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">À Oberland.</span>”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-23" class="pagenum" title="23"></a>
+“<span class="lang" lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Vous n’avez qu’a monter dans le train</span>,”
+and hospitably he indicated the train that
+stood now emptied, and breathing through
+its open doors. Walking on down the platform
+she caught through a door ajar in the
+background a glimpse of a truckle bed with
+coverings thrown back. Here as they laboured
+forward through the darkness the douanier
+had been sleeping, his station ready-staged
+for their coming, a farcical half-dozen trunks
+laid out to represent the belongings of the
+trainful of passengers. Appearances thus kept
+up, he was enjoying his rôle of pleasant host.
+Tant mieux, tant very much mieux. One
+could enjoy the fun of being let out into the
+night.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The solid air began to be intensely cold.
+But in its cold there was no bitterness and it
+attained only her face, whose shape it seemed
+to change. And all about the station were
+steep walls of starless darkness and overhead
+in a blue-black sky, stars oddly small and
+numerous; very sharp and near.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the train moved on night settled
+down once more. Once more there was dim
+<a id="page-24" class="pagenum" title="24"></a>
+gaslight and jolting shadows. But the air
+was clearer and only two passengers remained,
+two women, each in her corner and each in a
+heavy black cloak. Strangers to each other,
+with the length of the carriage between them,
+yet alike, indistinguishable; above each cloak
+a plump middle-aged face not long emerged
+from sleep: sheened with the sleep that had
+left the oily, glinting brown eyes. Presently
+they began to speak, with the freemasonry of
+women unobserved, socially off duty. Their
+voices frugal, dull and flat; the voices of those
+who have forgotten even the desire to find
+sympathy, to find anything turned their way
+with an offering.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They reached details. One of them was on
+her way home to a place with a tripping
+gentle name, a fairy keep agleam on a lakeside
+amidst mountains. To her it was dailiness,
+life as now she knew it, a hemmed-in loneliness.
+Visitors came from afar. Found it full of
+poetry. Saw her perhaps as a part of it, a
+figure of romance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When their patient voices ceased they were
+ghosts. Not even ghosts, for they seemed
+<a id="page-25" class="pagenum" title="25"></a>
+uncreated, seemed never to have lived and
+yet to preside over life, fixed in their places,
+an inexorable commentary. Each sat staring
+before her into space, patient and isolated,
+undisguised isolation. To imagine them alert
+and busied with their families about them
+made them no less sad. Immovable at the
+centre of their lives was loneliness, its plaints
+silenced, its source forgotten or unknown.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of what use traveller’s joy? Frivolous,
+unfounded, dependent altogether on oblivions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One of them was rummaging in a heavy
+sack made of black twill and corded at the
+neck. Toys, she said, were there—“<span class="lang" lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">pour mes
+p’tits enfants</span>.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“<span class="lang" lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Ça porte beaucoup de soins, les enfants</span>,”
+said the other, and compressed dry lips. The
+first agreed and they sat back, each in her
+corner, fallen into silence. Children to them
+seemed to be not persons but a material, an
+unvarying substance wearily known to them
+both and to be handled in that deft adjusting
+way of the French. Satisfied with this mutual
+judgment on life, made in camera, they relapsed
+into contemplation, leaving the air
+<a id="page-26" class="pagenum" title="26"></a>
+weighted with their shared, secretly scornful,
+secretly impatient resignation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet they were fortunate. Laden with
+wealth they did not count. It spoke in their
+complacency. Aspiration asleep. They looked
+for joy in the wrong place. In this they were
+humanity, blindly pursuing its way. Their
+pallid plump faces, so salient, could smile impersonally.
+Their heads were well-poised above
+shapely subdued bodies.
+</p>
+
+<p class="tb">
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+Now that it was empty and the blinds drawn
+up, the carriage seemed all window, letting in
+the Swiss morning that was mist opening here
+and there upon snow still greyed by dawn.
+Through the one she had just pushed up came
+life, smoothing away the traces of the night.
+She lay back in her corner and heard with
+closed eyes the steady voice of the train. The
+rattle and clatter of its night-long rush through
+France seemed to be checked by a sense of
+achievement, as if now it took its ease, delighting
+<a id="page-27" class="pagenum" title="27"></a>
+in the coming of day, in the presence
+of this Switzerland for whose features it was
+watching through the mist.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Incredible that in this same carriage where
+now she was at peace in morning light she
+had sat through a flaming darkness, penned
+and enduring. Lifting weary eyes she boldly
+surveyed it, saw the soilure and shabbiness
+the gaslight had screened, saw a friend, grimed
+with beneficent toil, and turned once more
+blissfully towards the window and its view of
+thin mist and dawn-greyed snowfields.
+</p>
+
+<p class="tb">
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+The leap of recognition, unknowing between
+the mountains and herself which was which,
+made the first sight of them—smoothed snow
+and crinkled rock in unheard-of unimagined
+tawny light—seem, even at the moment of
+seeing, already long ago.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They knew, they smiled joyfully at the
+glad shock they were, sideways gigantically
+advancing while she passed as over a bridge
+<a id="page-28" class="pagenum" title="28"></a>
+across which presently there would be no
+return, seeing and unseeing, seeing again with
+the first keen vision.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They closed in upon the train, summitless,
+their bases gliding by, a ceaseless tawny cliff
+throwing its light into the carriage, almost
+within touch; receding, making space at its
+side for sudden blue water, a river accompanying,
+giving them gentleness who were its
+mighty edge; broadening, broadening, becoming
+a wide lake, a stretch of smooth peerless
+blue with mountains reduced and distant
+upon its hither side. With the sideways climbing
+of the train the lake dropped away, down
+and down until presently she stood up to see it
+below in the distance, a blue pool amidst its
+encirclement of mountain and of sky: a
+picture sliding away, soundlessly, hopelessly
+demanding its perfect word.
+</p>
+
+<p class="tb">
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+“<span class="lang" lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Je suis anglaise</span>,” she murmured as the
+window came down into place.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-29" class="pagenum" title="29"></a>
+“<span class="lang" lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Je le crois, madame. Mais comment-voulez-vous-mon-dieu-vous-autres-anglais-qu’on-chauffe-les-coupés?</span>”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was left to pictures framed and glazed.
+</p>
+
+<p class="tb">
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+Berne was a snowstorm blotting out everything
+but small white green-shuttered houses
+standing at angles about the open space between
+the station and the little restaurant
+across the way, their strangeness veiled by
+falling flakes, flakes falling fast on freshly
+fallen snow that was pitted with large deep-sunken
+foot-prints. The electric air of dawn
+had softened, and as she plunged, following the
+strides of a row of foot-prints, across to her
+refuge, it wrapped her about, a pleasant enlivening
+density, warmed by the snow. Monstrous
+snowstorm, adventure, and an excuse for
+shirking the walk to the Bridge and its view
+of the Bernese heights. She was not ready
+for heights. This little secret tour, restricted
+to getting from train to breakfast and back
+<a id="page-30" class="pagenum" title="30"></a>
+again to the train, gave her, with its charm
+of familiar activity in a strange place, a sharp
+first sense of Switzerland that in obediently
+following the dictated programme she would
+have missed. But coming forth, strengthened,
+once more into the snow she regretted the low
+walking-shoes that prevented the following
+up of her glad meeting with the forgotten
+details of the continental breakfast, its tender-crusted
+rolls, the small oblongs of unglistening
+sugar that sweetened the life-giving coffee,
+by an exploration of the nearer streets.
+</p>
+
+<p class="tb">
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+Presently their talk fell away and the
+journeying cast again its full spell. Almost
+soundlessly the train was labouring along
+beside a ridge that seemed to be the silent top
+of the world gliding by, its narrow strip of
+grey snow-thick sky pierced by the tops of the
+crooked stakes that were a fence submerged.
+From time to time the faint clear sound of a
+bell, ting-ting, and a neat toy station slid by
+half buried in snow.
+</p>
+
+<p class="tb">
+<a id="page-31" class="pagenum" title="31"></a>
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+“I don’t dislike those kind of breakfasts
+myself,” she said and turned her face to the
+window. Her well-cut lips had closed unpressing,
+flowerlike. Both the girls had the
+slender delicate fragility of flowers. And
+strength. Refined and gentle, above a strength
+of which they were unaware. They were immensely
+strong or they would not appear undisturbed
+by their long journeying, would not
+look so exactly as if they were returning home
+in an omnibus from an afternoon’s shopping
+in their own Croydon.
+</p>
+
+<p class="tb">
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+They had come so far together that it would
+seem churlish, with the little terminus welcoming
+the whole party, to turn away from
+them. And she liked them, was attached to
+them as fellow adventurers, fellow survivors
+of the journey. The falling into the trap of
+<a id="page-32" class="pagenum" title="32"></a>
+travellers’ freemasonry was inevitable: a
+fatal desire to know the whence and the
+whither, and, before you are aware of it
+you have pooled your enterprise and the new
+reality is at a distance. But so far it had not
+come to that. There were no adieux. They
+had melted away, they and their things, lost
+in the open while she, forgetful of everything
+but the blessed cessation, had got herself out
+of the train.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The station was in a wilderness. High
+surrounding mountains making it seem that
+their half-day’s going up and still up had
+brought them out upon a modest lowland.
+There was no sign from where she stood of
+any upward track. Sheds, dumped upon a
+waste of snow beyond which mountains filled
+the sky and barred the way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Fierce-looking men in blue gaberdines and
+slouch hats, lounging about. One of these
+must be attacked and bargained with for a
+sleigh. But there were no sleighs to be seen,
+nothing at all resembling a vehicle, unless
+indeed one braved the heights in one of those
+rough shallow frameworks on runners, some
+<a id="page-33" class="pagenum" title="33"></a>
+piled with hay and some with peeled yellow
+timbers, neatly lashed. Perhaps a sleigh
+should be ordered in advance? Perhaps here
+she met disaster....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The man knew her requirements before she
+spoke and was all hot-eyed eagerness, yet
+off-hand. Brutish, yet making her phrases,
+that a London cabby would have received with
+deference, sound discourteous. In his queer
+German he agreed to the smaller sum and
+turned away to expectorate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The large barn-like restaurant was empty
+save for a group of people at the far end, forgotten
+again and again as she sat too happy
+to swoop the immense distance between herself
+and anything but the warm brownness of
+the interior and its strange quality, its intensity
+of welcoming shelter—sharp contrast
+with the bleak surrounding snow. Switzerland
+was here, already surrounding and protecting
+with an easy practised hand. And
+there was a generous savouriness.... She
+could not recall any lunching on an English
+journey affording this careless completeness of
+comfort.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-34" class="pagenum" title="34"></a>
+Incompletely sharing these appreciations her
+tired and fevered body cowered within the
+folds of the beneficent fur-coat seeking a somnolence
+that refused to possess it. Fever kept
+her mind alert, but circling at a great pace
+round and round amidst reiterated assertions.
+Turn and turn about they presented themselves,
+were flung aside in favour of what waited
+beyond, and again thrust themselves forward,
+as if determined, so emphatic they were, not
+only to share but to steer her adventure. And
+away behind them, standing still and now
+forever accessible, were the worlds she had
+passed through since the sleet drove in her
+face at Newhaven. And ahead unknown
+Oberland, summoning her up amongst its
+peaks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And hovering vehement above them all hung
+the cloud of her pity for those who had never
+bathed in strangeness—and its dark lining, the
+selfish congratulation that reminded her how
+at the beginning of her life, in the face of obstructions,
+she had so bathed and now under
+kindly compulsion was again bathing. And
+again alone. Loneliness, that had long gone
+<a id="page-35" class="pagenum" title="35"></a>
+from her life, had come back for this sudden
+voyaging to be her best companion, to shelter
+strangeness that can be known only in
+solitude.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In a swift glimpse, caught through the mesh
+woven by the obstinate circlings of her consciousness,
+she saw her time in Germany, how
+perfect in pain and joy, how left complete and
+bright had been that piece of her life. And
+in Belgium—in spite of the large party. Yet
+even the party, though they had taken the
+edge from many things had now become a rich
+part of the whole. But the things that came
+back most sharply had been seen in solitude:
+in those times of going out alone on small
+commissions, the way the long vista of boulevard
+seemed to sing for joy, the sharp turn,
+the clean pavé and neat bright little shops;
+the charcuterie just round the corner, the
+old pharmacien who had understood and
+quickly and gravely chloroformed the kitten
+quite dead; the long walk through the
+grilling lively Brussels streets to get the
+circular tickets—little shadow over it of pain
+at the thought of the frightened man who
+<a id="page-36" class="pagenum" title="36"></a>
+believed it sinful to go to mass and saw the
+dull little English Church as light in a pagan
+darkness; the afternoon alone in the polished
+old salon while the others were packing for
+the Ardennes tour just before the great
+thunderstorm, bright darkness making everything
+gleam, the candles melting in the heavy
+heat, drooping from their sconces, white, and
+gracious in their oddity, against the dark
+panelling: rich ancient gloom and gleam and
+the certainty of the good of mass, of the way so
+welcome and so right as an interval in living
+it stayed the talkative brain and made the
+soul sure of itself. That moment in Bruges—after
+the wrangling at the station, after not
+wanting to go deliberately to see the Belfry,
+after feeling forever blank in just this place that
+was fulfilling all the so different other places,
+showing itself to be their centre and secret,
+while aunt Bella bought the prawns and we all
+stood fuming in the sweltering heat—of being
+suddenly struck alive, drawn running away
+from them all down the little brown street—the
+Belfry and its shadow, all its might and
+sweetness and surroundedness, safe, before
+<a id="page-37" class="pagenum" title="37"></a>
+they all came up with their voices and their
+books.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And oh! that first glimpse that had begun it
+all, of Brussels in the twilight from the landing
+window; old peaked houses, grouped irregularly
+and rising out of greenery, gothic,
+bringing happy nostalgia. Gothic effects
+bring nostalgia, have a deep recognisable
+quality of life. A gothic house is a person, a
+square house is a thing....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In silence and alone; yet most people
+prefer to see everything in groups, collectively.
+They never lose themselves in strangeness and
+wake changed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That man is cheerfully bearing burdens.
+Usually in a party there is one who <em>is</em> alone.
+Harassed, yet quietly seeing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was smiling, the smile of an old friend.
+With a sharp effort she pushed her way through,
+wondering how long she had sat staring at
+them, to recognition of the Croydon party.
+Who else indeed could it be? She gathered
+herself together and instantly saw in the
+hidden future not the sunlit mountains of her
+desire but for the first time the people already
+<a id="page-38" class="pagenum" title="38"></a>
+ensconced at the Alpenstock, demanding
+awareness and at least the semblance of interest.
+Sports-people, not only to the manner
+born—that, though they would not know it,
+was a tie, a home-tie pulling at her heart—but
+to the manner dressed, making one feel
+not merely inadequate but improperly hard-up.
+But since she was to live on a balcony?
+And there was the borrowed fur-coat ...
+and the blue gown.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The words sung out by the Croydon father
+were lost amongst their echoes in the rafters.
+She heard only the English voice, come, as
+she had come, so far and so laboriously. Her
+gladly answering words were drowned by the
+sudden jingling of sleighbells at the door
+near by.
+</p>
+
+<p class="tb">
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+Behind the sturdy horse, whose head-tossings
+caused the silvery clash of bells was
+the sleigh of <em>The Polish Jew</em>, brought out of
+the darkness at the back of the stage and
+<a id="page-39" class="pagenum" title="39"></a>
+brightly coloured: upon a background of
+pillar-box red, flourishing gilt scrolls surrounded
+little landscape scenes painted upon
+its sides in brilliant deep tones that seemed
+to spread a warmth and call attention to the
+warmth within the little carriage sitting compact
+and low on its runners and billowing with
+a large fur rug.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As unexpected as the luxurious vehicle was
+the changed aspect of the driver. Still wearing
+smock and slouch hat he had now an air of
+gravity, the air of a young student of theology.
+And on his face as he put her into the sleigh
+was a look of patient responsibility. He
+packed and arranged with the manner of one
+handling valuables, silently; the Swiss manner
+perhaps of treating the English, acquired and
+handed down through long experience of the
+lavish generosity of these travellers from whom
+it was useless to expect an intelligible word.
+But there was contempt too; deep-rooted,
+patient contempt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This was luxury. There was warmth under
+her feet, fur lining upon the back of the seat
+reinforced by the thickness of the fur-coat
+<a id="page-40" class="pagenum" title="40"></a>
+and all about her the immense fur rug. There
+was nothing to fear from the air that presently
+would be in movement, driving by and growing
+colder as the sleigh went up into the unknown
+heights. Away ahead the Croydon
+party made a compact black mass between the
+two horses of their larger sleigh and the
+luggage standing out behind in unwieldy cubes
+just above the snow. Their driver was preparing
+to start. On all the upward way they
+would be visible ahead, stealing its mystery,
+heralding the hotel at the end.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were off, gliding swiftly over the snow,
+gay voices mingling with the sound of bells,
+silvery crashings going to the rhythm of a
+soundless trit-trot. Every moment her own
+horse threw up a spray of tinkles promising
+the fairy crashing that would ring upon the
+air against the one now rapidly receding. The
+mountains frowning under the grey sky and
+the snowfields beyond the flattened expanse
+round the station came to life, listening to the
+confidently receding bells.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Croydon party disappeared round a
+bend and again there was silence and a mighty
+<a id="page-41" class="pagenum" title="41"></a>
+inattention. But her man, come round from
+lashing on her luggage, was getting into his
+seat just as he was, coatless and gathering
+up the reins with bare hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Euh!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The small sound, like a word spoken <span class="lang" lang="it" xml:lang="it">sotto
+voce</span> to a neighbour, barely broke the stillness,
+but the sleigh leapt to the pull of the horse,
+and glided smoothly off. Its movement was
+pure enchantment. No driving on earth
+could compare to this skimming along on
+hard snow to the note of the bells that was
+higher than that of those gone on ahead and
+seemed to challenge them with an overtaking
+eagerness. Gay and silvery sweet, it seemed
+to make a sunlight within the sunless air and
+to call up to the crinkled tops of the mountains
+that were now so magnificently in movement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Euh-euh!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On they swept through the solidly impinging
+air. Again the million needles attacking.
+In a moment they were round the bend and
+in sight of the large sleigh, a moving patch
+upon the rising road.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Euh-euh-euh,” urged the driver laconically,
+<a id="page-42" class="pagenum" title="42"></a>
+and the little sleigh flew rocking up
+the slight incline. They were overtaking.
+The heavier note of the bells ahead joined its
+slower rhythm to their swift light jinglings.
+The dark mass of the Croydon party showed
+four white faces turned to watch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You are well off with your fur-coat,” cried
+the father as her sleigh skimmed by. They
+had looked a little crouched and enduring.
+Not knowing the cold she had endured in the
+past, cold that lay ahead to be endured again,
+in winters set in a row.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ringing in her head as she sped upwards
+along the road narrowing and flanked by
+massive slopes whose summits had drawn too
+near to be seen, were the shouted remarks
+exchanged by the drivers. They had fallen
+resonantly upon the air and opened within it
+a vision of the sunlit heights known to these
+men with the rich deep voices. But there
+was the hotel....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After all no one was to witness her apprenticeship.
+And to get up within sight of the
+summits was worth much suffering. Suffering
+that would be forgotten. And if these
+<a id="page-43" class="pagenum" title="43"></a>
+were Oberland men, then there was to be
+<em>ski-running</em> to-morrow. Si-renna, what else
+could that mean? Patois, rich and soft.
+Doomed to die. Other words gathered unawares
+on the way came and placed themselves
+beside those ringing in her ears. Terminations,
+turns of sound, upon a new quality of voice.
+Strong and deep and ringing with a wisdom
+that brought her a sense of helpless ignorance.
+The helpless ignorance of town culture.
+</p>
+
+<p class="tb">
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+The thin penetrating mist promised increasing
+cold. The driver flung on a cloak,
+secured at the neck but falling open across his
+chest and leaving exposed his thinly clad arms
+and bare hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She pulled high the collar of her fur-coat,
+rimy now at its edges, and her chin ceased
+to ache and only her eyes and cheekbones felt
+the thin icy attacking mist that had appeared
+so suddenly. The cold of a few moments ago
+numbing her face had brought a hint of how
+<a id="page-44" class="pagenum" title="44"></a>
+one might freeze quietly to death, numbed
+and as if warmed by an intensity of cold; and
+that out amongst the mountains it would not
+be terrible. But this raw mist bringing pain
+in every bone it touched would send one
+aching to one’s death, crushed to death by a
+biting increasing pain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She felt elaborately warm, not caring even
+now how long might go on this swift progress
+along a track that still wound through corridors
+of mountains and still found mountains
+rising ahead. But night would come and the
+great shapes all about her would be wrapped
+away until they were a darkness in the sky.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If this greying light were the fall of day then
+certainly the cold would increase. She tried
+to reckon how far she had travelled eastwards,
+by how much earlier the sun would set. But
+south, too, she had come....
+</p>
+
+<p class="tb">
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+The mist was breaking, being broken from
+above. It dawned upon her that they had
+been passing impossibly through clouds and
+were now reaching their fringe. Colour was
+<a id="page-45" class="pagenum" title="45"></a>
+coming from above, was already here in dark
+brilliance, thundery. Turning to look down
+the track she saw distance, cloud masses,
+light-soaked and gleaming.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now from just ahead high in the mist,
+a sunlit peak looked down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Long after she had sat erect from her warm
+ensconcement, the sunlit mountain corridors
+still seemed to be saying watch, see, if you
+can believe it, what we can do. And all the
+time it seemed that they must open out and
+leave her upon the hither side of enchantment,
+and still they turned and brought fresh vistas.
+Sungilt masses beetling variously up into pinnacles
+that truly cut the sky high up beyond
+their high-clambering pinewoods, where their
+snow was broken by patches of tawny crag.
+She still longed to glide forever onwards
+through this gladness of light.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the bright gold was withdrawing.
+Presently it stood only upon the higher ridges.
+The colour was going and the angular shadows,
+leaving a bleakness of white, leaving the mountains
+higher in their whiteness. The highest
+sloped more swiftly than the others from its
+<a id="page-46" class="pagenum" title="46"></a>
+lower mass and ended in a long cone of purest
+white with a flattened top sharply aslant
+against the deepening blue; as if walking up
+it. It held her eyes, its solid thickness of
+snow, the way from its blunted tower it
+came broadening down unbroken by crag,
+radiant white until far down its pinewoods
+made a gentleness about its base. Up there
+on the quiet of its topmost angle it seemed
+there must be someone, minutely rejoicing
+in its line along the sky.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A turn brought peaks whose gold had
+turned to rose. She had not eyes enough for
+seeing. Seeing was not enough. There was
+sound, if only one could hear it, in this still,
+signalling light.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The last of it was ruby gathered departing
+upon the topmost crags, seeming, the moment
+before it left them, to be deeply wrought into
+the crinkled rock.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At a sharp bend the face of the sideways-lounging
+driver came into sight, expressionless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“<span class="lang" lang="de" xml:lang="de">Schön, die letzte <a id="corr-0"></a>Glüh</span>,” he said quietly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When she had pronounced her “<span class="lang" lang="de" xml:lang="de">Wunderschön</span>,”
+she sat back released from intentness
+<a id="page-47" class="pagenum" title="47"></a>
+seeing the scene as one who saw it daily; and
+noticed then that the colour ebbed from the
+mountains had melted into the sky. It was
+this marvel of colour, turning the sky to molten
+rainbow, that the driver had meant as well
+as the rubied ridges that had kept the sky
+forgotten.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Just above a collar of snow, that dipped
+steeply between the peaks it linked, the sky
+was a soft greenish purple paling upwards
+from mauve-green to green whose edges melted
+imperceptibly into the deepening blue. In a
+moment they were turned towards the opposite
+sky, bold in smoky russet rising to
+amber and to saffron-rose expanding upwards;
+a high radiant background for its mountain,
+spread like a banner, not pressed dense and
+close with deeps strangely moving, like the
+little sky above the collar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The mountain lights were happiness possessed,
+sure of recurrence. But these skies,
+never to return, begged for remembrance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The dry cold deepened, bringing sleep.
+Drunk, she felt now, with sleep; dizzy with
+gazing, and still there was no sign of the end.
+<a id="page-48" class="pagenum" title="48"></a>
+They were climbing a narrow track between
+a smooth high drift, a greying wall of snow,
+and a precipice sharply falling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An opening; the floor of a wide valley.
+Mountains hemming it, exposed from base to
+summit, moving by as the sleigh sped along
+the level to where a fenced road led upwards.
+Up this steep road they went in a slow zig-zag
+that brought the mountains across the
+way now right now left, and a glimpse ahead
+against the sky of a village, angles and peaks
+of low buildings sharply etched, quenched by
+snow, crushed between snow and snow, and
+in their midst the high snow-shrouded cone
+of a little church; Swiss village, lost in wastes
+of snow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At a tremendous pace they jingled along a
+narrow street of shops and châlets. The
+street presently opened to a circle about the
+little church and narrowed again and ended,
+showing beyond, as the sleigh pulled up at the
+steps of a portico, rising ground and the
+beginning of pinewoods.
+</p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-2">
+<a id="page-49" class="pagenum" title="49"></a>
+CHAPTER II
+</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="first">
+<span class="firstchar">S</span><span class="postfirstchar">he</span> followed the little servant, who had
+darted forth to seize her baggage, into
+a small lounge whose baking warmth recalled
+the worst of the train journey; seeming—though,
+since still one breathed, air was
+there—like an over-heated vacuum.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The brisk little maid, untroubled, was already
+at the top of a short flight of wide
+red-carpeted stairs, and making impatient
+rallying sounds—like one recalling a straying
+dog. Miriam went gladly to the promise of
+the upper air. But in going upwards there
+was no relief.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Glancing, as she passed at the turn of the
+stairs a figure standing in a darkness made by
+the twilight in the angle of the wall, she found
+the proprietress receiving her; a thick rigid
+figure in a clumsy black dress, silent, and with
+deep-set glinting eyes hostile and suspicious
+<a id="page-50" class="pagenum" title="50"></a>
+stirring a memory of other eyes gazing out
+like this upon the world, of peasant women at
+cottage doors in German villages, peering out
+with evil eyes, but from worn and kindly faces.
+There was nothing kindly about this woman,
+and her commonness was almost startling,
+dreary and meagre and seeming to be of the
+spirit.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She blamed for the unmitigated impression
+the fatigue she was silently pleading whilst
+she searched for the mislaid German phrases
+in which to explain that she had chosen the
+cheaper room. She found only the woman’s
+name: Knigge. This was Frau Knigge, at
+once seeming more human, and obviously
+waiting for her to speak.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Suddenly, and still unbending from her rigid
+pose, she made statements in slow rasping
+English and a flat voice, that came unwillingly
+and told of vanished interest in life. Life, as
+she spoke, looked terrible that could make a
+being so crafty and so cold, that could show
+to anyone on earth as it showed to this woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Admitting her identity, seeing herself as
+she was being seen, Miriam begged for her
+<a id="page-51" class="pagenum" title="51"></a>
+room, hurrying through her words to hide the
+thoughts that still they seemed to reveal, and
+that were changing, as she heard the sound of
+her own voice, dreadfully, not to consideration
+for one whose lot had perhaps been too hard to
+bear, but to a sudden resentment of parleying,
+in her character as Roman citizen, with this
+peasant whose remoteness of being was so
+embarrassing her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The woman’s face lit up with an answering
+resentment and a mocking contempt for her
+fluent German. Too late she realised that
+Roman citizens do not speak German. But
+the details were settled, the interview was
+at an end, and the woman’s annoyance due
+perhaps only to the choice of the cheaper room.
+When she turned to shout instructions to the
+maid she became humanity, in movement,
+moving in twilight that for her too was going
+on its way towards the light of to-morrow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the door was at last blessedly closed
+upon the narrow room whose first statements
+miscarried, lost in the discovery that even up
+here there was no change in the baked dry
+air, she made for the cool light of the end
+<a id="page-52" class="pagenum" title="52"></a>
+window but found in its neighbourhood not
+only no lessening but an increase of the oppressive
+warmth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The window was a door giving on to a little
+balcony whose wooden paling hid the floor of
+the valley and the bases of the great mountains
+across the way. The mountains were
+now bleak white, patched and streaked with
+black, and as she stood still gazing at them
+set there arrested and motionless and holding
+before her eyes an unthinkable grey bitterness
+of cold, she found a new quality in her fast
+closed windows and the exaggerated warmth.
+Though still oppressive they were triumphant
+also, speaking a knowledge and a defiance of
+the uttermost possibilities of cold.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Cold was banished, by day and by night.
+For a fortnight taken from the rawest depths
+of the London winter there would be no waste
+of life in mere endurance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She discovered the source of the stable
+warmth in an unsightly row of pipes at the
+side of the large window, bent over like hairpins
+and scorching to the touch. The concentrated
+heat revived her weary nerves. At
+<a id="page-53" class="pagenum" title="53"></a>
+the end of the coil there was a regulator.
+Turning it she found the heat of the pipes
+diminish and hurriedly reversed the movement
+and glanced out at the frozen world and loved
+the staunch metallic warmth and the flavour
+of timber added to it in this room whose walls
+and furniture were all of naked wood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Turning to it in greeting she found it seem
+less small. It was small but made spacious
+by light. Light came from a second window
+that was now calling—a small square beside
+the bed with the high astonishing smooth
+billow of covering oddly encased in thin
+sprigged cotton—offering mountains not yet
+seen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The way to it was endless across the short
+room from whose four quarters there streamed,
+as she moved, a joy so deep that she brought
+up opposite the window as if on another day
+of life and glanced out carelessly at a distant
+group of pinnacles darkening in a twilight
+that was not grey but lit wanly in its fading,
+by snow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The little servant came in with the promised
+tea and made, as she set it upon the little table
+<a id="page-54" class="pagenum" title="54"></a>
+with the red and white check cover of remembered
+German cafés, bent over it in her short-skirted
+check dress and squab of sleek flaxen
+hair, a picture altogether German. She answered
+questions gravely, responsibility speaking
+even in the smile that shone from her
+plump toil-sheened young face, telling the
+story of how she and her like, permanently
+toiling, were the price of happiness for visitors.
+But this she did not know. She was happy.
+Liked being busy and smiling and being
+smiled at and shutting the door very carefully.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some movement of hers had set swinging an
+electric bulb hanging by a cord above the little
+table. Over the head of the bed there was
+another. Light and warmth in profusion—in
+a cheap room in a modest hotel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Switching on the light that concentrated
+on the table and its loaded little tray and
+transformed the room to a sitting-room, “I’m
+in Switzerland,” she said aloud to the flowered
+earthenware and bright nickel, and sat down
+to revel in freedom and renewal and at once
+got up again realising that hurry had gone
+<a id="page-55" class="pagenum" title="55"></a>
+from her days and flung off her blouse and
+found hot water set waiting on the washstand
+and was presently at the table in négligé and
+again ecstatically telling it her news.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The familiar sound of tea pouring into a
+cup heightened the surrounding strangeness.
+In the stillness of the room it was like a
+voice announcing her installation, and immediately
+from downstairs there came as if
+in answer the sound of a piano, crisply and
+gently touched, seeming not so much to
+break the stillness as to reveal what lay within
+it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She set down her teapot and listened and
+for a moment could have believed that the
+theme was playing itself only in her mind,
+that it had come back to her because once again
+she was within the strange happiness of being
+abroad. Through all the years she had tried
+in vain to recall it, and now it came, to welcome
+her, piling joy on joy, setting its seal upon the
+days ahead and taking her back to her Germany
+where life had been lived to music that
+had flowed over its miseries and made its
+happinesses hardly to be borne.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-56" class="pagenum" title="56"></a>
+For an instant she was back in it, passing
+swiftly from scene to scene of the months in
+Waldstrasse and coming to rest in a summer’s
+evening: warm light upon the garden, twilight
+in the saal. Leaving it she turned to
+the other scenes, freshly revived, faithfully
+fulfilling their remembered promise to endure
+in her forever, but each one as she paused in
+it changed to the summer’s evening she had
+watched from the darkening saal, the light
+upon the little high-walled garden, making
+space and distance with the different ways it
+fell on trees and grass and clustering shrubs,
+falling full on the hushed group of girls turned
+towards it with Fräulein Pfaff in their midst
+disarmed to equality by the surrounding
+beauty, making a little darkness in the summer-house
+where Solomon shone in her white dress.
+And going back to it now it seemed as though
+some part of her must have lived continuously
+there so that she was everywhere at once, in
+saal and garden and summer-house and out,
+beyond the enclosing walls, in the light along
+the spacious forbidden streets.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She relived the first moment of knowing
+<a id="page-57" class="pagenum" title="57"></a>
+gladly and without feeling of disloyalty how
+far a Sommerabend outdoes a summer’s
+evening, how the evening beauty was intensified
+by the deeps of poetry in the Germans
+all about her, and remembered her fear lest
+one of the English should sound an English
+voice and break the spell. And how presently
+Clara Bergmann, unasked, had retreated
+into the shadowy saal and played this ballade
+and in just this way, the way of slipping it
+into the stillness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“<span class="lang" lang="de" xml:lang="de">Man soll sich des Leben<a id="corr-1"></a>s freuen, im Berg
+und Thal. In so <a id="corr-2"></a>was kann sich ein’ Engländerin
+nie hineinleben.</span>”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps not, but in that small group of
+English there had been two who would in
+spite of homesickness have given anything
+just to go on, on any terms, existing in Germany.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is their joy; the joyful rich depth of life
+in them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And this ballade was joy. Eternal Sommerabend;
+and now to-morrow’s Swiss sunlight.
+Someone there was downstairs to
+whom it was a known and cherished thing,
+<a id="page-58" class="pagenum" title="58"></a>
+who was perhaps wise about it, wise in music
+and able to place it in relation to other compositions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Its charm she now saw, coming to it afresh
+and with a deepened recognition, lay partly
+in the way it opened: not beginning, but continuing
+something gone before. It was a
+shape of tones caught from a pattern woven
+continuously and drawn, with its rhythm
+ready set, gleaming into sight. The way of
+the best nocturnes. But with nothing of
+their pensiveness. It danced in the sky and
+tiptoed back to earth down the group of little
+chords that filled the pause, again sprang
+forth and up and came wreathing down to
+touch deep lower tones who flung it to and
+fro. Up again until once more upon down-stepping
+chords it came into the rhythm of
+its dance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was being played from memory, imperfectly,
+by someone who had the whole clear
+within him and in slowing up for the complicated
+passages never stumbled or lost the
+rhythm or ceased to listen. Someone choosing
+just this fragment of all the music in the world
+<a id="page-59" class="pagenum" title="59"></a>
+to express his state: joy in being up here in
+snow and sunlight.
+</p>
+
+<p class="tb">
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+When the gown was on, the creasing was
+more evident; all but the enlivening strange
+harmony of embroidered blues and greens and
+mauves was a criss-cross of sharp lines and
+shadows.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the second time the long loud buzzing
+of the downstairs bell vibrated its summons
+through the house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Standing once more before the little mirror
+that reflected only her head and shoulders she
+recreated the gown in its perfection of cut,
+the soft depths of its material that hung and
+took the light so beautifully.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Your first Switzerland must be good. I
+want your first Switzerland to be good.” And
+then, in place of illuminating hints, that little
+diagram on the table: of life as a zig-zag.
+Saddening. Perhaps he was right. Then,
+since the beginning had been so good, all a
+sharp zig, what now waited downstairs, heralded
+<a id="page-60" class="pagenum" title="60"></a>
+by the creased dress, was a zag, equally
+sharp.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The dining-room, low ceiled and oblong,
+was large and seemed almost empty. Small
+tables set away towards a window on the
+right and only one of them occupied, left clear
+the large space of floor between the door at
+which she had come in and a table, filling the
+length of the far side of the room where
+beside a gap in the row of diners a servant
+stood turned towards her with outstretched
+indicating hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No one but the servant had noticed her
+entry. Voices were sounding, smooth easy
+tones leaving the air composed, as she slipped
+into her place in a light that beside the unscreened
+glare upstairs was mellow, subdued
+by shades. The voices were a man’s across
+the way—light and kindly, ’Varsity, the
+smiling tone of one who is amiable even in
+disagreement—and that of the woman on her
+left, a subdued deep bass. Other voices
+dropped in, as suave and easy, and clipping and
+slurring their words in the same way; but
+rather less poised.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-61" class="pagenum" title="61"></a>
+The tone of these people was balm. Sitting
+with eyes cast down aware only of the subdued
+golden light, she recalled her fleeting
+glimpse of them as she had crossed the room,
+English in daily evening dress, and was
+carried back to the little world of Newlands
+where first she had daily shared the evening
+festival of diners dressed and suave about a
+table free of dishes, set with flowers and
+elegancies beneath a clear and softly shaded
+light: the world she had sworn never to leave.
+She remembered a summer morning, the
+brightness of the light over her breakfast
+tray and its unopened letters and her vow to
+remain always surrounded by beauty, always
+with flowers and fine fabrics, and space and
+a fresh clean air always close about her,
+playing their part that was so powerful.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And this little wooden Swiss hotel with its
+baked air and philistine fittings was to provide
+thrown in with Switzerland, more than a
+continuation of Newlands—Newlands seen
+afresh with experienced eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The clipped, slurred words had no longer
+the charm of a foreign tongue. Though still
+<a id="page-62" class="pagenum" title="62"></a>
+they rang upon the air the preoccupations of
+the man at the wheel: the sound of “The
+Services” adapted. But clustered in this
+small space they seemed to be bringing with
+them another account of their origin, to be
+showing how they might come about of themselves
+and vary from group to group, from
+person to person—with one aim: to avoid
+disturbing the repose of the features. Expression
+might be animated or inanimate, but
+features must remain undisturbed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then there is no place for clearly enunciated
+speech apart from oratory; platform and
+pulpit. Anywhere else it is bad form. Bad
+fawm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She felt she knew now why perfect speech,
+delightful in itself, always seemed insincere.
+Why women with clear musical voices undulating,
+and clean enunciation, are always
+cats; and the corresponding men, ingratiating
+and charming at first, turn out sooner or later
+to be charlatans.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The nicest people have bad handwriting and
+bad delivery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But all this applied only to English, to
+<a id="page-63" class="pagenum" title="63"></a>
+Germanics; that was a queer exciting thing,
+that only these languages had the quality of
+aggressive disturbance of the speaking face:
+chin-jerking vowels and aspirates, throat-swelling
+gutturals ... force and strength and
+richness, qualities innumerable and more
+various than in any other language.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Quelling an impulse to gaze at the speakers
+lit by discovery, she gazed instead at imagined
+faces, representative Englishmen, with eyes
+and brows serene above rapid slipshod speech.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here too of course was the explanation of
+the other spontaneous forms of garbling, the
+extraordinary pulpit speech of self-conscious
+and incompletely believing parsons, and the
+mincing speech of the genteel. It explained
+“nace.” Nice, correctly spoken, is a convulsion
+of the lower face—like a dog snapping
+at a gnat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She had a sudden vision of the English aspirate,
+all over the world, puff-puff-puffing
+like a steam-engine, and was wondering
+whether it were a waste or a source of energy,
+when she became acutely aware of being for
+those about her a fresh item in their grouping.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-64" class="pagenum" title="64"></a>
+It was a burden too heavy to be borne. The
+good Swiss soup had turned her bright fever
+of fatigue to a drowsiness that made every
+effort to sit decently upright end in a renewed
+abject drooping that if only she were alone
+could be the happy drooping of convalescence
+from the journey.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Their talk had gone on. It was certain
+that always they would talk. Archipelagoes
+of talk, avoiding anything that could endanger
+continuous urbanity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the midst of a stifled yawn the call to
+a fortnight’s continuous urbanity fell upon her
+like a whip. Dodging the blow she lolled
+resistant to the sound of bland voices. An
+onlooker, appreciative but resistant; that,
+socially, would be the story of her stay. A
+docile excursion, even if they should offer it,
+into this select little world, would come between
+her and her Switzerland. Refusal
+clamoured within her and it was only as an
+after-thought that she realised the impossibility
+of remaining for a fortnight without
+opinions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The next moment, hearing again the interwoven
+<a id="page-65" class="pagenum" title="65"></a>
+voices as a far-off unison of people
+sailing secure on smooth accustomed waters,
+she was bleakly lonely; suppliant. Nothing
+showed ahead but a return with her fatigue
+to sustain the silence and emptiness of a
+strange room. She was turning to glance at
+the woman on her left when the deep bass
+voice asked her casually if she had had a
+good journey. Casual cameraderie, as if
+already they had been talking and were now
+hiding an established relationship under conventionalities.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The moment she had answered she heard
+the university voice across the way remark,
+in the tone of one exchanging notes with a
+friend after a day’s absence, that it was a vile
+journey, but all right from Berne onwards,
+and looked up. There he was, almost opposite,
+Cambridge, and either history or
+classics, the pleasant radiance of <em>lit. hum.</em> all
+about him, and turned her way bent a little,
+as if bowing, and as if waiting for her acknowledgment—with
+his smile, apology introduction
+and greeting beaming together from
+sea-blue eyes set only ever so little too closely
+<a id="page-66" class="pagenum" title="66"></a>
+together in a neatly tanned narrowly oval
+face—before regaining the upright.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her soft reply, lost in other sounds, made
+a long moment during which, undisturbed by
+not hearing, he held his attitude of listening
+that told her he was glad of her presence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The close-set eyes meant neither weakness
+nor deceit. Sectarian eyes, emancipated. But
+his strength was borrowed. His mental
+strength was not original. An uninteresting
+mind; also he was a little selfish, with the
+selfishness of the bachelor of thirty—but
+charming.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The party was smaller than she had thought.
+The odd way they were all drawn up at one
+end of the table made them look numerous.
+Spread out in the English way they would
+have made a solemn dinner-party, with large
+cold gaps.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Someone asked whether she had come right
+through and in a moment they were all amiably
+wrangling over the pros and cons of breaking
+the journey.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Staring from across the table was a man
+alone, big oblong foreigner dwarfing his neighbours,
+<a id="page-67" class="pagenum" title="67"></a>
+and piteous, not to be looked at as the
+others could who fitted the scene; not so
+much sitting at table with the rest as set there
+filling a space. His eyes had turned towards
+a nasal voice suddenly prevailing; sombre
+brown, wistfully sulking below eyebrows lifted
+in a wide forehead that stopped unexpectedly
+soon at a straight fence of hair. Oblong
+beard reaching the top of stiff brown coat.
+Russian, probably the Chopin player.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Anyone’s a fool who passes Parrus without
+stopping off at least a few hours.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A small man at the end of the row, opaque
+blue eyes in a peaky face, little peaked beard,
+neat close-fitting dress clothes. Incongruous
+far-travelled guest of little Switzerland.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was next the window, with the nice
+man on his right. Then came the big Russian
+exactly opposite and again naïvely staring
+across, and beyond him a tall lady in a home-made
+silk blouse united by a fichu to the
+beginning of a dark skirt; coronet of soft,
+coiled white hair above a firmly padded face
+with polished skin, pink-flushed, glimmering
+into the talk, that was now a debate about to-morrow’s
+<a id="page-68" class="pagenum" title="68"></a>
+chances, into which sounded women’s
+voices from the table behind, smooth and clear,
+but clipped, free-masonish like the others.
+To the right of the coronetted lady an iron-grey
+man, her husband, gaunt and worn,
+with peevishly suffering eyes set towards the
+door on the far side of the room. Fastidious
+eyes, full of knowledge, turned away. He
+was the last in the row and beyond him the
+table stretched away to the end wall through
+whose door the servants came and went.
+His opponents were out of sight beyond the
+bass-voiced woman on the left, whose effect
+was so strangely large and small: a face
+horse-like and delicate, and below her length
+of face increased by the pyramid of hair
+above her pointed fringe, a meeting of old
+lace and good jewellery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To her own right the firm insensitive hand,
+that wore a signet ring and made pellets of
+its bread, belonged to just the man she had
+imagined, dark and liverish, but with an unexpectedly
+flattened profile whose moustache,
+dropping to sharp points, gave it an expression
+faintly Chinese; a man domestic but
+<a id="page-69" class="pagenum" title="69"></a>
+accustomed to expand in unrestricted statement,
+impatiently in leash to the surrounding
+equality of exchange. Beyond him his wife,
+sitting rather eagerly forward, fair and plump,
+with features grown expressionless in their
+long service of holding back her thoughts, but,
+betraying their secret in a brow, creased faintly
+by straining upwards as if in perpetual incredulity
+of an ever-present spectacle, and
+become now the open page of the story the
+mouth and eyes were not allowed to tell.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At her side a further figure and beyond it
+the head of the table unoccupied, leaving the
+party to be its own host.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The atmosphere incommoding the husband,
+who at a second glance seemed to call even
+pathetically for articulate opposition, was that
+of a successful house-party, its tone set by the
+only two in sight who were through and
+through of the authentic brand: the deep-voiced
+woman and the nice man. The invalid
+and his wife belonged to that inner
+circle. But they were a little shadowed by
+his malady.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was an atmosphere in which the American
+<a id="page-70" class="pagenum" title="70"></a>
+and the Russian were ill at ease, one an
+impatient watchfulness for simpler, more
+lively behaviour and the other a bored detachment,
+heavily anchored, not so much by
+thoughts as by hard clear images left by things
+seen according to the current formula of whatever
+group of the European intelligentsia he
+belonged to.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was speaking softly through the general
+conversation to the nice man, with slight deprecating
+gestures of eyebrows and shoulders,
+in his eyes a qualified gratitude. The nice
+man spoke carefully with head turned and
+bent, seeking his words. French, with English
+intonation. All these people, however fluently,
+would talk like that. All of them came
+from a world that counted mastery of a
+foreign tongue both wonderful and admirable—but
+ever so little <span class="lang" lang="la" xml:lang="la">infra dig</span>.
+</p>
+
+<p class="tb">
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+“Won’t you come in heah for a bit?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Drugged as she felt with weariness she
+turned joyfully into a room opening in the
+<a id="page-71" class="pagenum" title="71"></a>
+background of the hall whence the deep bass
+voice had sounded as she passed. A tiny
+salon, ugly; maroon and buff in a thick light.
+Plush sofa, plush cover on the round table in
+the centre, stiff buff-seated “drawing-room”
+chairs; a piano. It was from this dismal
+little room the Chopin had sounded out into
+the twilight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There she was, alone, standing very thin and
+tall in a good, rather drearily elderly black
+dress beside a cheerless radiator, one elbow
+resting on its rim and a slender foot held
+towards it from beneath the hem of a slightly
+hitched skirt: an Englishwoman at a fireside.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My name’s Harcourt, M’zz Harcourt,”
+she said at once.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Books were set star-wise in small graded
+piles about the centre of the table, the uppermost
+carrying upon their covers scrolls and
+garlands of untarnished gilt. The one she
+opened revealed short-lined poems set within
+yet more garlands, appealing; leaves and
+buds and birds lively and sweet about the
+jingling verse. Swiss joy in deep quiet valleys
+<a id="page-72" class="pagenum" title="72"></a>
+guarded by sunlit mountains. Joy of people
+living in beauty all their lives; enclosed. Yet
+making rooms like this.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it held the woman at the radiator,
+knowing England and her sea, and whose
+smile looking up she met, watching, indulgent
+of her détour and, as too eagerly she moved
+forward, indulgent also of that. Here, if she
+would, was a friend, and, although middle-aged,
+a contemporary self-confessed by a note
+in her voice of impatience over waste of time
+in preliminaries.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Mrs. Harcourt did not know how nimbly
+she could move, might think it strange when
+presently her voice must betray that she was
+already rejoicing—defying the note of warning
+that sounded far away within her—in a well-known
+presence, singing recklessly to it the
+song of new joy and life begun anew that all
+the way from England had been gathering
+within her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The announcement of her own name made
+the woman again a stranger, so much was she
+a stranger to the life belonging to the name, and
+brought into sudden prominence the state of
+<a id="page-73" class="pagenum" title="73"></a>
+her gown, exposed now in its full length. She
+recounted the tragedy and saw Mrs. Harcourt’s
+smile change to real concern.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here they were, alone together, seeming to
+have leapt rather than passed through the
+early stages.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Like love, but unobstructed. A balance of
+side-by-side, not of opposition. More open
+than love, yet as hidden and wonderful;
+rising from the same depth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hold it in front of the waydiator. Vat’ll
+take ’em out a bit. Such a poo’hy gown.”
+She moved a little back from the row of pipes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Going close to the radiator Miriam moved
+into a fathomless gentleness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it was also a demand, so powerful that
+it was drawing all her being to a point. All
+that she had brought with her into the room
+would be absorbed and scattered, leaving her
+robbed of things not yet fully her own.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The warning voice within was crying aloud
+now, urging her not only to escape before the
+treasures of arrival and of strangeness were
+lost beyond recovery, but to save also the past,
+disappeared round the corner yet not out of
+<a id="page-74" class="pagenum" title="74"></a>
+sight but drawn closely together in the distance,
+a swiftly moving adventure, lit from
+point to point by the light in which to-day she
+had bathed forgetful.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Even a little talk, a little answering of
+questions, would falsify the past. Set in her
+own and in this woman’s mind in a mould of
+verbal summarisings it would hamper and
+stain the brightness of to-morrow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She found herself hardening, seeking generalisations
+that would cool and alienate, and
+was besieged by memories of women whom she
+had thus escaped. And of their swift revenge.
+But this woman was not of those who avenge
+themselves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hesitating before the sound of her own voice,
+or the other which would sound if this second’s
+silence were prolonged, she was seized by
+revolt: the determination at all costs to avoid
+hearing in advance, in idle words above the
+ceaseless intercourse of their spirits, about
+Oberland; even from one whose seeing might
+leave her own untouched.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To open the way for flight she remarked that
+it must be late.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-75" class="pagenum" title="75"></a>
+“About nine. You’re dead beat, I can see.
+Ought to go to bed.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Not for worlds,” said Miriam involuntarily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Harcourt’s face, immediately alight for
+speech, expressed as she once more took
+possession of the radiator and looked down at
+it as into a fire, willingness to stand indefinitely
+by.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Everyone’s gone to bed. Bein’ out all
+day in vis air makes you sleepy at night.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Remembering that of course she would
+speak without gaps, Miriam glanced at the
+possibility of pulling herself together for conversation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I been pottering. My ski are at Zurbuchen’s
+bein’ repaired.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But what a <em>perfect</em> Swiss name. Like
+oak, like well-baked bread.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To get away now. Sufficient impression of
+the Alpenstock people perpetually strenuous,
+living for sport, and, redeeming its angularity,
+the rich Swiss background: Zurbuchen. But
+Mrs. Harcourt’s glance of surprised delight—there
+was amusement too, she didn’t think
+<a id="page-76" class="pagenum" title="76"></a>
+Swiss names worth considering—meant that
+she was entertained, anticipating further entertainment;
+to which she would not contribute.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No. I’m supposed to sit about and rest.
+Overwork.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You won’t. Lots of people come out like
+vat. You’ll soon find resting a baw out
+heah.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Should like a little sleep. I’ve had none
+for two nights.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Stop in bed to-morrow. Have your meals
+up.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Mm....”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For a moment Mrs. Harcourt waited, silent,
+not making the movement of departure that
+would presently bring down the shadow of
+returning loneliness her words had drawn so
+near; keeping her leaning pose, her air of being
+indefinitely available.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The deep bell of her voice dropped from its
+soft single note to a murmur rising and falling,
+a low narrative tone, hurrying.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Through the sound still coming and going
+in her mind of the name Mrs. Harcourt had
+<a id="page-77" class="pagenum" title="77"></a>
+so casually spoken, bringing with it the sunlit
+mountains and the outer air waiting in to-morrow,
+Miriam heard that the people at the
+Alpenstock were all right—with the exception
+of the two sitting at dinner on Mrs. Harcourt’s
+left, “outsiders” of a kind now appearing in
+Oberland for the first time. Saddened by
+their exclusion, embarrassed by unconscious
+flattery, Miriam impulsively asked their name
+and glowed with a sudden vision of Mrs.
+Corrie, of how she would have embraced this
+opportunity for wicked mondaine wit. Mrs.
+Harcourt, for a moment obediently reflecting,
+said she had forgotten it but that it was somefing
+raver fwightful. Everyone else, introduced
+by name, received a few words of commendation—excepting
+the Russian and the
+American. The Russian would be just a
+foreigner, an unfortunate, but the American
+surely must be an outsider? Insincerely, as
+if in agreement with this division of humanity
+by exclusion, she put in a question, and while
+Mrs. Harcourt pulled up her discourse to say,
+as if sufficiently, that he was staying only a
+couple of days and passed on to summon other
+<a id="page-78" class="pagenum" title="78"></a>
+hotels to the tribunal, she was glad that the
+Russian had been left untouched. Harry
+Vereker, fine, a first-class sportsman and
+altogether nice chap, was already lessened,
+domesticated, general property in his niceness;
+but the Russian remained, wistfully
+alone: attractive.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“.... hidjus big hotel only just built; all
+glass and glare. It’ll be the ruin of Oberland.
+No one’ll come here next year.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Though still immersed in her theme Mrs.
+Harcourt was aware, when next she glanced to
+punctuate a statement, if not exactly that
+instead of the object she offered it was herself
+and her glance that was being seen—the
+curious steeliness of its indignation—at least
+of divided attention, a sudden breach in their
+collaboration; and immediately she came to
+the surface, passing without pause to her full
+bell note, with an enquiry. Hoping to please.
+But why hoping to please?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This abrupt stowing away of her chosen
+material might be a simple following of the
+rules of her world; it suggested also the
+humouring of a patient by a watchful nurse,
+<a id="page-79" class="pagenum" title="79"></a>
+and since she had the advantage of not being
+in the depths of fatigue this perhaps was its
+explanation; but much more clearly it spoke
+her years of marriage, of dealing with masculine
+selfishness. And she was so swift, so repentant
+of her long, enjoyable excursion, that it was
+clear she had suffered masculine selfishness
+gladly. Neither understanding nor condemning.
+It had not damaged her love and she
+had suffered bitterly when it was removed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Suffering was pleading now in her eyes off
+their guard in this to-and-fro of remarks that
+was a little shocking: the reverberation of a
+disaster.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now that it was clear that her charming
+behaviour from the first might be explained
+by the attraction there was for her in a mannish
+mental hardness, that she sought in its
+callousness both something it could never give,
+as well as entertainment, and rest from perpetual
+feeling, she ceased to be interesting.
+She herself made it so clear that she had
+nothing to give. Offering her best help, what
+in the way of her world would be most useful
+to one newly arrived, she was yet suppliant;
+<a id="page-80" class="pagenum" title="80"></a>
+and afraid of failure, haunted by the fear of a
+failure she did not understand and that was
+perhaps uniform in her experience.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miriam found her own voice growing heavy
+with the embarrassment of her discoveries and
+her longing to break this so eagerly woven
+entanglement. Trying again for cooling generalities
+she had the sense of pouring words
+into a void. The gentle presence hovered
+there, played its part, followed, answered, but
+without sharing the effort to swim into the
+refreshing tide of impersonality; without seeing
+the independent light on the scraps of
+reality she was being offered. No wonder
+perhaps: they were a little breathless. She
+was scenting apology and retreat. And did
+not know that it was retreat not at all from
+herself, but from her terrible alacrity and
+transparence: the way the whole of her was
+at once visible. All her thoughts, her way
+of thinking in words, in set phrases gathered
+from too enclosed an experience. Enclosed.
+To be with her was enclosure. The earlier
+feeling of being encompassed that was so
+welcome because it was so womanly, so
+<a id="page-81" class="pagenum" title="81"></a>
+exactly what a man needs in its character of
+kindly confessor and giver of absolution in
+advance, had lost value before the discovery
+of this absence of vistas, this frightful sense of
+being shut in with assumptions about life
+that admit of no question and no modification.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again the dead husband intruded; his years
+of life at this woman’s side, his first adoration
+of her, and then his weariness, fury of weariness
+whose beginnings she felt herself already
+tasting, so that for sheer pity she was kept in
+her place, effusive, unable to go.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But at the moment of parting Mrs. Harcourt
+became again that one who had waited,
+impatient of wasting time in formalities. Her
+smile glanced out from the past, revealing
+the light upon her earlier days. It was a
+greeting for to-morrow rather than a good-night.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Going up to the little bedroom that was now
+merely a refuge off-stage, she found it brightly
+lit in readiness for her coming, summery bright
+all over, the light curtains drawn and joining
+with the unvarnished wood to make an enclosure
+<a id="page-82" class="pagenum" title="82"></a>
+that seemed to emulate the brightness
+of the Swiss daylight. The extravagant illumination,
+the absence of glooms and shadows,
+recalled the outdoor scene and something of
+this afternoon’s bliss of arrival and the joy
+that had followed it, when music sounded up
+through the house, of home-coming from long
+exile. Switzerland waited outside—enriched
+by her successful début—with its promise that
+could not fail. Meanwhile there was the unfamiliar
+enchantment of moving comfortably
+in a warm bedroom, not having the wealth
+one brought upstairs instantly dispersed by
+the attack of cold and gloom. The temperature
+was lower than before, pleasant, no
+longer oppressive; and more hospitable than
+a fire whose glow was saddened by the certainty
+that in the morning it would be an
+ashy desolation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The moment the basket chair received her
+the downstairs world was about her again;
+circling, clamorous with the incidents of her
+passage from lonely exposure to the shelter
+of Mrs. Harcourt’s so swiftly offered wing,
+from beneath which, with its owner assured
+<a id="page-83" class="pagenum" title="83"></a>
+of the hardness of what it sheltered, she could
+move freely forth in any direction.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The two Le Mesras—that was her pronunciation
+of Le Mesurier?—Three Chators.
+Mrs. Sneyde and Maud Something at the little
+table behind ... Hollebone. Maud Hollebone.
+The American, leaving. Interest hesitated
+between Harry Vereker already a little
+diminished, and the Russian: the reincarnated,
+attractive, ultimately unsatisfactory
+Tansley Street foreigner?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Someone was tapping at the door. She
+opened it upon Mrs. Harcourt offering a small
+tray, transformed to motherliness by a voluminous
+dressing-gown.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When she had gone she vanished utterly.
+There she was, actually in the next room, yet
+utterly forgettable. And yet she threw across
+the days ahead a strange deep light.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The steaming chocolate and the little English
+biscuits disappeared too quickly, leaving
+hunger.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The French window was made fast by a
+right-angle hand-piece, very stiff, that gave
+suddenly with a dreadfully audible clang.
+<a id="page-84" class="pagenum" title="84"></a>
+The door creaked open. Racing the advancing
+air she was beneath the downy billow
+before it reached her. It took her fevered
+face with its batallions of needles, stole up her
+nostrils to her brain, bore her down into the
+uttermost depths of sleep.
+</p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-3">
+<a id="page-85" class="pagenum" title="85"></a>
+CHAPTER III
+</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="first">
+<span class="firstchar">F</span><span class="postfirstchar">rom</span> which she awoke in light that
+seemed for a moment to be beyond
+the confines of earth. It was as if all her life
+she had travelled towards this radiance, and
+was now within it, clear of the past, at an
+ultimate destination.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How long had it been there, quizzically
+patient, waiting for her to be aware of it?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was sound, that had wakened her and
+ceased now that she was looking and listening;
+become the inaudible edge of a sound infinitely
+far away. Brilliant light, urgently describing
+the outdoor scene. But she was unwilling
+to stir and break the radiant stillness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Close at hand a bell buzzed sharply. Another,
+and then a third far away down the
+corridor. People ringing their day into existence,
+free to ring their day into existence
+when they pleased. She was one of them;
+<a id="page-86" class="pagenum" title="86"></a>
+and for to-day she would wait awhile, give the
+bell-ringers time to be up and gone down to
+breakfast while she kept intact within this
+miracle of light the days ahead that with the
+sounding of her own bell would be already in
+process of spending.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But perhaps there was a time-limit for breakfasts?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Screwing round to locate the bell with the
+minimum of movement she paused in sheer
+surprise of well-being. Of the shattering journey
+there was not a trace. Nor of the morning
+weariness following social excitements.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sitting up to search more effectually she
+saw the source of her wakening, bright gold
+upon the mountain tops: a smiling challenge,
+as if, having put on their morning gold, the
+mountains watched its effect upon the onlookers.
+</p>
+
+<p class="tb">
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+She was glad to be alone on the scene of
+last night’s dinner-party; to be in the company
+of the other breakfasters represented
+<a id="page-87" class="pagenum" title="87"></a>
+only by depleted butter-dishes and gaps in
+the piles of rolls, and free from the risk of
+hearing the opening day fretted by voices set
+going like incantations to exorcise the present
+as if it had no value, as if the speakers were
+not living in it but only in yesterday or to-morrow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And when there came a warning swift
+clumping of hob-nailed boots across the hall,
+across the room, she demanded Vereker, oddly
+certain that even at this late hour still somehow
+it would contrive to be he.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And there he was, lightly clumping round
+the table-end to his place, into which he
+slipped smiling his greeting, boyishly. Not at
+all in the self-conscious Englishman’s manner
+of getting himself seated when others are
+already in their places: bent, just before
+sitting down, forward from the waist and in
+that pose—hitching his trousers the while—distributing
+his greetings, and so letting himself
+down into his chair either with immediate
+speech or a simulated air of preoccupation.
+Vereker flopped and beamed at the same
+moment, unfeignedly pleased to arrive.
+<a id="page-88" class="pagenum" title="88"></a>
+Knickerbockers; but that was not the whole
+difference. He was always unfeignedly pleased
+to arrive?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He began at once collecting food and spoke
+with gentle suddenness into a butter-dish:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I hope you had a good night?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His talk made a little symphony with his
+movements which also were conversational,
+and he looked across each time he spoke, but
+only on the last word; a swift blue beam. In
+the morning light he seemed younger—perhaps
+a champion ski-er at the end of his day
+is as tired as a hard-worked navvy?—and a
+certain air of happy gravity and the very fair
+curly hair shining round its edges from recent
+splashings, gave him, in his very white, very
+woolly sweater, something of the look of a
+newly bathed babe in its matinée jacket—in
+spite of the stern presence, above the rolled
+top of his sweater, of an inch of stiff linen
+collar highly glazed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was of a type and of a class, and also, in
+a way not quite clear, a tempered, thoroughly
+live human being; something more in him
+than fine sportsman and nice fellow, giving
+<a id="page-89" class="pagenum" title="89"></a>
+him weight. Presently she found its marks:
+a pleat between the brows and, far away
+within his eyes even when they smiled, a sadness;
+that sounded too in his cheerful voice, a
+puzzled, perpetual compassion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the world? For himself?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But these back premises were touched with
+sunlight. Some sense of things he had within
+him that made him utterly <em>kind</em>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Isn’t it extraordinary,” she said, hoping
+to hide the fact that she had missed his last
+remark, “the way these people leave the
+lights switched on all the time, everywhere.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Cheap electricity,” he said as if in parenthesis,
+and as if apologetically reminding her of
+what she already knew—“Water power. They
+pay a rate and use as much as they like.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In all his answers there was this manner
+of apologising for giving information. And his
+talk, even the perfect little story of the local
+barber and the newspapers, which he told at
+top pace as if grudging the moment it wasted,
+was like a shorthand annotation to essential
+unspoken things, shared interests and opinions
+taken for granted. Talking with him she no
+<a id="page-90" class="pagenum" title="90"></a>
+longer felt as she had done last night either
+that she was at a private view of an exclusive
+exhibition, or gathering fresh light on social
+problems. There was in him something unbounded,
+that enhanced the light reflected
+into the room from the sunlit snow. His
+affectionate allusion to his Cambridge brought
+to her mind complete in all its parts—together
+with gratitude for the peace he gave in which
+things could expand unhindered—her own so
+sparse possession: her week-ends there with
+the cousins, their blinkered, comfort-loving
+academic friends, the strange sense of at once
+creeping back into security and realising how
+far she had come away from it; their kindnesses,
+their secret hope of settling her for
+life in their enclosed world, and their vain
+efforts to mould her to its ways; and then the
+end, the growing engrossments in London
+breaking the link that held her to them and to
+the past they embodied—and Cambridge left
+lit by their sweet hospitality, by the light
+streaming on Sunday afternoons through
+King’s Chapel windows; the Backs in sunlight,
+and a memory of the halting little chime.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-91" class="pagenum" title="91"></a>
+When she told him of the things that
+Cambridge had left with her, she paused just
+in time to escape adding to them the gait of
+the undergraduates: the slovenly stride whose
+each footfall sent the chin forward with a hen-like
+jerk.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He agreed at once with her choice, but
+hesitated over the little chime.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It might have been a new church. I never
+saw it. But if you had once heard it you
+<em>couldn’t</em> forget it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was absurd to be holding to her solitary
+chime in face of his four years’ residence. But
+it seemed now desperately important to state
+exactly the quality she had felt and never put
+into words. She sat listening—aware of him
+waiting in a sympathetic stillness—to each
+note as it sounded out into the sky above the
+town, making it no longer Cambridge but a
+dream-city, subduing the graceless modern
+bricks and mortar to harmony with the
+ancient beauty of the colleges—until the whole
+was a loveliness beneath the evening sky—and
+presently found herself speaking with
+reckless enthusiasm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-92" class="pagenum" title="92"></a>
+“<em>Don’t</em> you remember the four little gentle
+tuneless phrases, of six and seven notes alternately,
+one for each quarter, and at the hour
+sounding one after the other with a little
+pause between each, seeming to ask you to
+look at what it saw, at the various life of the
+town made suddenly wonderful and strange;
+and the last phrase, beginning with a small
+high note that tapped the sky, and wandering
+down to the level and stopping without
+emphasis, leaving everything at peace and
+very beautiful.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I think I <em>can’t</em> have heard it,” he said
+wistfully and sat contemplative in a little
+pause during which it occurred to her, becoming
+aware of the two of them talking on
+and on into the morning that it rested with
+her to wind up the sitting; that he might
+perhaps, if not quite immediately, yet in
+intention be waiting for her to rise and spare
+him the apparent discourtesy of pleading an
+engagement. Even failing the engagement
+they could not sit here forever, and the convention
+of his world demanded that she should
+be the first to go.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-93" class="pagenum" title="93"></a>
+She had just time to note coming from far
+away within herself a defiance that would
+sooner inflict upon him the discomfort of
+breaking the rule than upon herself the annoyance
+of moving at its bidding, when he
+looked across and said with the bowing attitude
+he had held last night as he spoke and
+waited for her to become aware of him: “May
+I put you up for the ski-club?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was, of course, his business to cultivate
+new people, and, if they seemed suitable, to
+collect them....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She smiled acknowledgment and insincerely
+pleaded the shortness of her stay. All she
+could do, short of blurting out her poverty
+which he seemed not to have seen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But a fortnight was, he declared, the ideal
+time: time to learn and to get on well enough
+to want to come out again next year; and
+hurried on to promise a fellow sufferer, a friend
+coming up, for only a few days, from the
+South, who would be set immediately to work
+and on whose account he was committed to-day
+to trek down to the station.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“We were,” he said, for the first time
+<a id="page-94" class="pagenum" title="94"></a>
+looking across almost before he spoke, and
+with the manner now of making a direct
+important communication, “at Cambridge
+together.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A valued friend, being introduced, recommended,
+put before himself. Warmth crept
+into his voice, and lively emphasis—compressed
+into a small note of distress. That
+note was his social utmost, for gravity and for
+joy; recalling Selina Holland—when she was
+deeply moved: a wailing tone, deprecating,
+but in his tone was more wistfulness, a suggestion
+too of anxiety. It had begun when he
+spoke of Pater’s Renaissance Studies, but had
+then merely sounded into the golden light,
+intensifying it. Now it seemed to flout the
+light, flout everything but his desire to express
+the absent friend.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That was some years ago. Since then he
+has been a very busy man, saying to this one
+go and he goeth ...” He smiled across as
+if asking her to share the strangeness of his
+friend’s metamorphosis.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’ve not seen him since?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Not since he bought his land.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-95" class="pagenum" title="95"></a>
+“He’s a landowner,” she said, and fell into
+sadness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He is indeed, on quite a big scale, and a
+very hardworking one.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A farmer,” murmured Miriam, “that’s not
+so bad.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s very arduous. He is always at his post.
+Never takes a holiday. For three winters I’ve
+tried to get him up here for a week.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Absolute property in land,” she said to
+the sunlit snow, “is a crime.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Before her, side by side with a vision of
+Rent as a clutching monster astride upon
+civilisation, was a picture of herself, suddenly
+hitting out at these pleasant people, all, no
+doubt, landowners. It was only because the
+friend had been presented to her in the distance
+and with as it were all his land on his
+back that this one article of the Lycurgan
+faith of which she had no doubt, had at all
+reared itself in her mind. And as it came,
+dictating her words while she stood by counting
+the probable cost and wondering too over
+the great gulf between one’s most cherished
+opinions about life and one’s sense of life as it
+<a id="page-96" class="pagenum" title="96"></a>
+presents itself piecemeal embodied in people,
+she heard with relief his unchanged voice:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, please tell me why?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And turned to see him flushed, smiling,
+pardoning her lapse, apologising for pardoning
+it, and altogether interested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s a whole immense subject and I’m not
+a specialist. But the theory of Rent has been
+worked out by those who are, by people sincerely
+trying to discover where it is that temporarily
+useful parts of the machinery of civilisation
+have got out of gear and become
+harmful. <em>No</em> one ought to have to pay for
+the right to sit down on the earth. <em>No</em> one
+ought to be so helplessly expropriated that
+another can <em>buy</em> him and use him up as he
+would never dream of using up more costly
+material—horses for instance.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You are a socialist?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Into her answer came the sound of a child’s
+voice in plaintive recitative approaching from
+the hall.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Daphne in trouble,” he said, “you’ll tell
+me more, I <em>hope</em>,”—and turned his pleading
+smile to meet people coming in at the door.
+<a id="page-97" class="pagenum" title="97"></a>
+They clumped to the small table nearer the
+further window and she caught a sideways
+glimpse before they sat down: a slender
+woman with red-gold hair carrying a bunchy
+little girl whose long legs dangled against her
+skirt—Mrs. Sneyde, the grass-widow, and,
+making for the far side of the table a big
+buoyant girlish young woman—uninteresting—the
+sister-in-law, Maud Hollebone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The child’s “so bitter, <em>bitter</em> cold,” sounded
+clear through the morning greetings in which
+she took no part. Her voice was strange, low
+and clear, and full of a meditative sincerity.
+Amidst the interchange of talk between Vereker
+and the two women it prevailed again: a
+plaintive monologue addressed to the universe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The grating of a chair and there she was
+confronting the talking Vereker, who was on
+his feet and just about to go. She stood
+gazing up, with her hands behind her back.
+A rounded face and head, cleanly revealed by
+the way the fine silky brown hair was strained
+back across the skull; bunchy serge dress and
+stiff white pinafore. Pausing, Vereker looked
+down at her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-98" class="pagenum" title="98"></a>
+“You going out, Vereker?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Not yet.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Your friend coming? Not telegraphed or
+anything?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He’s coming all right, Daphne. He’ll be
+here to-night. You’ll see him in the morning.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’ll be writing your letters till you
+start?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I may.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then I’ll come and sit in your room till
+my beecely walk.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She rapped out her statements—immediately
+upon his replies, making him sound
+gentle and slow—from the childish, rounded
+face that was serenely thinking, full of quick,
+calm thought. Regardless talk was going
+forward at the other table to which, her
+business settled, she briskly returned.
+</p>
+
+<p class="tb">
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+The little wooden hall was like a summer-house
+that was also a sports-pavilion. Against
+the wall that backed the dining-room stood
+bamboo chairs uncertain, as if, belonging elsewhere
+<a id="page-99" class="pagenum" title="99"></a>
+and having been told not to block the
+gangway by moving into the open, they did
+not know what they were for. The table to
+which they belonged stood boldly in the centre
+and held an ash-tray. Between it and the
+front door from above which the antlered head
+of a chamois gazed down upon the small
+scene, the way was clear, but the rest of the
+floor space was invaded on all sides by toboggans
+propped against the wall or standing clear
+with boots lying upon them, slender boots
+gleaming with polish and fitted with skates that
+appeared to be nothing but a single brilliant
+blade. Against one wall was a pair of things
+like oars. Ski? But thought of as attached
+to a human foot they were impossibly long.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From a hidden region away beyond the angle
+of the staircase came servants’ voices in
+staccato, and abrupt sounds: the sounds of
+their morning campaign, giving an air of
+callous oblivion to the waiting implements of
+sport, and quenching, with the way they had
+of seeming to urge the residents forth upon
+their proper business outdoors, the hesitant
+invitation of the chairs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-100" class="pagenum" title="100"></a>
+Beyond the dining-room and this little hall,
+whose stillness murmured incessantly of activities,
+there was no refuge but the dejected
+little salon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Filled with morning light it seemed larger,
+a little important and quite self-sufficient,
+giving out its secret strangeness of a Swiss
+room, old; pre-existing English visitors, proof,
+with its way of being, set long ago and unaltered,
+against their travelled hilarity. The
+little parlour piano, precious in chosen wood
+highly polished, with faded yellow keys and
+faded silk behind its trellis, was full of old
+music, seemed to brood over the carollings of
+an ancient simplicity unknown to the modern
+piano whose brilliant black and white makes
+it sound in a room all the time, a ringing
+accompaniment to the life of to-day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But into this averted solitude there came to
+her again the sense of time pouring from an
+inexhaustible source: gentle, marvellous, unutterably
+<em>kind</em>. It came in through the
+window whose screened light, filling the small
+room and halting meditatively there, seemed
+to wait for song.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-101" class="pagenum" title="101"></a>
+Drawing back the flimsy curtain from the
+window, she found it a door giving on a
+covered balcony through whose panes she
+saw wan sunless snowfields and beyond them
+slopes, patched with black pinewoods and
+rising in the distance to a high ridge, a smooth
+bulging thickness of snow against deep blue
+sky. The dense pinewoods thinned and as
+they climbed into small straggling groups with
+here and there a single file of trees, small and
+sharp-pointed, marching towards the top of
+the ridge.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Beautiful this sharp etching far-off of keen
+black pines upon the sunless snow and strange
+the clear deep blue of the sky. But mournful;
+remote and self-sufficient. Switzerland
+averted and a little discouraging.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The balcony extended right and left and a
+glimpse away to the left of mats hanging out
+into the open and a maid pouncing forth
+upon them with a beater sent her to the right,
+where the distance was obscured by a building
+standing at right angles to the house, a battered
+barn-like place, unbalconied, but pierced
+symmetrically by little windows; châlet,
+<a id="page-102" class="pagenum" title="102"></a>
+warm rich brown, darkened above by its
+sheltering, steeply jutting roof ... beautiful.
+Its kindliness extended all about it, lending a
+warmth even to the far-off desolate slopes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A door at her side revealed the dining-room
+lengthwise and deserted, and then she was
+round the angle of the house and free of its
+secret: its face towards the valley that was
+now a vast splendour of sunlight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Every day, through these windows that
+framed the view in strips this light would be
+visible in all its changings. Standing at the
+one that glazed the great mountain whose gold
+had wakened her she discovered that the
+balcony was a verandah, had in front of it a
+railed-in space set with chairs and tables.
+In a moment she was out in the open light,
+upon a shelf, within the landscape that seemed
+now to be the whole delight of Switzerland
+outspread before her eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Far away below, cleft along its centre by
+the irregular black line of its frozen river was
+the wide white floor of the valley, measuring
+the mountains that rose upon its hither side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Those high, high summits, beetling variously
+<a id="page-103" class="pagenum" title="103"></a>
+up into the top of the sky, with bright patches
+of tawny rock breaking through their smooth
+whiteness against its darkest blue, knew
+nothing of the world below where their mountains
+went downward in a great whiteness of
+broadening irregular slopes that presently bore
+pines in single file upwards advancing from
+the dense clumps upon the lower ridges, and
+met in an extended mass along the edge of the
+valley floor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here and there, clear of the pinewoods, and
+looking perilously high and desolate, a single
+châlet made a triangular warm brown blot
+upon the dazzling snow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In this crystal stillness the smallest sound
+went easily up to the high peaks; to the high
+pure blue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Turning to bless the well-placed little hotel
+she met a frontage of blank windows, each
+with its sharply jutting balcony, jaws, dropped
+beneath the blind stare of the windows set
+forever upon a single scene. Hotel; queer
+uncherished thing. No one to share its life
+and make it live.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On a near table was a folded newspaper,
+<a id="page-104" class="pagenum" title="104"></a>
+thin, heavily printed, continental. Switzerland
+radiant all about her and the Swiss world
+within her hands—a reprieve from further
+seeing and a tour, into the daily life of this
+country whose living went on within a setting
+that made even the advertisements look lyrical.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The simple text was enthralling. For years
+she had not so delighted in any reading. In
+the mere fact of the written word, in the building
+of the sentences, the movement of phrases
+linking part with part. It was all quite undistinguished,
+a little crude and hard; demanding,
+seeming to assume a sunny hardness
+in mankind. And there was something missing
+whose absence was a relief, like the absence of
+heaviness in the air. Everything she had
+read stood clear in her mind that yet, insufficiently
+occupied with the narrative and
+its strange emanations, caught up single words
+and phrases and went off independently touring,
+climbing to fresh arrangements and interpretations
+of familiar thought.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And this miracle of renewal was the work of a
+single night.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The need for expression grew burdensome in
+<a id="page-105" class="pagenum" title="105"></a>
+the presence of the empty sun-blistered tables.
+Perhaps these lively clarities would survive
+a return journey through the hotel?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Voices sounded up from below, from the
+invisible roadway. English laughter, of people
+actively diverting themselves in the winter
+landscape. Far away within each one was the
+uncommunicating English spirit, heedless, but
+not always unaware, filling its day with
+habitual, lively-seeming activities. The laughter
+sounded insincere; as if defying a gloom it
+refused to face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They passed out of hearing and the vast
+stillness, restored, made her look forth: at
+a scene grown familiar, driving her off to fresh
+seeking while it went its way towards the day
+when she would see it for the last time, giving
+her even now as she surveyed its irrevocably
+known beauty, a foretaste of the nostalgia
+that must rend her when once more she was
+down upon the plains.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But that time was infinitely far away beyond
+the days during which she was to live perpetually
+with this scene that clamoured now
+to be communicated in its first freshness.
+</p>
+
+<p class="tb">
+<a id="page-106" class="pagenum" title="106"></a>
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+The writing at top-speed of half-a-dozen
+letters left arrival and beginning in the past,
+the great doorway of the enchantments she
+had tried to describe safely closed behind her,
+and herself going forward within them. With
+letters to post she must now go forth, secretly,
+as it were behind her own back, into Oberland;
+into the scene that had seemed full experience
+and was but its overture.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The letters were disappointing. Only in
+one of them had she escaped expressing yesterday’s
+excited achievements and set down
+instead the living joy of to-day. And this
+for the one to whom such joy was incredible.
+But all were warm with affection newly felt.
+The long distance not only made people very
+dear—in a surprising way it re-arranged them.
+Foremost amongst the men was Densley of
+the warm heart and wooden head wildly hailed.
+His letter, the last and shortest, wrote itself
+in one sentence, descriptive, laughing, affectionate.
+How it would surprise him....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Life, she told herself as she crossed the hall
+<a id="page-107" class="pagenum" title="107"></a>
+trying to drown the kitchen sounds by recalling
+what had flashed across her mind as she
+wrote to Densley, is eternal because joy is.
+“Future life” is a contradiction in terms. The
+deadly trap of the adjective. <span class="lang" lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Pourquoi dater?</span>
+Even science insists on indestructibility—yet
+marks for destruction the very thing that
+enables it to recognise indestructibility. But
+it had come nearer and clearer than that.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Fawn-coloured woolly puppies, romping
+in the thick snow at the side of the steps as
+though it were grass, huge, as big as lion cubs,
+with large snub faces, and dense short bushy
+coats trying to curl, evenly all over their tubby
+tumbling bodies ... St. Bernards, at home
+in their snow. They flung themselves at her
+hands, mumbling her gloves, rolling over with
+the smallest shove, weak and big and beautiful
+and with absurd miniature barkings.
+</p>
+
+<p class="tb">
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+The hotel was at the higher end of the village
+and from its steps she could see down the narrow
+street to where the little church and its
+<a id="page-108" class="pagenum" title="108"></a>
+white cloaked sugar-loaf spire obscured the
+view and away to the right set clear of the
+village and each on the crest of a gentle slope,
+the hotels, four, five, big buildings, not unbeautiful
+with their peaked roofs and balconies
+and the brilliance of green shutters on
+their white faces. And even the largest, Mrs.
+Harcourt’s ‘hidjus big place’ recognisable by
+its difference, a huge square plaster box,
+patterned with rows and rows of uniform
+windows above which on its flat roof a high
+pole flaunted a flag limp in the motionless air,
+looked small and harmless, a dolls’ house
+dumped casually, lost in the waste of snow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If these hotels were full, there were in the
+village more visitors than natives. But where
+were they? The vast landscape was empty.
+From its thickly mantled fields came the smell
+of snow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Lost when she went down the street in a
+maze of fugitive scents within one pervading,
+and that seemed to compose the very air: the
+sweet deep smell of burning pinewood. Moving
+within it as the crowded little shop windows
+went by on either hand were the smells
+<a id="page-109" class="pagenum" title="109"></a>
+of dried apples and straw and a curious
+blending of faint odours that revealed themselves—when
+presently summoning an excuse
+for the excitement of shopping, at the cost
+of but a few of the multitude of small coins
+representing an English sovereign, she gained
+the inside of the third general store between
+the hotel and the church—as the familiar smell
+of mixed groceries; with a difference: clean
+smells, baked dry. No prevailing odour of
+moist bacon and mouldering cheese; of spilt
+paraffin and musty sacking, and things left
+undisturbed in corners. No dinginess. And
+though shelves and counter were crowded,
+every single thing gleamed and displayed itself
+with an air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But there were no Swiss biscuits. Only a
+double row of the familiar square tins from
+Reading, triumphantly displayed by the gaunt
+sallow-faced woman whose ringing voice was
+as disconcertingly at variance with her appearance
+as was her charmed manner with the
+eager cunning that sat in her eyes. She asked
+for soap and the woman set wide the door of
+an upright glass case in which were invitingly
+<a id="page-110" class="pagenum" title="110"></a>
+set forth little packets bearing names that in
+England were household words.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She glanced back at the biscuits. Petit-Beurre
+were after all foreign and brought with
+them always the sight of Dinant and its rock
+coming into view, ending the squabble about
+the pronunciation of <span class="lang" lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">grenouille</span>, as the Meuse
+steamer rounded the last bend. But catching
+sight above the biscuits of a box of English
+nightlights she chose a piece of soap at random
+and fought while she responded to the voluble
+chantings accompanying the packing of her
+parcel, with the nightmare vision of bedrooms
+<em>never</em> bathed in darkness, of people <em>never</em> getting
+away into the night, people insisting, even
+in rooms where brilliance can be switched on at
+will, on the perpetual presence of the teasing
+little glimmer; people who travel in groups
+and bring with them so much of their home
+surroundings that they destroy daily, piecemeal,
+the sense of being abroad.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Regaining the street in possession of a
+replica of the tablet she had unpacked last
+night, she found that the busy midst of the
+village lay just ahead where the way widened
+<a id="page-111" class="pagenum" title="111"></a>
+to encircle the little church. Many shops,
+some of them new-built, with roomy windows,
+and the lifeless impersonal appearance of
+successful provincial stores. There were more
+people here, more women in those heavy black
+dresses and head-shawls, more bloused and
+bearded men, crossing the snowy road with
+swift slouching stride. A post-office, offering
+universal hospitality.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As if from the bright intense sunlight all
+about her, a ray of thought had fallen upon the
+mystery of her passion for soap, making it so
+clear in her mind that the little ray and the lit
+images waiting for words could be put aside
+in favour of the strange dingy building breaking
+the line of shops, looking like a warehouse,
+its small battered door, high up, approached
+by a flight of steps leading from either side
+whose meeting made a little platform before
+the door. Rough sleds were drawn up round
+about the entrance, making it central in the
+little open space about the church, the perpetual
+head-tossings of the horses filling the
+bright air with showers of tinkles. It could
+hardly be a café; yet two men had just clattered
+<a id="page-112" class="pagenum" title="112"></a>
+down the steps flushed and garrulous.
+Strange dark-looking hostelry within which
+shone the midday sun of these rough men
+living in far-away châlets among the snow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was not only the appeal of varying shape
+and colour or even of the many perfumes each
+with its power of evoking images: the heavy
+voluptuous scents suggesting brunette adventuresses,
+Turkish cigarettes and luxurious
+idleness; the elusive, delicate, that could
+bring spring-time into a winter bedroom darkened
+by snow-clouds. The secret of its power
+was in the way it pervaded one’s best realisations
+of everyday life. No wonder Beethoven
+worked at his themes washing and re-washing
+his hands. And even in merely washing with
+an empty mind there is a <em>charm</em>; though it
+is an empty charm, the illusion of beginning,
+as soon as you have finished, all over again as
+a different person. But all great days had
+soap, impressing its qualities upon you, during
+your most intense moments of anticipation, as
+a prelude. And the realisation of a good day
+past, coming with the early morning hour, is
+accompanied by soap. Soap is with you
+<a id="page-113" class="pagenum" title="113"></a>
+when you are in that state of feeling life at
+first hand that makes even the best things
+that can happen important not so much in
+themselves as in the way they make you conscious
+of life, and of yourself living. Every
+day, even those that are called ordinary days,
+with its miracle of return from sleep, is heralded
+by soap, summoning its retinue of companion
+days.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To buy a new cake of soap is to buy a fresh
+stretch of days. Its little weight, treasure,
+minutely heavy in the hand, is life, past
+present and future compactly welded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Post-office offering universal hospitality
+more vitally than the little church. A beggar
+could perhaps find help in a church more
+easily than in a post-office. Yet the mere
+atmosphere of a post-office offered something
+a church could never give. Even to enter it
+and come away without transactions was to
+have been in the midst of life. And to handle
+stamps, and especially foreign stamps, was to
+be aware of just those very distances the post
+had abolished.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The priced goods in the windows were discouragingly
+<a id="page-114" class="pagenum" title="114"></a>
+high. One window behind whose
+thick plate glass were set forth just a few things
+very tastefully arranged, showed no prices at
+all and had the ominous note of a west-end shop.
+Next door was a windowful that might have
+been transplanted from Holborn so much
+steel was there, such an array of rectangular
+labels and announcements. Skates and skates
+and skates. Then a chemist’s and an inspiration,
+though the window showed nothing but
+a perforated screen and the usual coloured
+bottles bulging on a shelf above.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The counter was stacked with wares from
+Wigmore Street. Even the tooth-brushes
+were those of the new shape devised in Cavendish
+Square. The chemist was a bald preoccupied
+man speaking English abruptly.
+She came away with a jar of Smith’s cream,
+her shopping done and the face of the clock
+sticking out above the watchmaker’s telling
+her it was nearly noon. The little clock on
+the church said a quarter past eleven and
+glancing back at the watchmaker’s, now in
+the rear, she saw the reverse dial of the outstanding
+clock marking half past eleven. And
+<a id="page-115" class="pagenum" title="115"></a>
+Switzerland was the land of watchmakers....
+Her own watch said one o’clock, English time.
+Then it was noon. But this far world was not
+three minutes distance from the Alpenstock.
+There was still half-an-hour.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The post-office was a sumptuous hall.
+Little tables stood about invitingly set with
+pens and ink. No railed counter; a wooden
+partition extending to the ceiling; a row of
+arched pigeon-holes, all closed. Like a railway
+booking-office on Sunday, between trains—blankly
+indifferent to the announcement of
+the presence of a customer made by the clumping
+of her boots upon the wooden floor. And
+when presently—having gone the round of the
+posters, brilliant against the white-washed
+walls, all so much brighter and so much less
+bright than reality, all resounding with a single
+deep charm, bringing assurance of possessing,
+in one journey and one locality, the being of
+the whole—she tapped at a little shutter, it
+flew up impatiently, revealing an affronted
+young man in a blue cotton overall, glaring
+reproachfully through spectacles. The stamps
+handed over, the little door shot back into
+<a id="page-116" class="pagenum" title="116"></a>
+place with a bang, as if cursing an intruder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The open spaces called for a first view before
+the sense of its being no longer morning should
+have robbed them of intensity. But where
+the street joined the roadway there was a little
+shop, full sunlight falling on its window,
+whose contents were a clustered delight and
+each separate thing more charming than its
+neighbour.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Two women approaching along the road preceded
+by English voices distracted her, for a
+moment, with the strangeness of their headdress—a
+sort of cowl. In a moment they
+passed with dangling clinking skates, and her
+intention of getting a good view from behind
+was diverted back to the shop window, by
+“tourist-trap” interpolated in a tone meant to
+be inaudible, in the dissertation of the one holding
+forth in a voice not unlike Mrs. Harcourt’s,
+about a hotel “packed like a bee-hive and
+swarming with influenza.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was true. The shop was full of Swiss
+brummagem. She fastened on it the more
+eagerly. Little expensive cheap things whose
+<a id="page-117" class="pagenum" title="117"></a>
+charm was beyond price. Small clumsy
+earthenware, appealingly dumpy, flower patterned
+upon a warm creamy background;
+painted wooden spoons. Little brooches and
+trinkets innumerable. Cow-bells. Some
+small thing for everybody and a problem
+solved at the cost of a few marks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Turning away she caught sight of an old
+woman amazingly wrapped up, peering at her
+from inside a little booth set down in the snow
+on the other side of the way. A shelf laden
+with small things in carved wood protruded in
+front. She crossed to look at them. Silently
+with slow fumbling movements the old woman
+displayed her wares. Bears. Bears on ski,
+on toboggans, bears in every kind of unbearlike
+attitude. Intricate model châlets, useless
+and suggesting, imagined in England, nothing
+but the accumulation of dust. But there was
+an owl, with owlish dignity, very simply and
+beautifully carved. Her eyes returned to it
+and the old woman put forth an aged freckled
+hand and grasped its head, which went easily
+back upon a hinge and left revealed a clean
+white china inkwell.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-118" class="pagenum" title="118"></a>
+“Kipsake,” said the old woman huskily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“<span class="lang" lang="de" xml:lang="de">Danke schön. Ich komme wieder</span>,” smiled
+Miriam escaping, followed by hoarse cacklings
+of praise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Out upon the roadway fenced between
+dazzling snowfields, the end of the valley came
+into sight, new, but faintly reproachful, having
+waited too long, and complaining now about
+the lateness of the hour. Certainly it was
+worthy of a whole self, undistracted. But
+there was to-morrow, many to-morrows. She
+had done with the street and the shops save
+as a corridor, growing each day more dear, to
+daily fulfilment of the promise of this prospect
+whose beauty she was clearly recognising.
+And more than its beauty. Its great, great
+power of assertion, veiled for the moment by
+distractions, but there. Wonderfully beautiful
+was the speech and movement of the far-off
+smooth pure ridge of snow, rising high against
+the deepest blue of the sky, linking twin peaks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some of the near slopes were dotted with
+people, tiny figurines mitigating the snowfields
+and the towering mountains: the sounds
+of English voices ringing out infinitesimal in the
+<a id="page-119" class="pagenum" title="119"></a>
+wide space, yet filling it. Shutting out the
+scene, yet intensifying it; bringing gratitude
+for their presence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That remained even after the quaint peaked
+hoods of brilliant white or mauve, the effective
+skirts and jerseys of a group of women passing
+in the roadway had rebuked with their
+colours, clean and sharp against the snow, her
+tweed that in London had seemed a good
+choice, and her London felt hat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But though the clever clothes of these
+people brought a sense of exile they were
+powerless to rouse envy or any desire. Envy
+was impossible in this air that seemed, so
+sharp was every outline, to be no longer
+earth’s atmosphere but open space, electric.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps even this morning there was time
+to get clear, to be if only for a few moments,
+along some side track alone with the landscape,
+walking lightly clad in midsummer sun
+through this intensity of winter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The road was dropping and growing harder.
+No longer crunching under her feet, the snow
+beaten flat showed here and there dark streaks
+of ice, and her puttee-bandaged legs, flexible
+<a id="page-120" class="pagenum" title="120"></a>
+only at the knees, felt like sticks above her
+feet lost and helpless in the thick boots that
+seemed to walk of themselves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The dropping road took a sharp turn towards
+the valley, showing ahead a short empty
+stretch and another sharp turn, revealing it as
+the winding trail up which she had come last
+night. On the right it was joined by a long
+track running steeply down into a wilderness
+of snow in the midst of whose far distances
+appeared high up a little bridge half hidden
+amongst pines. The track was dotted with
+pigmy forms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“<em>Ash</em>-tongue!” A fierce hoarse voice just
+behind, and joining it another, clear and
+ringing: “<span class="lang" lang="de" xml:lang="de">Ach</span>-tooooong.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Plunging into the roadside drift she turned
+in time to see a toboggan bearing upon it a
+boy prone, face foremost eagerly out-thrust,
+shoot down the slanting road, take the bend
+at an angle that just cleared the fence and dart
+at a terrific pace down the slope towards the
+wilderness; followed by the girl with the
+ringing voice, lightly seated, her toboggan
+throwing her up as it bumped skimming from
+<a id="page-121" class="pagenum" title="121"></a>
+ridge to ridge down the uneven road. She
+took the bend smoothly with space to spare and
+flew on down the slope with lifted chin and
+streaming hair. Both mad. Children of the
+reckless English who had discovered the Swiss
+winter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This terrific scooting was not the tobogganing
+of which she had heard in London. Two
+more figures were coming, giving her excuse
+to wait lest they were coming her way and
+watch their passing from the drift that was
+like warm wool, knee-deep. They were women,
+coming slowly, paddling themselves along with
+little sticks. They took the bend with ironic
+caution and went on down the slope, still
+furiously stabbing the snow with their little
+sticks, their high, peaked cowls making them
+look like seated gnomes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Aware of intense cold invading her feet, she
+plunged out into the road and was beating
+her snow-caked puttees when an intermittent
+grinding sound approaching brought her upright:
+an aged couple side by side, white-haired
+and immensely muffled, sitting very
+grave and stern behind the legs protruding
+<a id="page-122" class="pagenum" title="122"></a>
+stiffly on either side the heads of their toboggans
+and set from moment to moment heels
+downwards upon the road to check a possible
+increase of their slow triumphant pace.
+Triumph. Behind the sternness that defied
+the onlooker to find their pose lacking in
+dignity was triumph. Young joy; for these
+who might well be patrolling in bath-chairs
+the streets of a cathedral town.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And they left the joyous message: that this
+sport, since pace could so easily be controlled,
+might be tested at once, alone, without
+instruction, this very afternoon. A subtle
+change came over the landscape, making it
+less and more; retiring a little as who should
+say: then I am to be henceforth a background,
+already a mere accessory, it yet challenged her
+vow, an intimidating witness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Along the empty stretch towards the valley
+the blazing sun blotted out the distance so
+that it was pleasant to turn the next corner
+and be going again towards the expanse that
+ended at the white high-hung collar. The
+fresh stretch of gently sloping road was
+longer than the one above it and walking freely
+<a id="page-123" class="pagenum" title="123"></a>
+here she found that her gait had changed,
+that she was planking along in a lounging
+stride which brought ease to her bandaged legs
+and made more manageable her inflexible feet.
+With a little practice, walking could be a joy.
+Walking in this scene, through this air, was an
+occupation in itself. And she was being
+assailed by the pangs of a piercing hunger.
+Obtrusive; insistent as the hunger of childhood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It would take a little longer to go back.
+It would be wise to turn now. At the corner
+ending this stretch. Suddenly it seemed
+immensely important to discover what there
+was round the corner. From the angle of the
+turning she could see the little bridge far away
+to the right, in profile, with pines stretching
+along the bank of what it spanned, that showed
+a little further on as a thin straight line
+steeply descending to join the serpentine that
+cut the white floor of the valley. Away to
+the right of the bridge straggling leafless trees
+stood in a curve. Behind them something
+moved; coming and going across the gaps
+between their trunks. Skaters.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-124" class="pagenum" title="124"></a>
+Then for the girl and boy that reckless rush
+was just a transit; a means of getting to the
+rink, as one might take a bus to a tennis-court.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A voice greeted her from behind, surprising
+in its level familiarity until the finished
+phrase revealed the American, to whom,
+turning to find him standing before her, his
+toboggan drawn to heel by its rope, she gave
+the smile, not for him, the lover’s smile reviewing,
+as they passed her in inverse rotation
+while she made the long unwelcome journey
+into his world of an American in Europe, her
+morning’s gatherings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But he had received it, was telling her that
+already she looked splendid, adding that when
+folks first came up they looked, seen beside
+those already there, just gass’ly. And for a
+moment the miscarriage was painful: to
+have appeared to drop even below his own
+level of undiscriminating hail-fellow-well-met.
+And for a fraction of a second as he stood
+before her in his correct garb she transformed
+him into an Englishman condemning her
+foolish grin—but there was his queer little
+<a id="page-125" class="pagenum" title="125"></a>
+American smile, that came to her from a
+whole continent and seemed to demand a
+larger face and form, a little smile dryly sweet,
+as misdirected as her own and during which
+they seemed to pour out in unison their independent
+appreciations and to recognise and
+greet in each other, in relation to the English
+world out here, fellow voyagers in a strange
+element.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It healed her self-given stripes that were,
+she reflected as they went on together up the
+hill, needless, since to him, as an American,
+her greeting would seem neither naïve nor
+bourgeois. For all Americans are either undisturbedly
+naïve and bourgeois or in a state
+of merely having learned, via Europe, to be
+neither. And this man, now launched in
+speech revealed himself by the way he had of
+handling his statements, as so far very much
+what he had always been.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Strange that it was always queer people,
+floating mysterious and intangible in an alien
+element who gathered up, not wanting them,
+testimonies that came from her of themselves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All the way back to the Alpenstock he pursued
+<a id="page-126" class="pagenum" title="126"></a>
+his monologue, information, and in an
+unbroken flow that by reason of its temperature,
+its innocence of either personal interest
+or benevolent intention, left her free to
+wander. There was in his narrow, unresonant
+voice only one shape of tone: a discouraged,
+argumentative rise and fall, very
+slight, almost on two adjacent notes, colourless;
+as of one speaking almost unawares at
+the bidding of an endless uniform perception.
+She heard it now as statement, now merely
+as sound and for a moment as the voice of a
+friend while after informing her that he had
+done the valley run and climb each morning
+and taken to-day a last turn to add yet one
+more layer to his week’s sunburn, he remarked
+that the long zig-zag was commonly deserted
+in the forenoon, folks mostly taking the other
+track, either to the rink, or further to the made
+run, or way beyond that to the ski-ing slopes.
+</p>
+
+<p class="tb">
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+When she was clear of the shop and crossing
+the road with the toboggan slithering meekly
+<a id="page-127" class="pagenum" title="127"></a>
+behind, the invisible distant slopes seemed
+lonely and her plan for getting immediately
+away to them postponed itself in favour of
+enjoying for a while the thrilled equilibrium
+with everything about her that was the gift
+of the slight pull on the cord she was trying to
+hold with an air of preoccupied negligence.
+Turning leisurely back from the short length
+of street ahead that too soon would show the
+open country, she came once more into the
+heart of the village and paid an unnecessary
+visit to the post-office, heard the toboggan pull
+up against the kerb and knew as she turned to
+abandon the cord that she had tasted the utmost
+of this new joy, and that when once more
+the cord was in her hands she must go forth
+and venture.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Out on the road beyond the village the
+pleasant even slithering alternated with little
+silent weightless runs, that at first made her
+glance back to see if the toboggan were still
+there. These little runs, increasing as the
+road began to slope came like reminders of
+its character, assertions of its small willingness
+for its task, enhancing its charm, calling
+<a id="page-128" class="pagenum" title="128"></a>
+her to turn and survey as she went its entrancing
+behaviour of a little toboggan.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But presently, and as if grown weary of
+gentle hints and feeling the necessity of
+stating more forcibly the meaning of its presence
+out here in the glittering stillness, it took
+a sudden run at her heels. Moving sideways
+ahead she reduced it to its proper place in the
+procession until the distance between them set
+it once more in motion. Overtaking her it
+made a half turn, slid a little way broadside
+and pulled up, facing her, in a small hollow,
+indignant. In the mercifully empty yet not
+altogether unobservant landscape it assumed
+the proportions of a living thing and seemed
+to say as she approached: “You <em>can’t</em> bring
+me out here and make a fool of me.” And
+indeed, even with no one in sight, she could
+not allow herself to walk down the slope with
+the toboggan ahead and pulling like a dog.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She might go back, make a détour on the
+level round about the village, turn the afternoon
+into a walk and postpone until to-morrow
+the adventure for which now she had neither
+courage nor desire. In choosing the time
+<a id="page-129" class="pagenum" title="129"></a>
+when there would be fewest people abroad she
+had forgotten that it was also the lowest
+point of the day. Even this first day had a
+lowest point. And belated prudence, reminding
+her that she had come away to rest,
+cast a chill over the empty landscape, changing
+it from reality to a picture of a reality seen long
+ago. At the sight of it she turned and went
+a few paces up the gradient and perched and
+gathered up the length of cord, and life came
+back into the wastes of snow, the mountains
+were real again, quiet in the motionless afternoon
+light, and the absurd little toboggan a
+foe about to be vanquished.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It slid off at once, took a small hummock
+askew, righted itself, to a movement made too
+instinctively to be instructive, and slid onwards
+gathering pace.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But ecstasy passed too swiftly into awareness
+of the bend in the road now rushing up to
+meet her ignorance. Ramming her heels into
+the snow she recovered too late with a jolting
+pang in both ankles and a headlong dive into
+this morning’s drift, a memory of what she
+should have done and stood up tingling with
+<a id="page-130" class="pagenum" title="130"></a>
+joy in the midst of the joyous landscape stilled
+again that had flown with her and swooped
+up as she plunged, and was now receiving her
+exciting news.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The backward slope invited her to return
+and go solemnly, braking all the way and
+testing the half-found secret of steering. But
+the bend tempted her forward. A single dig
+on the left when she reached it and she would
+be round in face of the long run down to the
+level.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the dig was too heavy and too soon
+and landed her with her feet in the drift and
+the toboggan swung broadside and all but
+careering with her backwards along the steepness
+that lay, when once more she faced it, a
+headlong peril before the levels leading on
+and up to the little bridge could come to bring
+rescue and peace.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pushing carefully off, sliding with bated
+breath and uncomfortably rasping heels, down
+and down, making no experiments and thankful
+only to feel the track slowly ascending
+behind her she remained clenched until only
+a few yards were left down which with feet
+<a id="page-131" class="pagenum" title="131"></a>
+up she slithered deliriously and came to
+rest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was done. She had tobogganed herself
+away from Oberland into the wilderness, the
+unknown valley waiting now to be explored,
+with the conquered steed trailing once more
+meek and unprotesting in the background.
+The afternoon was hers for happiness until
+hunger, already beginning its apparently almost
+continuous onslaught, should make welcome
+the triumphant climb back to Oberland
+and tea upon the promontory.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The high bridge that in the distance looked
+so small and seemed to span smallness was
+still small, a single sturdy arch; but beneath
+it dropped a gorge whose pines led down to a
+torrent, frozen; strange shapes of leaping
+water arrested, strangely coloured: grey in
+shadow, black in deep shadow, and here and
+there, caught by the light, a half-transparent
+green.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a great fellowship of pines clustered
+on either bank and spreading beyond the
+bridge to a wood that sent out a rising arm
+blocking the view of the valley and the pass.
+<a id="page-132" class="pagenum" title="132"></a>
+They made a solitude down here above the
+silenced waters. The backward view was
+closed by the perilous slope whose top was now
+the sky-line, leaving Oberland far away out of
+sight in another world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The track through the wood, wide and level
+for a while with pointed pines marching
+symmetrically by, narrowed to a winding path
+that took her in amongst them, into their
+strange close fellowship that left each one a
+perfect thing apart. Not lonely, nor, for all
+the high-bulging smoothness of snow in which
+it stood, cold. It was their secret, pine-breath,
+that brought a sense of warm life, and their
+close-clustered needles. Out on the mountain-sides
+they looked black and bleak, striving
+towards the sun until they were stayed by the
+upper cold. Seen close they were a happy
+company bearing light upon the green burnish
+of their needles and the dull live tints of their
+rough stems. And very secret; here thought
+was sheltered as in a quiet room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Out in the immense landscape, in the down-pouring
+brilliance of pure light, thought was
+visible. Transparent to the mountains who
+<a id="page-133" class="pagenum" title="133"></a>
+took its measure and judged, yet without
+wounding, and even while they made it seem
+of no account, a small intricate buzzing in
+the presence of mighty, simple statement
+sounding just out of reach within the air,
+and invited thoughtless submission to their
+influence as to a final infinite good that would
+remain when they were no more seen, there
+was pathos in their magnificence; as if they
+were glad even of one small observing speck,
+and displayed gently the death they could
+deal, and smiled in their terrifying power as
+if over an open secret.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And to walk and walk on and on amongst
+them, along their sunlit corridors with thought
+shut off and being changed, coming back
+refreshed and changed and indifferent, was
+what most deeply she now wanted of them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The track climbed a ridge and there below
+were the American’s wide snowfields.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Before she was assured by the doffed cap
+outheld while he made his salutation—the
+sweeping foreign <span class="lang" lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">coup de chapeau</span> that was so
+decisive a politesse compared to the Englishman’s
+meagre small lift; and yet also insolent—she
+<a id="page-134" class="pagenum" title="134"></a>
+was rejoicing in the certainty that the
+bearded figure in spite of the English Norfolk
+suit and tweed cap, was the big Russian. He
+alone, at this moment, of all the people in the
+hotel would be welcome. Remote, near and
+friendly as the deepest of her thoughts, and
+so far away from social conventions and the
+assumptions behind conventions, as to leave
+all the loveliness about her unchanged—and
+yet trailing an absurd little toboggan, smaller,
+and, in contrast with his height, more ridiculous
+an appendage than her own. He
+plunged down the ridge in the English style,
+by weight and rather clumsily, and in a moment
+was by her side at the head of the run
+that went, pure white and evenly flattened,
+switch-backing away across the field out of
+sight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In a slow mournful voice that gave his
+excellent French a melancholy music he asked
+her if she had already tested the run and
+became when he had heard the short tale of
+her adventure impatiently active. Her toboggan,
+he said, and raised its fore-part and
+bent scanning, was too large, too heavy and
+<a id="page-135" class="pagenum" title="135"></a>
+with runners not quite true. It would be
+better for the moment to exchange. Try,
+Try, he chanted with the true Russian nonchalance
+and, abandoning his own went off
+down the gentle slope on the discredited mount
+that she might now blame for her mysterious
+swerve at the bend.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After the gentle drop, carrying him over the
+first small rise as if it were not there, he flew
+ahead gathering swiftness with each drop,
+away and away until at last he appeared a
+small upright figure far away on the waste of
+snow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The run compared with what she had already
+attempted seemed nothing at all. The
+drops so slight that once or twice she was
+stranded on a ridge and obliged to push off
+afresh. And the light little toboggan, responding
+to the slightest heel-tap upon the hard
+pressed snow, taught her at once the secret of
+steering. And when at last full of the joy of
+fresh conquest she was pulled up by the loose
+snow at the end of the run, she was eager only
+to tramp back and begin again. But tramping
+at her side he tore her triumph to shreds.
+<a id="page-136" class="pagenum" title="136"></a>
+Silently she tried to imagine the toboggan
+having its own way uncontrolled for the whole
+of that sweeping trek, for the two quite steep
+drops towards the end.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The second time he started her in advance
+and remained behind shouting, his voice rising
+to a crescendo at the first steepness: “<span class="lang" lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Il n’y
+a pas de danger!</span>” With an immense effort
+she restrained her feet and entered paradise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“<span class="lang" lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Ça ira, ça ira</span>,” he admitted smiling
+when once more they were side by side.
+They tramped back in silence, under the eyes
+as they approached the ridge of a group newly
+appeared upon its crest and from which
+when they drew near a voice came down in
+greeting. She looked up to see the Croydon
+family, all very trim in sporting garb and
+carrying skates, gathered in a bunch, at once
+collectively domestic and singly restive. They
+smiled eagerly down at her and she read in the
+father’s twinkling gaze that she was providing
+material for Croydon humour, so distinctly
+and approvingly, was it saying in the Croydon
+way: “You’ve not lost much time,” and so
+swiftly, having told her in response to her own
+<a id="page-137" class="pagenum" title="137"></a>
+greeting that the rink was within five minutes
+easy walking, did he turn and disappear with
+his family in tow down the far side of the ridge.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The third run left her weary and satisfied.
+Again they were tramping back side by side,
+and although her experience of Russians had
+taught her that gratitude was out of place and
+enthusiasm over simple joys a matter for half-envious
+contempt, her thankfulness and felicity,
+involuntarily eloquent, treated him,
+marching tall and sombre at her side upon feet
+that in spite of the enormous boots showed
+themselves slender and shapely terminations
+of a well-hung frame, as if he had been of her
+own English stock; let him see the value, to
+herself, of his kindly gift. All she lived for
+now, she told him, was to rush, safe-guarded
+by a properly-mastered technique, at the utmost
+possible speed through this indescribable
+air, down slopes from which the landscape flew
+back and up. He smiled down, of course, the half
+incredulous smile. Of course bored, giving only
+part of a dreamy attention to all this raving.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“<span class="lang" lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">C’est bon pour la santé</span>,” he murmured as
+she paused.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-138" class="pagenum" title="138"></a>
+What did he know of santé, unless perhaps
+he had been in prison? He might be a
+refugee; an anarchist living in Switzerland.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When he, too, turned out to be now returning
+in search of tea and they were climbing the
+slope towards Oberland, their toboggans colliding
+and bumping along as best they might
+at the ends of cords twisted together round the
+wrist of his gloveless hand, she remarked by
+way of relieving a silence he did not seem to
+think it necessary to break, that the Swiss
+winter must be less surprisingly beautiful to
+Russians than to the people of the misty north.
+He agreed that doubtless this was so and
+gloomily asked her if she had been in Russia.
+He agreed with everything she said about his
+country as seen from a distance, but without
+interest and presently, as if to change the
+subject, declared that he knew nothing of
+Russia and Russians.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His voice sounded again too soon to give
+her time to select a nationality that should
+soften the disappointment of losing him as a
+Russian, and in a moment he was talking of
+Italy, and the Italy she knew by so many
+<a id="page-139" class="pagenum" title="139"></a>
+proxies dead and living was stricken out of
+her mind, to give place to the unknown Italy
+who had produced this man, simple and sincere,
+gloomy and harsh-minded, playing Chopin
+with all his heart. But when presently she
+learned that he was a business man on holiday
+from Milan, her Italy returned to her. He
+was from a world that everywhere was the
+same, a world that existed even within Italy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And at dinner again he sat apart wrapped
+in his gloom until again Vereker was rescuing
+him with speech and he was responding in
+the withheld, disclaiming Russian way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A Latin consciousness was, in this group,
+something far more remote than a Russian
+would have been, and she wondered what it
+was that behind Vereker’s unchanging manner
+was making his half of the bridge upon which
+they met. Music perhaps, if Vereker, with
+eyes candid and not profound and not deep-set,
+were musical. She caught a few words. It
+was the weather. Do Italians discuss the
+weather? Was Guerini, behind his gratitude
+in being rescued from isolation, wondering at
+the Englishman’s naïveté? Vereker was not
+<a id="page-140" class="pagenum" title="140"></a>
+showing off his French. He was being courteous,
+being himself. No one, except when he
+could seize a chance the American, made any
+sort of parade. Nor was it that they made a
+parade of not making a parade. Talk with
+them was easy because it was quite naturally
+serene. No emphasis. No controversy. The
+emergence of even a small difference of opinion
+produced at once, on both sides, a smiling
+retreat. Deep in his soul the American must
+certainly be smiling at this baffling urbanity.
+English correctness and hypocrisy. Here was
+the original stuff from which the world-wide
+caricatures were made.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And talk with these people always ended in
+a light and lively farewell, a manner of dropping
+things that handed a note of credit for
+future meetings. A retreat, as from royalty,
+backwards. A retreat from the royal game
+of continuous courtesy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And together with the surprise of discovering—when
+having departed upstairs she was
+drawn down to the little salon by the sound
+of the Chopin ballade—not the Italian but
+Vereker at the piano in the empty room, was
+<a id="page-141" class="pagenum" title="141"></a>
+the boon of his composure. Of his being and
+continuing to be after she had slipped into the
+room and reached a chair from which she could
+just see him in profile, so quietly engrossed. A
+little strung, as though still the phrases that
+yesterday he had so carefully recaptured might
+again elude him; but listening. Led on, and
+listening and in the hands of Chopin altogether.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Seated thus exposed he was slender, delicate,
+musicianly; only the line of his jaw gave him
+an appearance of strength; and perhaps the
+close cropping of his hair so that of what would
+have been a flamboyant mass only crisp ridges
+were left, close against a small skull, like
+Cæsar’s. His spruceness and neatness made
+stranger than ever the strange variance between
+the stiff, magpie black and white of
+dress clothes, and the depth and colour of
+music.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He played the whole ballade; sketchily
+where the technical difficulties came thick and
+fast, but keeping the shape, never losing the
+swinging rhythm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Its concluding phrases were dimmed by the
+need of finding something to say that should
+<a id="page-142" class="pagenum" title="142"></a>
+convey her right to say anything at all; but
+when the last chord stood upon the air, the
+performance seemed to have been a collaboration
+before which they now sat equally committed.
+And when his face came round, its
+smile was an acknowledgment of this.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For an instant she felt that nothing could
+fit but a gratefully affectionate salute and
+then a “How’s old So-and-So in these days?”
+after the manner of men of his type drifting
+happily about upon the surfaces of life. And
+when she said: “You got the whole of it this
+time,” it was as if the unexpressed remainder
+had indeed passed across to him, as if she were
+the newly-arrived friend whose presence somewhere
+upstairs had made him so radiant
+during dinner and afterwards sent him to
+pour out his happiness in the deserted little
+salon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“After a fashion,” he said with the little
+flicker of the eyelids that was his way, from
+sixth-form or from undergraduate days, of
+sustaining for further speech the pose of his
+turned head and smiling face: “There’s no
+one like him, is there?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-143" class="pagenum" title="143"></a>
+“You were playing last evening just after
+I came. For a moment I couldn’t believe
+that ballade was actually here. I heard it
+long ago, and never since, and I’ve never been
+able to recall the theme.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m <em>so</em> glad,” he said with his little note of
+distress. “I’ve been trying for <em>days</em> to get
+it all back.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For him, too, it came out of a past, and
+brought that past into this little Swiss room,
+spread it across whatever was current in his
+life, showed him himself unchanged. And in
+that past they had lived in the same world,
+seen and felt in the same terms the things that
+are there forever before life has moved. So
+far they were kindred. But since then she
+had been flung out into another world; belonged
+to the one in which he had gone forward
+only through an appreciative understanding
+of its code, of what it was that
+created its self-operating exclusiveness. He
+did not yet know that she stood outside the
+charmed circle, had been only an occasional
+visitor, and that now, visiting again after years
+of absence, she was hovering between the
+<a id="page-144" class="pagenum" title="144"></a>
+desire to mask and remain within it and
+her proper business as a Lycurgan: to make
+him aware of the worlds outside his own, let
+him see that his innocent happiness was kept
+going by his innocent mental oblivion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And whilst they called up cherished names
+and collided in agreement she wondered what
+these people who lived in exile from reality
+could find in their music beyond escape into
+the self for whom in their state of continuous
+urbane association there was so little space;
+and presently became aware of lively peace
+filling the intervals between their to and fro
+of words, distracting attention from them,
+abolishing everything but itself and its sure
+meaning: so that into this Swiss stillness of
+frost without and electricity within nothing
+had been present of the Switzerland that had
+brought them both here, and now suddenly
+came back, enhanced, a single unbounded
+impression that came and was gone, that was
+the face of its life now begun in her as memory.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She read her blissful truancy in his eyes, his
+recognition of their having fallen apart, but
+not of its cause, which he thought was perhaps
+<a id="page-145" class="pagenum" title="145"></a>
+the monotony of their continuous agreement,
+and was now swiftly seeking a fresh bridge
+that in an instant, since clearly he intended to
+prolong the sitting, he would, deferentially
+flickering his eyelids, take courage to fling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But into the little pause came the sound
+of footsteps approaching through the hall,
+and an intensity of listening that was their
+common confession of well-being and was
+filling them with a wealth of eager communication
+that must now be postponed until to-morrow.
+But to-morrow the college friend
+would be in possession; there was only this
+evening, a solitary incident. Perhaps the
+door would open upon someone who would
+straightway withdraw, leaving the way open
+for the waiting conversation. And the college
+friend had come only for a few days ...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But this falling from grace was rebuked by
+the reminder of Vereker’s all-round niceness.
+He would, of course, retain the intruder. If
+it were a man there would be three-cornered
+talk enlivened by what was being sacrificed to
+it. But with the opening of the door, as she
+raised her eyes towards it and caught in
+<a id="page-146" class="pagenum" title="146"></a>
+passing a glimpse of him upon his music stool,
+out of action and alone, she saw that dear and
+nice as he was, had always been, he could not
+fully engage her, was real to her on a level just
+short of reaching down to the forces of her
+nature; was pathetically, or culpably, a
+stranded man; subsisting.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Guerini: huge, filling the doorway, hesitating
+for a moment and retreating, quietly
+closing the door, but not before Vereker wheeling
+round on his music-stool, had seen his
+departing form.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was his unexpectedness, the having forgotten
+him so that he came like an apparition,
+that had sent him away. Even so, a woman
+of the world would have promptly become a
+smiling blank and suitably vocal; or withdrawn
+and expressionless in the manner of a
+hotel guest only partly in possession of a room
+now to be partly taken over by another. But
+she had left her thoughts standing in her
+face, leaving Vereker, who had turned just
+too late, to be hostess.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wheeling back to face her, he was again the
+gentle companion from the past. In his elegant
+<a id="page-147" class="pagenum" title="147"></a>
+sunny voice he was recalling their morning’s
+talk, begging at once with his despairing
+little frown, for more light on the subject of
+property in land. It was clear that these
+things had never come his way. It was after
+all not his fault that his education had held
+his eyes closed, that they had since been kept
+closed by wealth and ease taken for granted.
+And in his way he had kept fine. His adoration
+for his gods of art and literature was
+alive and genuine—and he was a sportsman.
+It was difficult face to face with his gentle
+elegance to remember that he was distinguishing
+himself in an exacting sport. Repentant
+of her condemnation she set forth the
+steps of the reasoning and the groups of facts,
+saw him eagerly intent—not upon herself but
+upon this new picture of life, wrestling step
+by step with what he saw far off—and presently
+had the joy of seeing him see how
+economic problems stood rooted in the holding
+of land at rent. But he was only one; there
+were thousands of men, nice men, needing
+only hints, as blinkered as he.
+</p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-4">
+<a id="page-148" class="pagenum" title="148"></a>
+CHAPTER IV
+</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="first">
+<span class="firstchar">H</span><span class="postfirstchar">urrying</span> through her dressing to keep
+the appointment that had not been
+made and whose certainty in her own mind was
+challenged in vain by all the probabilities, she
+opened her door upon the silent corridor;
+stillness and silence as if everyone else in the
+hotel had been spirited away leaving clear,
+within the strange surroundings in which for
+a while she was set down, the familiar pathway
+of her life. And when she reached the dining-room
+the sight of them there, side by side at
+breakfast in the brilliant morning light with
+no one else in the room save herself approaching,
+had for a moment the hard unreality of
+things deliberately arranged. She saw them
+very clearly and it was as if neither of them
+were there; as if they were elsewhere each on
+his own path from which <a id="corr-6"></a>this tacit meeting
+was a digression.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-149" class="pagenum" title="149"></a>
+But before she was half-way to the table they
+were rising. Their breakfast over, they were
+going off into their day. She was too late;
+her haste was justified of its wisdom. Reaching
+her place, she murmuring a casual greeting,
+turned away towards the spaces of her own
+day opening, beyond this already vanishing
+small disappointment, as brightly as the light
+shining in from the sunlit snow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They halted a moment while Vereker introduced
+his friend to whose height, as she sat
+down to the table, she glanced up to meet the
+intent dark gaze of a man on guard. She was
+already far away, and in the instant of her
+hurried astonished return to face for the first
+and perhaps the last time this man who was
+challenging her, the eyes were averted and
+the two men sat down: to freshly broken rolls
+and steaming cups.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The little self-arranged party was secure in
+the morning stillness that was the divine invisible
+host equally dear to all three. Happy
+in this fulfilment of premonition, she sat silent,
+delighting in the challenge left, miscarried and
+superfluous upon the empty air, wickedly
+<a id="page-150" class="pagenum" title="150"></a>
+delighting in the friend’s discomfort in following
+the dictates of the code forbidding him
+again to look across until she should have
+spoken, and confining his large gaze within the
+range of his small immediate surroundings.
+Refusing rescue, she busied herself with breakfast,
+enjoying his large absurdity, free, while
+he paid the well-deserved penalty of his innocently
+thwarted attack, to observe to
+her heart’s content.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He sat taking sanctuary with Vereker—who
+at his sunny best was making conversation
+about the trials in store—slightly turned
+towards him and away from the barred vista
+across which no doubt, before she came in,
+his large gaze had comfortably extended;
+responding now and again with thoughtful
+groans.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Beside Vereker’s sunburned fairness he was
+an oiled bronze; heavy good features, heavy
+well-knit frame. Lethargic, or just a very
+tired man on a holiday, bemused by his sudden
+translation. Superficially he was formidable,
+“strong and silent.” His few remarks,
+thrown into the talk that Vereker kept
+<a id="page-151" class="pagenum" title="151"></a>
+up while he waited for his two friends to
+fraternise and admire each other, came forth
+upon a voice deliberately cultivated since his
+undergraduate days, a ponderous monotone,
+the voice of a man infallible, scorning argument,
+permanently in the right. Its sound was
+accompanied by a swaying movement from
+side to side of his body bent forward from the
+hips: suggesting some big bovine creature
+making up its mind to charge.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She recalled other meetings with his kind,
+instant mutual dislike and avoidance. This
+time there was no escape. She was linked to
+him by Vereker, obliged by Vereker to tolerate
+his presence, sit out his portentousness
+and be aware, since Vereker found him so very
+fine, of the qualities hidden within. Courage
+of course, tenacity, strength to adventure in
+strange places. Were such things enough to
+justify this pose of omniscience? With that
+pose it was forever impossible to make terms;
+and if this were not a single occasion, if there
+were further meetings, there would sooner or
+later be a crossing of swords. She considered
+his armoury.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-152" class="pagenum" title="152"></a>
+Mentally it was a flimsy array; a set of
+generalisations, born of the experience that
+had matured him and become now his whole
+philosophy, simple and tested, immovable;
+never suspected of holding good only for the
+way of living upon which it was based.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The fact of the existence of life had either
+never entered his head or been left behind in
+the days before he crystallised. He had now
+become one of those who say “our first parents”
+and see a happy protégé of an entirely masculine
+Jehovah duped into age-long misery
+by the first of the charmers. Homage and
+contempt for women came equally forth from
+him, the manifest faces of his fundamental
+ignorance. The feminine world existed for
+him as something apart from life as he knew
+it, and to be kept apart. Within that world
+“charm” and “wit” drew him like magnets
+and he never guessed their source; knew
+nothing of the hinterlands in the minds of
+women who assumed masks, put him at his
+ease, appeared not to criticize. And such
+women were the sum of his social knowledge.
+One day he would be a wise old man “with
+<a id="page-153" class="pagenum" title="153"></a>
+an eye for a pretty face,” wise with the wisdom
+that already was cheating him of life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was no hope for him. His youth had
+left him Vereker, his chum whose sunny simplicity
+had always disarmed him, who did not
+resent his portentous manner. From women
+he would have, till old age, flattery for his
+strength. From his workers nothing but
+work, and respect for his English justice and
+honesty. It was inconceivable that anyone
+should ever pierce his armour; the ultimate
+male density backed by “means” and “position.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His pose had found its bourne in his present
+position of authority, his state of being bound
+to present a god-like serenity; and it had
+become so habitual that even when it was
+put out of action he could not disencumber
+himself of it. At this moment, for lack of
+proper feminine response from across the
+table, it was actually embarrassing him. To
+proper feminine response, charming chatter
+or charming adoring silence he would pay
+tribute, the half respectful, half condescending
+interest of the giant in his hours of ease.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-154" class="pagenum" title="154"></a>
+Unable any longer to endure silently, she
+rode across him with speech; pictures, for
+Vereker, of her yesterday’s adventure. Lively
+and shapely, inspired by the passage of wrath.
+Her voice had a bright hard tone, recognisable
+as the tone of the lively talker.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was aware of the friend accepting her
+as the bright hard mondaine; at once attentive,
+his pose relaxed so far as to be represented
+only by the eyebrows left a little lifted and
+still knitting his deliberately contemplative
+brow. He was looking, poor dear, at the
+pictures, enjoying them, their mechanism,
+their allusions. And she, for a weary empty
+interval, was being a social success. It was
+a victory for the friend, a bid for his approval.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Vereker was puzzled, meeting a stranger;
+a little taken aback. But when grown weary
+of the game of brightly arranged exaggerations,
+she relapsed into simplicity, he recovered at
+once and again brought forth his ski-club.
+The friend sat by while one after another the
+persuasive arguments came forth, smiling with
+the slightly lifted brow that was now his
+apology for smiling at all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-155" class="pagenum" title="155"></a>
+And suddenly he was grave, intent as he
+had been at the first moment; this time towards
+the door, outside which sounded Daphne’s
+eager breathless voice and ceased in the
+doorway. Her swift slight footsteps crossed
+the room and brought her to a standstill just
+in sight, gazing at the stranger.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He remained grave, darkly gazing. Vereker,
+half-risen, eager to be off, was looking at him
+in the manner of a hostess arrested in giving
+the signal for departure. For a moment the
+man and the child stared at each other, and
+then she moved stealthily, rounding the table-end.
+A light came into his unsmiling face.
+With a rush she was upon him, mouth set,
+eyes blazing, clenched fists beating upon his
+breast.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“<em>Eaden</em>,” she panted, “evil, <em>evil</em> Eaden.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was no defence, no display of comic
+fear, no wrist-catching dominance. And when
+she desisted and stood back still searching him
+with grave face a little thrust forward in her
+eagerly-thinking way, he turned more sideways
+from the table, to attend while hurriedly
+with the air of one having other business on
+<a id="page-156" class="pagenum" title="156"></a>
+hand and no time to waste, she catechised
+him. He answered simply, with just her
+manner of one cumbered with affairs and eager
+nevertheless to contrive meetings; devouring
+all the time with his eyes the strange hurried
+little face, the round wide eyes set upon something
+seen afar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They had recognised each other. To the
+rest of the party she was a quaint, precocious
+child. This man saw the strange power and
+beauty of the spirit shining in those eyes almost
+round, almost protruding, and, if there
+had been in the blue of them, that toned so
+gently into the pearly blue surrounding, a
+shade more intensity of colour, merely brilliant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You <em>must</em>,” she said, her lips closing
+firmly on her ultimatum, head a little out-thrust,
+hands behind back. “You’d better
+go now,” with a glance at the group that had
+gathered round. She pattered swiftly away
+to her table in the background.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Daphnee’ll always get what she wants
+with her nagging,” said the Skerry youth
+standing by.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-157" class="pagenum" title="157"></a>
+“She will get what she wants with her
+beaux yeux,” said Miriam warmly, and saw
+the little form panting along its ardent way up
+through life, seeking and testing and never
+finding, in any living soul.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“<em>Yes</em>,” groaned Eaden and impatiently
+sighed away the wrath in his eyes set upon the
+departing figure of the youth. Again they
+were lit and gentle and as if still gazing upon
+Daphne. He sat for a moment, paying tribute
+to a suddenly found agreement before
+joining Vereker held up at the door in the little
+crowd of newly-arriving breakfasters.
+</p>
+
+<p class="tb">
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+It was something like cycling in traffic,
+only that this scattered procession making
+for the rink seemed all one party. The
+<span class="lang" lang="de" xml:lang="de">achtungs</span> of those starting on their journey
+from the top of the slope rising behind her
+rang out like greetings, and the agonised
+shrieks coming up from below as one and another
+neared the gap visible now in the distance
+<a id="page-158" class="pagenum" title="158"></a>
+as an all-too-swiftly approaching confusion
+of narrowly avoided disasters, were
+full of friendly laughter: the fearless laughter
+of those experienced in collisions. For a
+moment she was tempted to steer into the
+snow and wait until the road should be clear.
+But the sudden sideways swerve of a toboggan
+just ahead called forth unawares her first
+<span class="lang" lang="de" xml:lang="de">achtung</span>. It rang, through the moment which
+somehow manœuvred her clear of the obstacle,
+most joyously upon the air and hailed her—seeming
+to be her very life sounding out into
+the far distances of this paradise, claiming
+them as long ago it had claimed the far distances
+surrounding outdoor games—and sent
+her forward one of the glad fellowship of
+reckless tobogganners whom now unashamed
+she could leave to go along her chosen
+way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ignoring yells from behind she slowed to
+pass the gap and its glimpse of the descending
+track dotted with swiftly gliding humanity,
+took the sharp bend beyond it and was out of
+sight careering down the first slope of the
+valley run with sky and landscape sweeping
+<a id="page-159" class="pagenum" title="159"></a>
+upwards, mountains gigantically sweeping
+upwards to the movement of her downward
+rush.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The dreaded bends arrived each too swiftly
+with its threat of revealing upon the smooth
+length of the next slope an upward-coming
+sleigh or village children steering down at
+large. Slope after slope showed clear and
+empty, each steeper than the last, and here
+and there a patch of ice sent her headlong,
+sent the landscape racing upwards until her
+heels could find purchase for a steadying dig
+and bring back the joy of steering forward
+forever through this moving radiance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The fencing was growing lower, almost
+buried in deep snow. A sweeping turn and
+ahead, at the end of a long smooth slope,
+the floor of the valley, the end. From a
+drive of both heels she leaned back and shot
+forward and flew, feet up, down and down
+through the crystal air become a rushing wind,
+until the runners slurred into the soft snow,
+drove it in wreaths about her, and slowed and
+stopped dead leaving her thrown forward with
+the cord slack in her hands, feet down, elbows
+<a id="page-160" class="pagenum" title="160"></a>
+on knees come up to meet them, a motionless
+triumphantly throbbing atom of humanity in
+a stillness that at once kept her as motionless
+as itself to listen to its unexpected voice: the
+clear silvery tinkle, very far away, of water
+upon rock; some little mountain stream freed
+to movement by the sun, making its way down
+into the valley. She listened for a while to
+the perfect little sound, the way it filled the
+vast scene, and presently turned to search the
+snowy levels, longing to locate it and catch
+a glimpse, defying distance, of the sunlit
+runnel. The mountains were cliffs upon the
+hither side, their shoulders and summits invisible
+until one looked up to find them remote
+in the ascended sky.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Down here at their feet was <span class="lang" lang="la" xml:lang="la">terra firma</span>,
+broad levels on either side the windings of
+the frozen river that was trimmed here and
+there with bare trees sparse and straggling,
+their gnarled roots protruding through the
+snow that bulged its rim. A bird-cry sounded
+from a tree at the roadside; on silent wings
+a magpie, brilliant in sunlit black and white
+sailed forth and away across the wastes of
+<a id="page-161" class="pagenum" title="161"></a>
+snow. Birds and the tinkling runnel, the sole
+inhabitants of this morning solitude.
+</p>
+
+<p class="tb">
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+Whose magic survived the long backward
+climb and the run down to the rink amidst
+the sociable echoes of the morning’s tumult,
+survived the knowledge that in the minds of
+these busy skaters it was merely the bottom
+of the hill; nothing to do down there unless
+you were going on down to the station to meet
+and sleigh up with someone newly arrived.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here on their tree-encircled rink they were
+together all day as in a room. Passing and
+re-passing each other all day long. Held
+together by the enchantment of this continuous
+gliding. Everyone seemed to be gliding easily
+about. Only here and there a beginner
+shuffled along with outstretched jerking arms
+and anxious face. It was skating escaped
+from the niggardly opportunities of England
+and grown perfect. Long sweeping curves;
+dreaming eyes seraphic, even the sternest
+betrayed by the enchantment in their eyes.
+<a id="page-162" class="pagenum" title="162"></a>
+There were many of these in this English
+crowd. Many who knew there was absurdity
+in the picture of grown persons sweeping
+gravely about for hours on end. Only a great
+enchantment could keep them in countenance
+and keep them going on. Envy approached
+and stared her in the face. But only for a
+moment. She could skate, rather better
+than the beginners. In a day or two she could
+be sweeping enchantedly about. It was a
+temptation answered before it presented itself,
+only presenting itself because it could
+move more quickly than thought: to be
+racing about on a sled was a reckless flouting
+of the prescribed programme, but innocent,
+begun in forgetfulness. To have come and
+seen, to sit and stroll about each day just
+seeing, would have been joy enough.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But when she looked across from the grey
+crowded rink and its belt of ragged bare trees
+to the mountains standing in full sunlight and
+filling half the opposite sky and saw away
+above the pinewoods ascending beyond the
+little bridge the distant high white saddle of
+the pass with its twin peaks rising on either
+<a id="page-163" class="pagenum" title="163"></a>
+side—they startled her with their heightened
+beauty. These enchanted skaters, cooped
+upon their sunk enclosure had enlivened the
+surrounding scene not only by bringing forgetfulness
+of it, but because she knew the
+secret of their bliss, had shared long ago the
+experience that kept them confined here all
+day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Gliding, as if forever; the feeling, coming
+even with the first uncertain balance, of breaking
+through into an eternal way of being. In
+all games it was there, changing the aspect of
+life, making friends dearer, making even those
+actually disliked dear, as long as they were
+within the rhythm of the game. In dancing
+it was there. But most strongly that sense
+of being in an eternal way of living had come
+with skating in the foggy English frost. And
+this it must be that kept all these English
+eagerly and shamelessly fooling about on
+bladed feet; eternal life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It might be wrong. Wells might be right.
+Golf. There must be a secret too in golf.
+The mighty swipe, the swirl of the landscape
+about the curving swing of the body, the
+<a id="page-164" class="pagenum" title="164"></a>
+onward march? All these must count even
+if the players think only of the science of the
+game, only of excelling an opponent. Even
+in safe and easy games there is an element of
+eternity, something of the quality there must
+be in sports that include the thrill of the life-risk.
+Savage sports. Fitness, the sense of
+well-being of the healthy animal? But what
+<em>is</em> health? What <em>is</em> the sense of well-being?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“We know <em>nothing</em>. That at least you must
+admit: that we walk in darkness.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And proclaim ourselves enlightened by
+awareness of the fact.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A figure swinging swiftly up the rink, a
+different movement cutting across the maze
+of familiar movements, drawing her eyes to
+follow it until it was lost and watch until again
+it came by: clothed in uniform purplish
+brown close-fitting, a belted jerkin, trousers,
+slenderly baggy, tapering down into flexibly
+fitting boots. A strong lissome body that
+beautifully shaped its clothing and moved in
+long easy rushes, untroubled by shackled feet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was not perhaps doing anything very
+wonderful, just rushing easily about, in the
+<a id="page-165" class="pagenum" title="165"></a>
+manner of a native of some land of ice and
+snow. But he transformed the English skaters
+to jerking marionettes, clumsily clothed, stiff-jointed.
+Visibly jointed at neck and waist, at
+knees and ankles and elbows. Their skating
+seemed now to be nicely calculated mechanical
+balancing of jointed limbs, each limb trying
+to be autonomous, their unity, such as it was,
+achieved only by methods thought out and
+carefully acquired. They seemed to be giving
+exhibitions of style, with minds and bodies
+precariously in tune. He was style spontaneously
+alive. His whole soul was in his
+movements.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She made her way to a near bench under the
+trees to watch for him. Sitting there with
+her feet upon the ice she became one with the
+skaters, felt their efforts and controls, the
+demand of the thin hard blade for the perpetual
+movements of loss and recovery. Not
+all were English, skating with reservations.
+Here a little Frenchman with arms folded on
+his breast came by as if dancing, so elegantly
+pointed were the swinging feet above which
+gracefully he leaned now forward now back.
+<a id="page-166" class="pagenum" title="166"></a>
+Effortlessly. In his stroke there was no jerk
+of a heavy-muscular drive, yet he covered as
+much space as the English, and more quickly.
+Behind him an Englishwoman with a bird’s-wing
+pointing back along the side of her little
+seal cap, going perfectly gracefully in smooth
+slight sweeps; serene.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Near at hand two men practised trick
+skating, keeping clear the space about them
+with their whirling limbs. They swept about
+with eyes intent, and suddenly one or other
+would twirl, describe a circle with an outflung
+leg and recover, with an absurd hop.
+Clever and difficult no doubt, but so very ugly
+that it seemed not worth doing. The stout
+man’s hop seemed as though it must smash the
+ice. Between their dervish whirls they talked.
+They were arguing. Amiably quarrelling;
+the occasional hysterical squeal in the voice
+of the stout man revealing “politics.” They
+were at loggerheads over the housekeeping,
+the lime-lit, well-paid, public housekeeping,
+“affairs,” the difficult responsible important
+business that was “beyond the powers of
+women,” that was also “dirty work for which
+<a id="page-167" class="pagenum" title="167"></a>
+women were too good”; wrangling. The stout
+man executed a terrific twirl and brought up
+facing his opponent who had just spoken. He
+advanced upon him bent and sliding, arms
+dangling low: “Just <em>so</em>,” he chanted amiably
+and, recovering the upright, presented a face
+really foolish, a full-moon foolishness, kindly
+perfection of inability to see further than his
+good British nose: “We’re back at what I told
+Hammond this morning: we <em>can’t afford</em> to ignore
+the <em>Trades Union Secretaries</em>.” With a
+swift turn he was off before the other man
+could respond, skating away beyond their enclosure,
+smiling his delight, staring ahead,
+with wise eyes, at nothing at all but the
+spectacle of his opponent caught out and
+squashed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The spectacle of his complacency was profoundly
+disquieting. He was the typical
+kindly good-natured John Bull. Gently nurtured,
+well-educated, “intelligent,” ready to
+take any amount of time and trouble in
+“getting at facts” and “thinking things out.”
+And he was a towering bully. Somewhere
+within his naïve pugnacity was the guilty
+<a id="page-168" class="pagenum" title="168"></a>
+consciousness of being more pleased in downing
+an opponent than concerned for human
+welfare. There was no peace of certainty in
+him. He had scored and was flushed with
+victory. And all over English politics was
+this perpetual prize-fighting. The power of
+life and death was in the hands of men playing
+for victory; for their own side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Morning and evening in some hotel that big
+man’s voice boomed incessantly. Behind it a
+kindly disposition and a set of fixed ideas. No
+mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t you skeete?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Making for the bench, bent forward to reach
+it hands first was the younger Croydon girl;
+behind her the other, rallentando, balancing
+to a standstill.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She had greeted them, ere she was aware,
+with the utmost enthusiasm. Smiling in their
+way, a gentle relaxation of the features that
+left them composed, they stood about her,
+pleased to see and greet a stranger who was
+also an old friend, renewing their great adventure.
+At the same time they were innocently
+rebuking her outbreak.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-169" class="pagenum" title="169"></a>
+In her suburban past she had instinctively
+avoided their kind, scented a snare in their
+refined gentility, liked them only for the way,
+in the distance, going decorously in pretty
+clothes along tree-lined roadways, they contributed
+to the brightness of spring. Meeting
+them out here, representative of England,
+the middle-class counterparts, in their ardent
+composure, of the hotel people who so strangely
+had received her as a relative, she wanted in
+some way to put forth her claim as one who
+knew of old their world of villa and garden,
+their gentle enclosed world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s glorious; we’re having a lovely
+tame,” said the younger, looking away down
+the rink: an English rose, thoroughly pretty
+in the characterless English way, shapely
+sullen little face, frowning under the compulsion
+of direct statements. Her hair, that in
+the train had been a neat bun, hung now in a
+broad golden plait to her waist where its ends
+disappeared behind a large black bow like a
+bird with wings outspread.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now with one seated close on each side
+of her it was with difficulty that she attended
+<a id="page-170" class="pagenum" title="170"></a>
+to their talk so clearly did it exhibit their world
+as a replica of the one just above it: as a
+state of perpetual urbane association; conformity
+to a code in circumstances more
+restricted, upon a background more uniform,
+and searched by the light of a public opinion
+that was sterner than the one prevailing above.
+All the bourgeois philistine in her came forth
+to sun itself in their presence, zestfully living
+their lives, loving their friends and relatives,
+ignoring everyone who lived outside the
+charmed circle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One against the other, they joyously relived
+the short time whose sunburn had so
+becomingly accentuated their Blair Leighton
+fairness. Their stories centred round the
+success or breakdown of the practical jokes
+that seemed to be the fabric of life at their
+hotel ... all the old practical jokes: even
+apple-pie beds. In and out of these stories
+went Mr. Parry who was presently pointed out
+upon the ice; a stout little dark man skating
+about at random, his movements visibly hampered
+by the burden of his sociability, his eyes
+turning, to the detriment of his steering,
+<a id="page-171" class="pagenum" title="171"></a>
+towards everyone he passed in his search for
+prey.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He makes us all <em>roar</em>; every evening.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There were others, some whose names and
+their rôles, as assistants or willing victims of
+the schemes of Mr. Parry seemed sufficiently
+to describe them, and, as central decoration in
+the picture, these two girls newly arrived and
+certainly Mr. Parry’s most adored recruits,
+ready trained by a brother in the science of
+practical joking, yet not hoydenish; demure
+and sweet and, to his loneliness, the loneliness
+of an undignified little man, not quite grotesque,
+and incapable of inspiring romantic
+affection, figures of romance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Growing weary of their inexhaustible theme—of
+waiting for the emergence of some sign
+of consciousness of the passing moment, a
+dropping of references backwards or forwards,
+that would leave them in league together,
+there as individuals—she pressed them for
+personal impressions of the adventure in its
+own right, the movement into strangeness, the
+being off the chain of accustomed things.
+They grew vague, lost interest and fell presently
+<a id="page-172" class="pagenum" title="172"></a>
+into a silence from which she pulled
+them by an enquiry about the plait.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the midst of the story of the plait and
+just as some people were being pointed out
+who still thought them three sisters, two with
+their hair up, and one with a plait who did
+not appear at dinner, came a longing to escape,
+the sense of a rendez-vous being missed, with
+the scene and the time of day. But her preparations
+for flight were stayed by their payment
+for her interest in the plait. They plied
+her with questions; presently they were
+offering to lend her skating-boots, and choosing
+from amongst the guests at their hotel,
+people she would like. They were pitying her,
+thinking that she must be having a poor time
+and determined at once that she should do
+more than just stand upon the edge, sunning
+herself in the glow of the life they were finding
+so entrancing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But her contemplation of the desert that
+must be, from their point of view, the life of
+a woman obviously poor and apparently
+isolated, took her for a moment far away,
+and when she returned the link between them
+<a id="page-173" class="pagenum" title="173"></a>
+was snapped. Her silence had embarrassed
+their habit of rapid give and take. Making
+vague promises, she took leave, rescued by
+their immediate reversion to the forms of
+speech set for such occasions, from holding
+forth upon the subject of the dead level of
+happiness existing all over the world independent
+of circumstances. They would have
+thought her both pious and insane.
+</p>
+
+<p class="tb">
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+All the afternoon they had been in harmony,
+strolling and standing about together
+in the snow until there seemed nothing more
+to say; and after each run there had been
+something more to say. Till Italy lost all
+strangeness but its beauty and he had seemed
+a simpler Michael free from Michael’s certainty
+that everyone in the world was marching
+to annihilation. It was the discovery of a
+shared sense of life at first hand that had
+made them not fear saying the very small
+things.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-174" class="pagenum" title="174"></a>
+And suddenly there was a wall, dividing.
+No more communication possible; the mountains
+grown small and bleak and sad and even
+now, in being alone upon the promontory there
+was no peace, in all the wide prospect no
+beauty.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Why was it so much a matter of life and
+death, for men as for women? Why did each
+always gather all its forces for the conflict?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If all he said were a part of the light by
+which he lived he should have been able to
+remain calm. But he had not remained calm.
+He had been first uneasy, then angry, and then
+sorry for the destruction of their friendship.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The thing most needed is for men to
+<em>recognise</em> their illusion, to leave off while there
+is yet time their newest illusion of life as only
+process. Leave off trying to fit into their
+mechanical scheme a being who lives all the
+time in a world they have never entered.
+They seem incapable of unthinking the suggestions
+coming to them from centuries of
+masculine attempts to represent women only
+in relation to the world as known to men.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was then he was angry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-175" class="pagenum" title="175"></a>
+“How else shall they be represented?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“They <em>can’t</em> be represented by men. Because
+by every word they use men and women
+mean different things.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Probably Italian women led men by the
+nose in the old way, the way of letting them
+imagine themselves the whole creation. And
+indeed the problem presently will be: how
+to save men from collapsing under their loss
+of prestige. Their awakening, when it comes,
+will make them pitiful. At present they are
+surrounded out in the world by women who
+are trying to be as much like them as possible.
+That will cease when commerce and politics
+are socialised.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Art,” “literature,” systems of thought,
+religions, all the fine products of masculine
+leisure that are so lightly called “immortal.”
+Who makes them immortal? A few men in
+each generation who are in the same attitude
+of spirit as the creators, and loudly claim them
+as humanity’s highest spiritual achievement,
+condoning in those who produce them any
+failure, any sacrifice of the lives about them
+to the production of these crumbling monuments.
+<a id="page-176" class="pagenum" title="176"></a>
+Who has decreed that “works of
+art” are humanity’s highest achievement?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Daphne, preceded by her hurried voice;
+followed by her maid carrying a tray. She
+came swiftly in her manner of a small panting
+tug, eyes surveying ahead with gaze too wide
+for detail.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Put it there; near the lady.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hitching herself into a chair, she sighed
+deeply, but not to attract attention, nor in the
+manner of a conversational opening. She had,
+without self-consciousness, the preoccupied
+air of one who snatches a tiresome necessary
+meal, grudging the expense of time. All her
+compact stillness was the stillness of energy
+momentarily marking time. Her face, distorted
+by efforts, mouth firmly closed, with a
+goodly bite of the stout little roll, was busily
+thinking and talking. Continuous. There
+was no cessation in her way of being, no dependence,
+none of the tricks of appeal and
+demand that make most children so quickly
+wearisome. Yet she was a baby sitting there;
+a lonely infant, rotund.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her face came round, so perfectly impersonal
+<a id="page-177" class="pagenum" title="177"></a>
+in its gravity that Miriam knew the irrepressible
+smile with which she met it for an
+affront, felt herself given up to the child’s
+judgment, ready to be snubbed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For a moment the round eyes surveyed her,
+deep and clear, a summer sea in shadow, and
+then, with her head a little butted forward in
+the way she had of holding it during her breathless
+sentences, she hurriedly swallowed her
+mouthful and cried:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’re <em>nice</em>! I didn’t know!” Condemnation
+and approval together. Scarcely
+daring to breathe she waited while the child
+drew near, shouting for her maid who came
+grumbling and departed smiling when the
+tables were drawn side by side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That’s-my-beecely-German-nurse-I-hate-her.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“She talks German with you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“She talks. I don’t listen. She has a
+beecely voice. Vicky Vereker says she can’t
+helper voice, can’t help being a silly stupid
+and Evil Eaden didn’t say anything and Vicky
+said show him how she speaks.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And did you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-178" class="pagenum" title="178"></a>
+“I should have been <em>sick</em>. Evil Eaden’s
+gone ski-ing again. Evil Eaden likes Napoleon
+and Vicky doesn’t; he wouldn’t.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why do you like Napoleon so much?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Because I like him because he’s the good
+dear little big one. Everybody is the big
+silly small one almost.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Meditating on Napoleon as a pattern for
+womanhood, Miriam heard the returned ski-ers
+arrive upon the platform and watched the
+eager calm little face that was still busily
+talking, for a sign.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“When I’ve done my beecely edjacation,
+when I go back to Indja,” it was saying,
+looking out with blind eyes across the bright
+intolerable valley.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Vereker’s voice, gently vibrant and sunny,
+sounded near by, and a deep groan from Eaden
+just visible, collapsed in one of the small green
+chairs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ve got to go now,” said Daphne, relinquishing
+her second roll and sliding to the
+floor. Covering the small space with her little
+quick-march, she pulled up in front of Eaden
+and stood surveying, hands behind back, feet
+<a id="page-179" class="pagenum" title="179"></a>
+a little apart, head thrust forward. Napoleon
+in a pinafore.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’re dead beat, that’s what you are.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Daphne, I am. I’m a broken man. Don’t
+pound me. But you may stroke me if you
+like.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On a table at his side stood a large brown
+bear on ski, his gift to her, bought on his way
+home from the old woman at the corner and
+that now they were surveying together. She
+had approached it with two little eager steps
+and pulled up just short with her arms at her
+sides, volubly talking just out of hearing but
+to his delight who heard and watched her.
+Between her sallies she sought his face, to
+bring him to contemplate and agree. Did it
+please her? She had not yet handled it.
+Could anything please her? The giver and
+the giving were calling forth her best, that
+moved him and Vereker as men are moved at
+the sight of life in eager operation, spontaneous
+as they never seem to be, commanding
+and leading them. Vereker was amused.
+Eaden disarmed and delighted, protective of
+a splendour. Suddenly she seized the bear
+<a id="page-180" class="pagenum" title="180"></a>
+in her arms and held it while she talked and
+put it carefully down and looked back at it
+as she turned with her little quick-march to
+someone calling from the house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s all right, Daphne.” Eaden’s voice
+eager, free of its drawl, crying out in pity and
+wrath. He had leapt from his chair and was
+gathering and fixing together the detached
+parts, bear and ski and pole found by Daphne
+returned, lying as if broken upon the table at
+his side. She stood speechless, a little forlorn
+child red-cheeked and tearful in dismay. A
+little way off stood the Skerry youth with his
+grin.
+</p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-5">
+<a id="page-181" class="pagenum" title="181"></a>
+CHAPTER V
+</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="first">
+<span class="firstchar">W</span><span class="postfirstchar">hat</span> had brought this wakening so
+near to the edge of night? The
+mountains were still wan against a cold sky,
+whitening the morning twilight with their snow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How long to wait, with sleep gone that left
+no borderland of drowsiness, until the coming
+of their gold?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And in a moment she had seen forever the
+ruby gleaming impossibly from the topmost
+peak: stillness of joy held still for breathless
+watching of the dark ruby set suddenly like a
+signal upon the desolate high crag.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It could not last, would soon be plain sunlight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Already it was swelling, growing brighter,
+clearing to crimson. In a moment it became
+a star with piercing rays that spread and
+slowly tilted over the upper snow a flood of
+rose.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-182" class="pagenum" title="182"></a>
+Each morning this miracle of light had happened
+before her sleeping eyes. It might not
+again find her awake. But it had found her
+awake, carried her away in a moment of pure
+delight that surely was absolution? And
+when presently the rose had turned to the
+familiar gold creeping down to the valley it
+was more than the gold of yesterday. In
+watching its birth she had regained the first
+day’s sense of endless time. To-day was set
+in advance to the rhythm of endless light.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To-day was an unfathomable loop within
+the time that remained before the end of
+Eaden’s visit, his short allowance that added,
+by being set within it, to her own longer portion.
+His coming had brought the earlier
+time to an end; made it a past, expanding in
+the distance. And beyond his far-off departure
+was a group of days with features yet
+unseen. Looking back upon that distant past
+it seemed impossible that the crest of her first
+week was not yet reached.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet the few days that seemed so many had
+already fallen into a shape. Morning blessedness
+of leisure smiled down upon by the
+<a id="page-183" class="pagenum" title="183"></a>
+mountains again tawny in their sunlight,
+witnessed to by every part of the house wandered
+through; rich sense of strength unspent;
+joy of mere going out again into the
+wide scene, into the embrace of the crystal
+air; the first breath of its piny scent, of the
+scent of snow and presently the dry various
+scents confined within the little street, messengers
+of strange life being lived close at hand;
+the morning dive into the baking warmth of
+the post-office to find amongst the English
+vehement at their pigeon-holes the sharpest
+sense of being out in the world of the free;
+then the great event, the wild flight down to
+the valley’s sudden stillness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The afternoon with Guerini; but, after
+yesterday, there might be no afternoon with
+Guerini: freedom instead, for fresh discovery
+until tea-time, on the promontory in the midst
+of unpredictable groupings. Sunset and afterglow,
+high day moving away without torment
+or regret; the mountains, turning to a darkness
+in the sky; telling only of the sure approach
+of the deep bright world of evening.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The gold-lit evening feast was still momentous,
+<a id="page-184" class="pagenum" title="184"></a>
+still under the spell of the setting, the
+silent host who kept the party always new.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And it was in part the setting, the feeling
+of being out of the world and irresponsible,
+that last night had kept Eaden a docile listener.
+He had heard a little of the truth, at least
+something to balance the misrepresentations
+of socialism in the Tory press. But he had
+heard in a dream, outside life. Sitting on the
+stairs, huge in his meek correctness of evening
+dress. There was, to be sure, in face of Vereker’s
+determination, nothing else for him to do.
+But it was with one consent that they had all
+three subsided on the wide stairs, secure from
+the intrusions that menaced the little salon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And it was only for a moment she had sunned
+herself in the triumph of being claimed,
+forcibly enthroned in the sustaining blue gown
+upon the red-carpeted stairs with the best of
+the hotel’s male guests a little below on each
+side of her. After that moment there was only
+effort, the effort to make things clear, to find
+convincing answers to Vereker’s questions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And there were no witnesses, only Guerini,
+coming from the salon and apologetically past
+<a id="page-185" class="pagenum" title="185"></a>
+them up the stairs; and the maids, passing
+to and fro.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is no evening social centre in this
+hotel, no large room. That is why these
+sports-people like it. The day is concentrated
+within the daylight. The falling away after
+dinner is a turning towards the next day’s work.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That Grindelsteig hotel must be rather fascinating.
+She thought I shared her disapproval
+of people “running up and down
+balconies and in and out of each other’s rooms
+all night long.” I did. Yet they are only
+carrying out my principles....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She despises even those who come out for
+sport unless all day they are risking life and
+limb. So fragile and brittle-looking, so Victorian
+and lacy, yet living for her ski-parties
+with picked people from the other hotels;
+going off at dawn, swallowed up until dinner-time
+and then, straight to bed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The social promise of the first evening has
+miscarried. The social centre is the Oberland
+Ski-club; the rest, a mere putting in of time.
+I am living on the outskirts, looking for developments
+in the wrong place; have seen all
+<a id="page-186" class="pagenum" title="186"></a>
+there will be to see until the end of my
+stay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Into the golden sunlight fell the clashing of
+morning sleighbells describing the outdoor
+world. Listening to them she felt the vast
+surroundings that lately had become a setting,
+owing part of its entrancement to the delightful
+sense of success in a charming social atmosphere,
+re-asserting themselves in their own
+right, accusing her of neglect, showing the
+days winding themselves off to an end that
+would leave her in possession only of the valley
+road and the fields beyond the bridge.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The dawn had wakened to remind her.
+Watching the coming of the light she had been
+restored to her first communion with it, back
+in the time when the people downstairs had
+seemed superfluity, thrown in with the rest.
+When all was over they would appear in the
+distance: bright figures of a momentary
+widening of her social horizon, unforgotten,
+but withdrawn into their own element; not
+going forward into her life as this winter
+paradise would go forward, brightening her
+days with the possibility of reunion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-187" class="pagenum" title="187"></a>
+This morning she would break the snare, be
+a claimant for a lunch packet, an absentee
+for the whole day. With the coming of the
+far-off afternoon, Guerini, looking down from
+his window on to the promontory either to
+escape or to claim her company, would find
+no one there.
+</p>
+
+<p class="tb">
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+Even in terror there was gladness of swift
+movement that left her pressed like a niched
+effigy into the wall of the drift as the beast
+pranced by, revealing in its wake a slouching
+peasant; clear brilliant eyes brooding amidst
+unkempt shagginess, pipe at an angle of
+jaunty defiance to the steep his heedless
+tramping brought so near.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was honourably plastered with snow and
+the precious package that had leapt and might
+have hurled itself into the void was still safely
+on its string about her neck, but the narrow
+rising path bereft of its secrecy by evidence of
+homely levels above of field and farm was
+<a id="page-188" class="pagenum" title="188"></a>
+perhaps only a highway for humiliating perils.
+More cows might be coming round the bend;
+a whole herd. There might be—it would harmonise
+with the way life always seemed to
+respond to deliberate activity with a personal
+challenge—on this very day the dawn had
+drawn her away from beaten tracks, a general
+turning out of cattle for an airing; mountain
+cattle, prancing like colts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Man and cow were now upon the widening
+path, approaching the sloping field with the
+barn at the end, the cow trotting swiftly ahead,
+through the half buried posts beside the sunken
+open gate, and now careering hither and
+thither with flying tail, the powdery snow
+flung in wreaths about its course. It was half
+mad of course, poor thing, with the joy of
+release from one of those noisome steamy sheds
+whose reek polluted the air surrounding them
+and saddened the landscape with reminder of
+the price of happiness: oblivion of hidden,
+helpless suffering.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But in summer-time this air-intoxicated
+captive would stand knee-deep in rich pasture;
+mild. Its colouring was mild, soft tan and
+<a id="page-189" class="pagenum" title="189"></a>
+creamy white, in ill-arranged large blots; and
+with its short legs, huge bony mass of head and
+shoulders from which the spine curved down
+as if sagging beneath the weight of the clumsy
+body, it missed the look of breeding, the even
+shape and colouring of lowland cattle. Its
+horns, too, had no style, rose small and
+sharp from the disproportionate mass of
+skull.
+</p>
+
+<p class="tb">
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+Almost without warning, so slight in the
+dense pinewood was the sound of its muffled
+gliding, the sled was upon her, heavy with
+piled logs and a ruffian perched upon them:
+slithering headlong, fitting and filling the
+banked path from side to side. Somehow she
+flung herself upon the root-encumbered bank,
+somehow hitched her feet clear of the sled as
+it rushed by. The villain, unmoved and
+placidly smoking, had not even shouted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No time to shout, no use <em>shouting</em> she murmured
+breathless, smiling at the absurd scene,
+a treasure now that danger was past, a glimpse
+<a id="page-190" class="pagenum" title="190"></a>
+into local reality. But danger was past only
+for the moment. This pleasant wide path
+she had mistaken for a woodland walk winding
+and mounting safely amidst the peace of the
+pinewoods was a stern highway, almost a
+railway; formed like a railway to the exact
+dimensions of its traffic.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Intently listening, going swiftly where the
+sides of the track were too high for an escaping
+sprawl, she toiled on and up and came presently
+to a gap and a view of the small hut
+seated clear of the pines, high against the pure
+blue upon its curve of unblemished snow,
+come down now nearly to her level and revealed
+as a châlet with burnished face, inhabited:
+above its chimney the air quivered
+in the heat of a clear-burning fire.
+</p>
+
+<p class="tb">
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+The hotel lunch, opened upon the trestle
+table, looked pert, a stray intruder from the
+cheap sophisticated world of to-day into these
+rich and ancient shadows. The old woman,
+but for her bell-like, mountainy voice, was a
+gnarled witch moving amongst them, unattained
+by the cold light from the small low
+<a id="page-191" class="pagenum" title="191"></a>
+windows that struck so short a way into the
+warmly varnished interior.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And it seemed by magic that she produced
+the marvellous coffee in whose subtle brewing
+was a sadness, the sadness of her lonely permanence
+above the waste of snow and woods—old
+grandmother, a living past, her world
+disappeared, leaving only the circling of the
+seasons about her emptied being.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In this haunting presence the triumph of
+distance accomplished, the delicious sense of
+known worlds waiting far below, world behind
+world in a chain whose end was the far-off
+London she represented here in this high remoteness,
+could not perfectly flourish, came in
+full only when the silence had had time to fill
+itself with joy that was too strong to be oppressed
+by the departed ancient voice that was
+like the echo of a sound falling elsewhere.
+</p>
+
+<p class="tb">
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+Again, recalling the far-off morning, a dark
+barn-like room. But the woman opened a
+<a id="page-192" class="pagenum" title="192"></a>
+door at the end of it, led the way through a
+passage still darker: another door and she
+was out upon the edge of the world, upon a
+dilapidated little grey balcony jutting over an
+abyss. As far as sight could reach were sunlit
+mountain tops range beyond range till they
+grew far and faint.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Faced alone, the scene, after the first moment’s
+blissfully ranging perception, was saddened
+in its grandeur through the absence
+there of someone else perceiving. Thousands,
+of course, had seen it from this perch in the
+centre of the row of slummy little balconies.
+But so splendid was the triumph of the unexpected
+mountains ranged and lit that no
+company, even exclamatory, could break their
+onslaught. Alone, there was too heavy a
+burden of feeling in the speechless company
+of this suddenly revealed magnificence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The woman coming out with the tea that
+one day she must take here accompanied, was
+brisk about the view: an adjunct, thrown in
+gratis with her refreshments which were good
+and which presently caused the mountains,
+turned away from, to be felt preparing a
+<a id="page-193" class="pagenum" title="193"></a>
+friendliness; becoming the last, best reward of
+her day’s accomplishments.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The way home down and down and across
+the levels to the rink and up the little homely
+slope into Oberland would be a jog-trot taken
+half asleep to the haven of things small and
+known amidst which she would sit renewed,
+to-day’s long life-time stilled to a happy throbbing
+of the nerves, a bemused beaming in the
+midst of friends. Its incidents blurred that
+would come back one day clearer, more
+shining than all the rest?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Warned by a growing chill she turned to
+face the mountains in farewell and found them
+lit by the first of the afterglow. Far away in
+the haze beyond the visible distance a group of
+slender peaks showed faintly, rose-misted pinnacles
+of a dream-city from whose spires would
+presently gleam the rubies of farewell.
+</p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-6">
+<a id="page-194" class="pagenum" title="194"></a>
+CHAPTER VI
+</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="first">
+<span class="firstchar">T</span><span class="postfirstchar">he</span> solitary excursion had made a gap
+in the sequence of days. Those standing
+behind it were now far away, and yesterday
+had failed to bridge the gap and join itself
+to their serenity. To-day looked shallow
+and hurried, with short hours beyond it rushing
+ahead to pause in the sunlight of the ski-fest
+and then to fly, helter-skelter towards the end.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Eaden’s departure was helping time to
+hurry. In the distance it had promised to
+leave things as they were before he came. But
+now that it was at hand it seemed a sliding
+away of everything.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was no depth in the morning light.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She turned to survey the scene on which it
+fell and saw the early gold stealing faithfully
+towards the valley. Once Eaden had gone
+this thinned-out urgency of time would cease.
+For everyone but Vereker his going was only a
+<a id="page-195" class="pagenum" title="195"></a>
+removal of something grown familiar; a
+reminder, soon forgotten, of the movement of
+time. Slight reminder. He reflected only
+surfaces and was going away, unchanged, to
+reflect the surfaces of another shape of life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet last night he had talked. Had been
+less a passenger unable to take root. It was
+he who had been the first to subside on the
+stairs—with a groan for his hard day’s work.
+Perhaps the approach of his known life had
+given him a moment of clairvoyance, showing
+its strangeness, the strange fact of its existence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Last night had been good, was showing
+now how very good it had been: three friends
+glad to sit down together and presently
+talking, each voice transformed, by the approach
+of the separation that would make it
+cease to sound, to the strange marvel of a
+human voice. Everything said had seemed
+important in its kindliness, and though there
+had been no socialism he had talked at last
+of his peasants and his ceaseless fighting with
+their ancient ways as though he wished to
+excuse himself from accepting socialism, to
+<a id="page-196" class="pagenum" title="196"></a>
+point out its irrelevance to the life of peasant
+and soil.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Industrial socialism had bored him. He
+thought its problems irrelevant, raised by
+clever doctrinaires who had nothing to lose.
+She had failed him by standing too much in
+one camp. The proper message for him came
+from the people who saw land as the fundamental
+unit.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Tell him to look away from capital and
+wages. And read George. And the Jewish
+land-laws, never surpassed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Good-bye. Please remember that work
+is an unlimited quantity.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then she remembered that this morning
+there would be a meeting at breakfast. He
+and Vereker would be there together as on
+the first morning; with time to spare.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But going into the dining-room she found
+his departure already in full swing. He was
+talking, smiling across at Mrs. Sneyde and
+Miss Hollebone with the eagerness of one who
+finds at the last moment the ice broken and
+communication flowing the more easily for
+having been dammed up and accumulating.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-197" class="pagenum" title="197"></a>
+Sitting down unnoticed except by Vereker
+she presently heard Maud Hollebone, to whom
+he had scarcely spoken, arranging, across the
+width of the room, to hasten her departure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were going down to Italy together; as
+casually as guests leaving a party and finding
+that their way home lies in the same direction
+will share a hansom across London. To
+travelled people a journey to Italy was as
+simple as crossing London. Was even a bore,
+a tiresome experience to be got through as
+pleasantly as possible. Behind her manner
+of soncy, quietly boisterous school-girl indifference
+Maud was pleased, but still kept her
+poise, her oblivious independence—of what?
+On what, all the time going about with Mrs.
+Sneyde, neglecting all opportunities for recognising
+the existence of the house-party, aloof
+without being stand-offish, was she feeding her
+so strongly-rooted life?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was pleased of course to be carrying off
+as her escort the imposing oiled bronze, now
+almost animated as he crossed to the little
+table to discuss details and stood, a pillar of
+strength, at the disposal of the two ladies now
+<a id="page-198" class="pagenum" title="198"></a>
+looking so small and Mrs. Sneyde, as she fired
+remarks at him, so scintillating. She, no
+doubt, had her ideas and thought it an excellent
+plan. But the sister already knew too
+late that it was not. Had felt the project
+change during his approach with his week’s
+happiness all about him, and realised now that
+she represented a reprieve, was to be, by
+keeping Oberland before his eyes during part
+of his long journeying, an extension of his
+holiday.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Standing at close quarters, already accustomed
+to her companionship, he was aware,
+behind his animation, of sacrificing for the
+sake of it the precious silent interval between
+his strenuous idling and the arduous work
+ahead; was paying the price always paid for
+tumult half-consciously insincere. The finding
+of Maud also immersed in the business
+of departure and therefore seen in a flash of
+time as a comrade, had enlivened him as one
+is enlivened by a greeting without regard to
+the giver of it. That enlivening glow had
+already departed and he was left reduced, with
+its results upon his hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-199" class="pagenum" title="199"></a>
+It was settled. The elopement arranged
+and he, with his instructions, moving off to
+clear her path. Perhaps secretly he was
+pleased after all. Perhaps his life in the south
+was not a flight from society and he was glad
+to be ever so slightly back again in its conspiracy
+to avoid solitude. Glad to be walking
+again on those sunny levels where there is
+never a complete break-off and departure.
+Never a void. Where even sorrow and suffering
+are softened by beautiful surroundings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Their windows, she reflected as Eaden,
+meeting the le Mesuriers at the door was
+halted for farewells, even their hotel windows,
+give on to beauty. And they can always move
+on. And soul-sickness, the suffering of mind
+so often a result of fatigue and poor food and
+ugly surroundings, was rare amongst them.
+They were cheerful and amused. If bored
+they shift on and begin again. If bored by
+the life of society itself they remain within it
+and cut figures as cynics.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s only fair to warn you,” Maud was
+crying from her table, “that I’m a vile fellow-traveller.
+Hate travelling.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-200" class="pagenum" title="200"></a>
+She rose and wandered to the window behind
+her table.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’re going to take away our property?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here she was, the unknown Miss Hollebone,
+close at hand, flopped in a chair, school-girlish.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Rather!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here in this warm circle was the old freemasonry
+of school-fellows, two profiles slightly
+turned, abrupt remarks, punctuated by jabbings
+at ink-stained desks, the sense of power
+and complete difference in relation to a stuffy
+old world; sudden glances, perfect happiness.
+Happiness that kept both quite still; hearing,
+feeling, seeing, in a circle of light suddenly
+created, making possible only slight swift
+words in whose echo one forgot which had
+spoken, which was which.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What are we to do?” They faced each
+other to laugh delight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t know. What we really want is
+<em>your</em> socialism in <em>our</em> world. The socialist
+ways you have in your world without knowing
+it, because you know no other ways.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You don’t object to us?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-201" class="pagenum" title="201"></a>
+“Good Lord, no! But just to cultivate you
+would be to go to sleep as you are all
+asleep.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You a Londoner?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Till death us do part.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Lucky dog!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Eaden was at her elbow to whom she turned
+with a guarded brightness, slipped back into
+her own world, into the half-conscious conspiracy
+of avoidance. Orderly world. A pattern
+world, life flowing in bright set patterns
+under a slowly gathering cloud.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Its echoes followed Miriam into the deserted
+little salon. Through the open door she heard
+a coming and going in the hall that at this hour
+should be empty and eloquent of people spread
+far and wide in the landscape. The bright
+pattern was flowing into a fresh shape, flowing
+forward in its way, heedless of clouds, heedless
+of the rising tide. On the little table was
+Daphne’s bear on ski, immortal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now in the hall the sound of her, demanding.
+Drawn to the door Miriam saw
+Vereker taking the stairs two at a time, immersed
+in friendship. And Eaden arrested
+<a id="page-202" class="pagenum" title="202"></a>
+in the middle of the hall by Daphne up-gazing
+with white determined face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Look at me,” she was saying, and his
+down-bent face lost its smile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’re not to go,” she said swiftly, in
+casual tone, and then breathlessly, still searching
+his unmoved face, “You’re not to go.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That’s right, Daphne,” cried Vereker
+pausing on the stairs. “Make him stay for the
+Fest, he wants to.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Eaden watched her while she waited for
+Vereker’s footsteps to die away, watched her
+in frowning concentration while her voice
+came again, the voice of one who tells another’s
+woe: “Not for the Fest, but because if you
+go away I shall die.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miriam turned swiftly back into the room,
+but she had seen the pain in his face, seen him
+wince. Daphne on her last words had taken
+a little impatient step and stood averted with
+clenched fists, and now their voices were going
+together up the stairs, hers eagerly talking.
+</p>
+
+<p class="tb">
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<a id="page-203" class="pagenum" title="203"></a>
+She made ready to go out amongst the
+mountains standing there in their places as
+for countless ages they had stood, desolate,
+looking down upon nothing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A door opened at the far end of the corridor
+and Vereker’s footsteps came swiftly trotting,
+went by and paused at a door further down:
+Maud Hollebone’s, at which now he was
+urgently tapping. A few words at the opened
+door and he had returned. A moment later
+came Maud, swishing along at a run: for more
+discussion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her thoughts turned to the promontory
+within easy reach. But it would be absurd to
+sit about visibly hung up by the bustle of
+events that were not even remotely her events.
+It was too late to do the valley run and walk
+back before lunch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I shall <em>die</em>.” Who was comforting
+Daphne? No one. No one could. Somewhere
+outside she was disposed of, walking
+with her nurse, uncomforted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She peered into Daphne’s future, into the
+years waiting ahead, unworthy of her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-204" class="pagenum" title="204"></a>
+Vereker’s door opened again, letting out the
+returning Maud; coming back to go on with
+her packing, to talk to Mrs. Sneyde. The
+two of them, surrounded by the opulence of
+wealthy packing, talking, skipping about in
+talk: family affairs, and in both their minds
+Maud’s journey to Milan with the mild and
+foolish bronze.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the footsteps had passed she went out
+into the corridor and across the space of sunlight
+streaming through Mrs. Harcourt’s door
+open upon its empty room. Far away in the
+landscape, with those people from the Kursaal,
+Mrs. Harcourt was forgetfully ski-ing,
+knowing nothing of all this bustle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Maud’s door too was set wide. Her
+room deserted, neat and calm as Mrs. Harcourt’s
+... Where was Maud?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From the room beyond came Mrs. Sneyde,
+dressed for outdoors, brilliant in green and
+gold, turning, coming forward with laughter
+and an outstretched restraining hand, suppressing
+her laughter to speak in the manner of
+one continuing a confidential talk; laughter
+remaining in her eyes that looked, not at the
+<a id="page-205" class="pagenum" title="205"></a>
+stranger she addressed for the first time, but
+away down the passage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ve just,” she whispered, “been in their
+room tyin’ up Daphne’s finger. Cut it on one
+of their razors. The poor things were terrified.
+Had her sittin’ on the table with her finger in a
+glass of water!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No. It’s nothing; but those two great
+fellows were jibberin’ with fright. She’s a
+little demon. Two towels on the floor. One
+all over chocolate and the other bright with
+gore. They wanted to fetch old stick-in-the-mud.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What a tragedy for Mr. Eaden’s last
+hours.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He’s not goin’; stayin’ for the Fest. Nobody’s
+goin’ but the dear Skerrys.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Didn’t know they were going.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Nor nobody else. Till Ma suddenly began
+about her luggage. Wants to save the sleigh
+fare. Vereker’s arranged it; the luggage is
+goin’ by the Post and they’re toboggannin’;
+can’t you see them? ‘Whee don’t ye see
+goodbee to Daphnee,’ says she to Tammas.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Cruel, a little cruel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-206" class="pagenum" title="206"></a>
+“They found out a good deal about the
+peasants.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The <em>peasants</em>? The village desperadoes?
+<em>Is</em> there anything to find out about them?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The lives they lead.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Tammas been tryin’ to convert them?
+With his weak eyes? Through his smoked
+glasses?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You know he smashed his glasses?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He would.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes. I heard his mother scolding him on
+the balcony and he slowly trying to explain;
+all in that low tone, as if they were conspiring.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“In an enemy camp. They were like that
+if you spoke to them. We all tried; but by
+the time they’d thought and begun to answer
+you’d forgotten what you said.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I suddenly remembered some glasses I’d
+been advised to bring. They seemed astonished
+and suspicious and yet eager. ‘Try
+them on, Thomas,’ she said.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Tree them on, Tammas. I hear her.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And yesterday he handed them back
+jammy round the edges. I thought he was
+<a id="page-207" class="pagenum" title="207"></a>
+tired of them. They said nothing about going.
+But he told me about the peasants.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“They had jam teas, on their own, upstairs.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Anyhow, they got in touch with the
+natives.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I ain’t surprised. Natives themselves.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“With the people in the châlet behind.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Old Methuselah? Not difficult if you
+smash things. The old boy mended Daphne’s
+watch. Of course she went in to see him do
+it. Went in jabberin’ German which she
+<em>won’t</em> talk with Frederika. Was there an hour
+till I went to fish her out. Couldn’t see her,
+my dear—couldn’t see <em>anything</em>; smoke, like
+a fog, couldn’t <em>breathe</em>. Made her out at last
+squatting close up to the filthy old villain on
+his bench. Lost, in the insides of watches.
+She’s goin’ to be a watchmaker now.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It must be his son.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Who must?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The one Thomas told me of. A woodcutter.
+Terrible. In the snow. It’s only
+on snow they can bring the wood down from
+the higher places. Someone bought a high
+copse, cheaply, because the higher——”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-208" class="pagenum" title="208"></a>
+“Higher you go, the fewer—now I know
+what that means.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The cheaper. Over two hours climb from
+here; somewhere across the valley. And the
+men and sleds must be there by daylight.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Poor devils!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes. And the horses for the climbing
+must be fed two hours before the start. Sometimes
+they have to feed them before three in
+the morning. One lot of men was caught up
+there by an avalanche and were there four days
+before they could be got down.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ai-<em>eee</em>; don’t tell us.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“At the best it’s dangerous work. They
+get maimed; lose their lives. All the winter
+this is going on. We don’t read their papers,
+don’t know the people and don’t hear of it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Isn’t it just as well? <em>We</em> can’t help it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It ought to be done some other way.
+Men’s lives ought not to be so cheap.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How did Tammas get all this learning?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Speaks German.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Jee-roozlum!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And French.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And Scotch. And having no one to talk
+<a id="page-209" class="pagenum" title="209"></a>
+Scotch to, talks to the peasants, about their
+trees. Daphne <em>hates</em> the trees.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“<em>Hates</em> them?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Would like to make a big bonfire and
+burn’m all up.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miriam was silent, searching the green eyes
+for Daphne.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, that’s Daphne. She’s mad about
+Napoleon. Reads all the books. Has’m in
+her room. I have to expound when she gets
+stuck. Won’t say her prayers till we’ve read
+a bit of Bony. Won’t say ‘make me a good
+girl.’ Says ‘make me a man and a sojer.’
+She and Eaden are as thick as thieves. He’s
+an angel to her. I’ve got to be <em>hoff</em>. Goin’
+to the Curse-all for lunch. Maud’s there.
+She’s goin’ south to-morrow with the Chisholmes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Before the Fest?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Chisholmes have got to pick up their kid
+somewhere. Maud’s had enough of Switzerland
+for this year.”
+</p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-7">
+<a id="page-210" class="pagenum" title="210"></a>
+CHAPTER VII
+</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="first">
+<span class="firstchar">T</span><span class="postfirstchar">he</span> clouds were a rebuke; for being
+spell-bound into imagining this bright
+paradise inaccessible. The world’s weather
+cannot be arranged as a conversation with one
+small person. Then how did the rebuke
+manage to arrive punctually at the serenest
+moment of self-congratulation? As if someone
+were watching ...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She looked levelly across the sunny landscape
+and the clouds were out of sight. But
+there was a movement in the air, a breeze softly
+at work ousting the motionless Oberland air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She walked ahead, further and further into
+the disconcerting change. Everything was
+changed, the whole scene, reduced to homeliness.
+She caught herself drooping, took
+counsel and stiffened into acquiescence: “I
+might have known. I’m accustomed to this.
+It removes only what I thought I couldn’t
+<a id="page-211" class="pagenum" title="211"></a>
+give up. Something is left behind that can’t
+be taken away”—and heard at once within
+the high stillness the familiar sound of life,
+felt the sense of it flowing warmly in along the
+old channels, and heard from the past in
+various tones, amused, impatient, contemptuous:
+“You <em>are</em> philosophical.” Always a
+surprise. What did they mean with their
+“philosophical”? The alternative was their
+way of going on cursing, missing everything
+but the unfavourable surface.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Someone has said that there is nothing
+meaner than making the best of things.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The clouds made soft patches of shadow
+upon the higher snow. Beside the angular
+sharp shadows growing upon the northern
+slopes they were blemishes, smudgy and
+vague. But free, able to move and flow while
+the mountains stood crumbling in their places.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The clouds were beautiful, slowly drifting,
+leaving torn shreds upon the higher peaks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Upon the ridge beyond the cloaked silence
+of the little wood the breeze blew steadily from
+across the levels—that were strangely empty;
+no sign of moving specks making for the further
+<a id="page-212" class="pagenum" title="212"></a>
+ridge. Hurrying along the track she
+recalled too late the slightness of the information
+upon which she had built her idea of the
+golden scene; the gay throng, herself happily
+in the midst.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Without a single clear idea of the direction
+she had trusted to the bright magic to draw
+her to itself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The subtly changed air and the melancholy
+clouds re-stated themselves, became the prelude
+to disaster. The increasing wind and the
+cloud-bank hiding the distant mountains were
+proclaiming the certainty of punishment well-deserved:
+to wander at a loss and miss the Fest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She glanced at her afternoon in retrospect:
+aimless walking in a world fallen into greyness
+and gloom, into familiarity that was already
+opening the door to the old friend, at whose
+heart lived a radiance out-doing the beams
+shed by anticipation over unknown things.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But all the time the ski-ing which now she
+was not to see would be going forward, mocking
+her until she could forget it; until the hours
+it filled should have passed into others bright
+enough to melt regret.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-213" class="pagenum" title="213"></a>
+Climbing the rise beyond the levels she was
+at once climbing up to find the Fest, would
+plod the landscape until she found it, late, but
+still in time to share and remember. She
+reached the crest beyond the rise—there it
+was: a small shape, like an elongated horseshoe,
+upon a distant slope. Black dots close-clustered
+in a strange little shape upon the
+wastes of snow, defying the wastes of snow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was plenty of space. Gaps on each
+side of the track and even towards the top of
+the rise where people were grouped more
+closely about the comforting, the only festal
+sign, looking like an altar with its gold-embroidered,
+red velvet frontal. Nothing could
+be seen behind its shelf but a small hut upon
+the levels that extended backwards until the
+pinewoods began with the rising mountain-side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Where to stand? Up amongst the connoisseurs
+to see the start, half-way down with a
+view of the ski-ers coming, or at the bottom of
+the row amongst the black-clothed natives standing
+about in scattered groups in the loose snow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Choosing a place half-way down she became
+one of the gathered crowd of Oberland visitors
+<a id="page-214" class="pagenum" title="214"></a>
+lining the smoothed and steeply sloping course.
+They were all there. The black and distant
+dots had become people in every fashion of
+sport’s-clothes, standing on skis, sitting on
+toboggans, stamping about in the snow,
+walking up and down; and all waiting, all
+looking betweenwhiles expectantly up the
+track towards the deserted altar. There was
+a good deal of talking. Here and there the
+incessant voices of men who make a hobby of
+talking. But most of them talked intermittently,
+in the way of these leisured English
+who veil their eagerness as they wait half
+apologetically and wholly self-consciously for
+a show. There patiently they would wait,
+good-humoured, not deigning to be disturbed,
+not suffering anything to disturb their pose
+of amused independence that looked so like
+indifference and masked a warmth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Just across the way was a stout lady in a
+seal-skin coat and curiously different snow-boots.
+She sat sturdily bunched on her
+toboggan and they stuck out in front of her,
+close-fitting, the rubber soles curving sharply
+to the instep and neatly down again into the
+<a id="page-215" class="pagenum" title="215"></a>
+shape of a heel. She clasped a camera and
+her sallow heavy face was drawn into a frown
+that remained there while she turned towards
+a voice sounding from over the way:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“.... and we’ll just be <em>here</em> till judgment
+<em>day</em>.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I was told,” she answered at large with
+face upraised, deep furrows from nose to chin
+giving strength to her hanging cheeks, “I
+was to see sky-jumping, but I see no men on
+their skys to jump.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+American continuousness held up in Europe,
+brought to despair by the spectacle of tolerance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sunlight had gone and on the slope of the
+breeze small snowflakes drifted down to the
+snow. For a while it seemed as though the gathering
+in the white wilderness were there in vain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From the group of black figures at the top
+of the rise a deep Swiss voice sang out an
+English name. Heads were craned forward,
+but the altar remained empty. The confronted
+rows were transformed. Each life,
+risen to gazing eyes, waited in a stillness upon
+the edge of time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The knickerbockered tweed-clad form arrived
+<a id="page-216" class="pagenum" title="216"></a>
+upon the shelf from nowhere, leaped,
+knees bent and arms outspread, forward
+through the air upon the long blades that looked
+so like thin oars flattened out, came down,
+arms in upward-straining arches, with a resounding
+whack upon the slope and slid half-crouching,
+gaining the upright, fully upright
+with hooked arms swinging, at full speed to
+the bottom of the hill, went off in a wide curve
+and was stopped, swaying, just not falling,
+in wreaths of whirling snow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Achievement. Thrilling and chastening.
+Long ago someone had done this difficult thing
+for the first time, alone, perhaps driven by
+necessity. Now it was a sport, a deliberate
+movement into eternity, shared by all who
+looked on. She felt she could watch forever.
+Cold had withdrawn from the snow and from
+the drifting flakes. One after another the
+figures appeared at the top of the rise and
+leapt, making the gliding race to the sound of
+cheers that now broke forth each time the
+forward rush followed the desperate dive.
+For those who crashed and rolled, slanting
+ski and sloping helpless body rolling over and
+<a id="page-217" class="pagenum" title="217"></a>
+over down the slope, there was comment of
+laughter silly and cruel. Yet one man sliced
+his face with a ski-point and one had lain
+stunned at the bottom of the slope ...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Vereker came at last, looking very young
+and lightly built, leaping neatly and far, and
+gliding easily upright, to the accompaniment
+of frantic cheering, at a splendid pace down the
+slope and far on into the loose snow and round
+in a sweeping curve that encircled a distant
+sapling and left him facing up the track half-hidden
+in a cloud of churned-up snow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was the best. Length of jump, pace,
+style. The best of the English. And kind life
+had led her to him for speech, for the recovery
+of shared things; and was making now more
+memories that fitted with the rest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Skied onlookers were planking sideways up
+and down the course, flattening it. Snow still
+fell thinly. The distant mountains were lost
+in mist. The forgotten scene was utterly
+desolate. Warmth flowing forth from within
+made a summer in its midst.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Tsoor-<em>boo</em>-chn!” The strong spell-binding
+peasant name filled out the ringing cry.
+<a id="page-218" class="pagenum" title="218"></a>
+Switzerland was coming, bringing its so
+different life of mountain and pinewood, its
+hardy strength, perhaps to outdo the English
+in this brave game.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here he came, in black against his snow,
+deep velvety black against the snow, gliding
+past the little hut with a powerful different
+gait. It was partly his clothes, the way they
+seemed all of one piece, closely fitting, without
+angles. And his size, huge. From the edge of
+the shelf he leapt high into the air and seemed
+to stand there against the sky, in a dream.
+Down he swooped, sailing, dreaming, to the
+track, rose smoothly from the terrific impact
+and smoothly went his way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What could be more beautiful? He was
+heavy and solid, thickly built. But with his
+shapely clothing and smooth rhythmic movement
+he made the English graceless and their
+clothes deliberately absurd.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All the Swiss, though some were rough and
+ungainly, moved with that strong and steady
+grace. But Zurbuchen was the best. It was
+he who would live in her memory, poised
+against the sky like a great bird.
+</p>
+
+<p class="tb">
+<a id="page-219" class="pagenum" title="219"></a>
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+“You took photographs?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“For him,” smiled Vereker with his quizzical
+affectionate glance. “To remind him of what
+he has to do next year. But we’ll share them.
+Yours will remind you that next year you won’t
+be let off.” Eaden remained silent and expressionless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“They will look strange amongst your cypress
+groves.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“They will look passing strange.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You will come out again?” She wanted
+neither to know nor to seem to want to know,
+but Vereker had left him there for a moment
+on her hands. She was caught in the social
+trap. Expected, being a woman, not to walk
+off alone, but to wait and provide, while she
+waited, suitable entertainment, some kind of
+parlour trick. For a moment it seemed as
+though he would not answer. He was silent
+and used to stillness, yet embarrassed now by
+stillness in the presence of a perceiving witness.
+Another woman would not seem to perceive.
+Would have given her question the semblance
+of sincerity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-220" class="pagenum" title="220"></a>
+“No,” he said suddenly. “If I go away at
+all next year I shall go east.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“When you’ve ’eard the East a-callin’....”
+She turned to look towards the returning
+Vereker. Eaden gazed away towards
+the snowy distances. He was taking his farewell.
+To-morrow he would be gone back to
+his chosen isolation, uninfluenced. Tender-hearted
+lover of brave souls, of Daphne, and
+who yet would bring so little to his love-making.
+He stood in his heavy silence, heavy man’s
+silence of waiting for recognisable things.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, that man knew what he was talking
+about.” Suddenly his friendly beam and a
+forward approaching step, a turning away, at
+the first hint of something he had heard before,
+from his formal preoccupation, preoccupation
+with a glimpse of the next break in his unknown
+southern life. She had nothing more to say.
+Vereker was at hand who had held them at truce
+together. But now without Vereker they were at
+truce, the only kind of truce he could understand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For a moment she was aware, far away in
+the future, of one of whom he was the forerunner,
+coming into her life for mortal combat.
+</p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-8">
+<a id="page-221" class="pagenum" title="221"></a>
+CHAPTER VIII
+</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="first">
+<span class="firstchar">I</span><span class="postfirstchar">n</span> spite of her contempt for tobogganing
+she was going warily, slowing up a little
+at the bends, a gnome in an extinguishing cowl,
+Mrs. Harcourt, carelessly carrying her long
+past and the short future that so strangely she
+regarded as indefinite, looking forward, making
+plans for next winter with eager school-girl
+eyes; carelessly bringing the life she carried
+about with her down to the valley this afternoon
+with brusque cameraderie, her day-time
+manner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her company added something to the joy
+of flying through the backward-flowing landscape.
+But it was shortening the run and
+fitting it within reduced surroundings—making
+it show as it showed to her within her larger
+scale of movement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here already was the steepest bend of the
+run, with the patch of black ice across its
+<a id="page-222" class="pagenum" title="222"></a>
+middle. Mrs. Harcourt had passed it safely
+and disappeared. It was past and a group
+of people came into sight midway down the
+next slope: two figures pushing off and Mrs.
+Harcourt at the side of the track, dismounted,
+beating her skirt. She had collided, managed
+to run into them; a collision and a humiliating
+smash ...
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Fools! Fooling all over v’place. Had
+to slam into v’side.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A blessing the fence is broken just here.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Not their fault I’m not smashed up. I
+was yellin’ for all I was worth.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s <em>really</em> dangerous when you can’t see
+what’s ahead. Someone said tobogganing
+accounts for more accidents than any other
+sport.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t wonder, with so many idjuts about.
+Where’s Daphne?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Held up, poor little soul. A broken cord,
+just as they were starting; the maid went in
+for another.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Paw kid. She’ll be too late. No good
+waiting.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They mounted and sped off one behind the
+<a id="page-223" class="pagenum" title="223"></a>
+other through a scene that was now the child’s
+vast desolation. In place of joyous flight,
+selfish, in which Daphne had been forgotten,
+came now this absurd urgency to arrive. Mrs.
+Harcourt felt it. She was sorry, in her kindliness,
+for Daphne’s disappointment, but saw
+nothing of the uselessness of arriving without
+her. Thought of nothing but herself, her
+determination, her hatred of being beaten.
+This made a shelter. Under the shelter of Mrs.
+Harcourt’s determination to be there because
+she had said she would be there it was possible
+to be seen rushing uselessly to the last farewell.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another bend. Beyond it a sleigh coming
+up and Mrs. Harcourt carefully passing it and
+the other tobogganers drawn up in the snow.
+It was safely past. Mrs. Harcourt was getting
+ahead. Going recklessly. Even for her there
+was something more in this desperate urgency
+than the mere determination to arrive.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If she too were to arrive it was now or never.
+Now, at once, in the midst of this winding
+ice-patched roadway, she must give herself up
+to what she had learned on the safe snowfields
+and never yet dared to try here until the last
+<a id="page-224" class="pagenum" title="224"></a>
+clear slope was reached. Lifting her feet to
+the bar, leaning back to swing free and steer
+by weight she let herself go. The joy of flight
+returned, singing joy of the inaccessible world
+to which in flight one was translated, bringing
+forgetfulness of everything but itself. Bend
+after bend appeared and of itself her body
+swayed now right now left in unconscious
+rhythm. The landscape flew by, sideways-upwards,
+its features indistinguishable. She
+was movement, increasing, cleaving the backward
+rushing air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the last slope she was level with Mrs.
+Harcourt, safely, triumphantly returned to
+the known world, passing her, flying down so
+blissfully that arrival would now be nothing
+but an end to joy. Flying down towards two
+small figures standing on the level, turned this
+way, watching up the incline down which
+speeded, superfluously, absurdly, just these
+two women.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Where’s Daphne?” said Eaden in his
+rich, indolent voice; looking over their heads,
+staring up the slope.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While Mrs. Harcourt’s deep bass, still
+<a id="page-225" class="pagenum" title="225"></a>
+staccato with her anger, told the brief tale, she
+watched the pain and wrath in his face, strong
+man’s sympathy of pain with this child to
+whose spirit he gave homage, anger with those
+who had deserted her. Her useless explanation
+flickered about him unspoken, silenced by
+the pain she shared.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s no good, old man,” said Vereker
+gently, watch in hand: “we must be off.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Formal hand-shaking. To Mrs. Harcourt’s
+padding of sociable remarks he paid no heed,
+keeping his eyes still above her on the bend at
+the head of the slope until he turned to tramp
+off with Vereker, to the sound of Vereker’s
+kindly, sunny voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Paw kid. Eaden was frightfully wrath.
+Thought we ought to have brought her.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I couldn’t have dared, down those slopes,
+on a small single,” said Miriam wearily. But
+the judge within stood firm. She had not
+thought of trying.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The now distant men were marching swiftly,
+reaching the point where the road sloped
+downwards; had reached it and were settling
+on their toboggans. A face came round.
+<a id="page-226" class="pagenum" title="226"></a>
+Miriam looked back up the slope still cruelly
+empty, and round again to see the men seated,
+gliding off, lessening. Their caps vanished
+below the level of the ridge. And now the
+upward slope held a single small toboggan
+coming headlong. Daphne had made the run
+alone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How <em>dare</em> you let him go?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miriam moved forward surprised by her
+own approach. Her mind was filled with the
+simple selfish truth. The wrath-blazing eyes
+saw it, recognised her for what she was and
+turned away to the wastes of snow:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Eaden, my Eaden ... I shall <em>never</em> see
+him again.” Tears flowed from the wide eyes
+and swiftly down the face so little convulsed
+by grief that bent her, standing there with
+arms sideways out as if to save her from falling,
+to keep her upright, facing her loss, fists
+clenched to fight her woe. Of themselves
+Miriam’s arms reached forth to stay the torment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Incredibly Daphne was clinging, sobbing
+with hidden face: “Do you love me—do you
+love me?” She held her without speaking,
+<a id="page-227" class="pagenum" title="227"></a>
+silenced while still the broken voice went on, by
+the sense of being carried forward into a world
+known only by hearsay and that now was
+giving forth all about them in the stillness its
+ethereal sounds—sounds she had sometimes
+felt within a gentle wind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Daphne’s head was raised and her flushed
+face busy in eager speech as they went forward
+together over the snow. When presently she
+assured her that one day Eaden would come
+back, the child pulled upon her arm and spoke
+in a new way of her new love. She spoke no
+more of Eaden, walking sturdily uphill, eagerly
+talking, sunned for a while in humble helpless
+love that soon must be removed.
+</p>
+
+<p class="tb">
+&nbsp;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+With Eaden’s departure holding Vereker
+away until to-morrow and Mrs. Harcourt disappeared
+upstairs with all those who sought
+sleep and early rising, the hotel was empty,
+strange again and going its independent way
+as on the day of her arrival. The presence of
+<a id="page-228" class="pagenum" title="228"></a>
+Guerini hidden away in the little salon where
+daily he had spent his unimaginable evening
+of a Milan business man on holiday, increased
+its emptiness, made it as desolate as the world
+of his thoughts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He must have learned something in seeing
+her evening after evening—not in the least
+goloshy in her blue gown of many colours—seated
+on the crimson stairs between the two
+Englishmen, in seeing discussion prevail over
+personalities; new world for him of men
+seeking, without sentimental emotion, without
+polite contempt, conversation with a woman.
+Had any light dawned in him? Would he
+show any grace of dawning light?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She went into the little salon and there he
+was, rising to greet her, with the look of a man
+penned within an office, the look upon his low
+Italian brow of worry left over from his daily
+life. He looked common too, common and
+ordinary—she wondered now that she could
+ever have mistaken him for a musician wandered
+from Russia. But beside the pathetic
+appeal of his commonness, supporting it, was
+the appeal of his disarray, his obvious gladness
+<a id="page-229" class="pagenum" title="229"></a>
+and relief, like Michael coming back after a last,
+final explanation and dismissal, saying impenitently:
+“You whipped me yesterday, to-day
+you must not whip.” He was extraordinarily
+like Michael in his belief in the
+essential irrelevance of anything a woman may
+say.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was his last evening in Oberland and the
+first time they had found themselves alone
+together since the afternoons in the snowfields
+that were now so clearly in his mind as he
+stood still turning over those hopeless little
+old Swiss books, but turned towards her as she
+ensconced herself in the chair from which so
+long ago she had watched Vereker at the
+piano. Yet their life together had gone on.
+The grim little room was full of it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again she had that haunting sense of being
+a collection of persons living in a world of
+people always single and the same. Mrs.
+Harcourt, she reflected as she said the books
+were like faded flowers, was fastidiously selective
+and always one person, one unfaltering
+aspect. Vereker, Eaden, all the others. Yet
+the lives she lived with each one were sharply
+<a id="page-230" class="pagenum" title="230"></a>
+separated lives, separable parts of herself,
+incompatible. The life she lived with Guerini,
+beginning unconsciously that first evening
+when he had turned upon her throughout
+dinner his brown stare, hurrying forward during
+their afternoons in the snow, ending with
+their quarrel, begun again with the reproachful
+gaze he had sent across the table on the evening
+of her truancy, had persisted during the
+intervening time and was now marching off
+afresh on its separate way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was clear that these close questionings
+held not only the remains of his surprise over
+the nature of the things that had separated
+them but also his determination to try to see
+these things as she saw them. They revealed
+much pondering, not over the things in themselves
+but over their power with her, and
+presently it was clear that he meant to see her
+again. She sat ensconced, considering him,
+measuring the slow movement of his thoughts,
+the swiftness of the impressions he was drawing
+from his attention to every inflection of her
+voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She knew she ought to go, that she was
+<a id="page-231" class="pagenum" title="231"></a>
+building up with every moment she stayed in
+the room a false relationship. The cordiality
+of her voice, its dreamy animation, was not
+for him nor made by him. It told its tale to
+her alone. His talk of London had taken her
+thoughts there and she saw it afar, vivid with
+charmed and charming people. For the first
+time she was seeing London as people whose
+secret had revealed itself during this last two
+weeks, and was at this moment beginning
+consistently to live her life there as in future
+it would be lived, as she had lived it, but
+unconsciously and only intermittently, during
+the past year.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This man appealed, she realised it now, from
+the first to a person who no longer existed, to
+a loneliness that during the past years had
+been moving away from her life. It was only
+in its moving that she had realised its existence.
+This man saw her still as lonely and
+resourceless; and also as interesting, something
+new in his narrow experience. He too
+was lonely, had an empty life, in the busy
+business man’s way of having an empty life:
+no centre and a lonely leisure. And he was
+<a id="page-232" class="pagenum" title="232"></a>
+more than half bent on offering her the chance
+that so often in the past had been at her
+elbow, of pretending herself into a single settled
+existence, a single world, safe. Even now it
+was a temptation. But it was the Italian
+background that was the real temptation.
+As soon as he talked of settling himself in
+London he was lessened, and the temptation
+disappeared. Life as a single conversation
+in a single place with the rest of the world
+going by might seem possible when thought of
+in all the newness of Italy. In London it at
+once fell into proportion and became absurd.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In London was Hypo, held up, at any rate
+saying he was held up, and not now so much
+awaiting her decision as taking it for granted.
+A big shadow, that might turn into sunshine.
+A gleaming shadow that lost its brightness as
+she faced it. And, behind it, a world that
+perhaps took most of its glamour from this
+uncertain shadow.
+</p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-9">
+<a id="page-233" class="pagenum" title="233"></a>
+CHAPTER IX
+</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="first">
+<span class="firstchar">I</span><span class="postfirstchar">t</span> was an urgent tapping on the wall from
+Mrs. Harcourt’s side, and she was
+speaking as she tapped. With half-opened
+eyes Miriam grew aware of darkness, half-darkness
+of early morning, and listened through
+the companion darkness within her of the
+knowledge that this was her last whole day,
+to this strange clamour from the lady whose
+nightly presence at her side had been for so
+long forgotten.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Look out of ve window!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sitting up in bed she saw hanging in mid-air
+just outside the window a huge crimson
+lamp, circular in a blue darkness. Sleepily
+she cried her thanks and leaped awake to
+dwell with the strange spectacle, the gently
+startling picture, in its sudden huge nearness,
+of the loveliness of space. The little distant
+moon, enormous and rosy in blue mist, seemed
+<a id="page-234" class="pagenum" title="234"></a>
+to float in the blue as in blue water, seemed to
+have floated close in sheer unearthly kindliness,
+to comfort her thoughts on this last day with
+something new and strange.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The day passed with heartless swiftness,
+savourless. Full of charms whose spell failed
+under the coming loss.
+</p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-10">
+<a id="page-235" class="pagenum" title="235"></a>
+CHAPTER X
+</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="first">
+<span class="firstchar">A</span><span class="postfirstchar">nd</span> for the last morning again a strange
+surprise. Mountains and valley were
+hidden behind impenetrable mist, even the
+nearest objects were screened by the thickly
+falling snow. Alpine winter tremendously at
+work, holding her fascinated at windows downstairs,
+upstairs; mighty preparation for the
+beauty of days she would not see, robbing her
+of farewell, putting farewell back into yesterday’s
+superficial seeing which had not
+known it was the last.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But when she was forced to turn away to
+her packing she found, within the light of this
+veiled world that cast within doors a strange
+dark brilliance, something of the London
+gloom, and the enjoyment of a concentrated
+activity that had always been one of the gifts
+of a London fog. It was as if already she were
+translated, good-byes said and the journey
+<a id="page-236" class="pagenum" title="236"></a>
+begun. The hours ahead became a superfluous
+time, to be spent in a Switzerland whose
+charm, since London had reached forth and
+touched her, had fallen into its future place as
+part of life: an embellishment, a golden joy
+to which she would return.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And when she saw the guests assembled at
+lunch in full strength it was as though having
+left them for good she returned for a moment
+to find them immersed in a life to which she
+was a stranger. Confined by the weather,
+they had produced the pile of letters waiting
+in the lounge and were now rejoicing in unison
+over the snowfall. In speech and silence each
+one revealed himself, but as a dream-revival
+of someone known long ago; and in the dream
+it was again as on that first evening when she
+had sat a listening outsider, fearing and hoping
+to be drawn in, and again it was Mrs. Harcourt
+who, when her association with these
+people was seeming to be a vain thing cancelled,
+drew her in with a question.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The short hour expanded. Once more she
+was caught into the medium of their social
+vision, into the radiance that would shine
+<a id="page-237" class="pagenum" title="237"></a>
+unchanged when she was gone and was the
+secret of English social life and could, if it
+were revealed to every human soul, be the
+steering light of human life throughout the
+world. These people were the fore-runners,
+free to be almost as nice as they desired.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then, with the suddenness of a rapid
+river, her coming freedom flowed in upon her,
+carrying her outside this pleasant enclosure
+towards all that could be felt to the full only
+in solitude amongst things whose being was
+complete, towards that reality of life that
+withdrew at the sounding of a human voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was already from a far distance that, alone
+with her upon the landing, she promised Mrs.
+Harcourt remembrance and letters, said good-bye
+and saw once more her first diffident
+eagerness; felt that it was she, withdrawn
+since the first days, who had yet lived her life
+with her, transferred something of her being
+into the gathered memories and would keep
+them alive, keep the mountain scene in sight
+near at hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Alone in her room still thinking of Mrs.
+Harcourt, she remembered from “Ships that
+<a id="page-238" class="pagenum" title="238"></a>
+Pass in the Night” how on the last day all but
+one person had forgotten the departing guest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then in getting up from lunch she had seen
+them all, unknowing, for the last time—as
+yesterday the mountains. For all these people
+hidden away in their rooms, immersed in
+their own affairs, she was already a figure slid
+away and forgotten. With the paying of
+Frau Knigge’s bill her last link with the Alpenstock
+had been snapped.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But when the coach-horn sounded and she
+went down into the hall, there they all were,
+gathering round, seeing her off. Hurriedly,
+with the door open upon the falling snow and
+the clashing of sleighbells, she clasped for the
+first time strange and friendly hands, saw, in
+eyes met full and near, welcome from worlds
+she had not entered. Beside the door she
+met Daphne forgotten, who clutched and drew
+her back into the window space for desperate
+clinging, and entreaties sounding lest for this
+new slow-witted lover the searching gaze
+should not be enough.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was not until she was inside the dark coach
+and its occupants had thanked heaven she was
+<a id="page-239" class="pagenum" title="239"></a>
+English and let down a window, that she
+remembered Vereker. He alone had made no
+farewell.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The coach pulled up outside the post-office
+and there he stood in the driving snow, and
+all the way down the valley she saw them one
+by one and saw him standing in great-coat and
+woollen helmet, heard his elegant light distressful
+voice begging her to come out next year.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And brighter now than the setting they had
+charmed was the glow these people had left
+in her heart. They had changed the aspect of
+life, given it the promise of their gentle humanity,
+given her a frail link with themselves and
+their kind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She climbed into a carriage whose four
+corners were occupied and sat down to the
+great journeying.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“History repeats itself.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Looking up she found all about her the
+family from Croydon, met the father’s quizzical
+brown eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Had a farewell kick-up at our place last
+night. We’re feeling the effects. <em>You</em> look
+very fit. Enjoyed yourself?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-240" class="pagenum" title="240"></a>
+“I’ve had a splendid time.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You collared the handsomest man in Oberland
+anyhow—that young giant of a Russian.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Italian.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Bless my soul! Hear that, Doris?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“We were up till <em>fave</em> this morning,” said
+Doris.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The train moved off, but only Doris, once
+more grown-up with her hair in a staid bun
+under her English winter hat, turned to watch
+the station disappear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Want to go back, Doris?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah love,” she breathed devoutly, “could
+thou and aye with feete conspire——”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miriam joined the sister in intoning the rest
+of the lines.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah Moon——” began Doris, and the
+brother leaned forward holding towards her a
+gloved hand whose thumb protruded through
+a fraying gap:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A little job for you in Paris.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She regarded it undisturbed and turned
+away the scornful sweetness of her face towards
+the window and the snowflakes falling thickly
+upon the shroud of snow.
+</p>
+
+<div class="trnote chapter">
+<p class="transnote">
+Transcriber’s Notes
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical errors
+were silently corrected. Further careful corrections, some after consulting
+other editions, are listed here (before/after):
+</p>
+
+
+
+<ul>
+
+<li>
+... “Schön, die letzte <span class="underline">Gluh</span>,” he said quietly. ...<br>
+... “Schön, die letzte <a href="#corr-0"><span class="underline">Glüh</span></a>,” he said quietly. ...<br>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+... “Man soll sich des Leben<span class="underline">’</span>s freuen, im Berg ...<br>
+... “Man soll sich des Leben<a href="#corr-1"></a>s freuen, im Berg ...<br>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+... und Thal. In so <span class="underline">wass</span> kann sich ein’ Engländerin ...<br>
+... und Thal. In so <a href="#corr-2"><span class="underline">was</span></a> kann sich ein’ Engländerin ...<br>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+... his own path from which <span class="underline">his</span> tacit meeting ...<br>
+... his own path from which <a href="#corr-6"><span class="underline">this</span></a> tacit meeting ...<br>
+</li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77646 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
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@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This book, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for eBook #77646
+(https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77646)