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<title>Oberland: Pilgrimage, Volume 9 | Project Gutenberg</title>
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   <!-- AUTHOR="Dorothy M. Richardson" -->
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   <!-- PUBLISHER="Duckworth & Co., London" -->
   <!-- DATE="1927" -->
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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>
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