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Title: Oberland
Pilgrimage, Volume 9
Author: Dorothy M. Richardson
Release date: January 8, 2026 [eBook #77646]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Duckworth, 1927
Credits: Jens Sadowski and the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OBERLAND ***
OBERLAND
VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES
POINTED ROOFS
BACKWATER
HONEYCOMB
THE TUNNEL
INTERIM
DEADLOCK
REVOLVING LIGHTS
THE TRAP
OBERLAND
(The next volume is in preparation)
OBERLAND
BY
DOROTHY M. RICHARDSON
AUTHOR OF “POINTED ROOFS,” ETC.
DUCKWORTH
3 HENRIETTA STREET, LONDON
First published 1927
(All rights reserved)
Printed in Great Britain by Ebenezer Baylis & Son, Ltd., The Trinity
Press, Worcester.
TO
J. H. B.
OBERLAND
CHAPTER I
The sight of a third porter, this time a gentle-looking man carrying a
pile of pillows and coming slowly, filled her with hope. But he passed
on his way as heedless as the others. It seemed incredible that not one
of these men should answer. She wasted a precious moment seeing again
the three brutishly preoccupied forms as figures moving in an evil
dream. If only she were without the miserable handbags she might run
alongside one of these villains, with a tip in an outstretched hand and
buy the simple yes or no that was all she needed. But she could not
bring herself to abandon her belongings to the mercy of this
ill-mannered wilderness where not a soul would care if she wandered
helpless until the undiscovered train had moved off into the night. She
knew this would not be and that what she was resenting was not the human
selfishness about her of which she had her own full share, but this
turning of her weariness into exhaustion ruining the rest of the journey
that already had held suffering enough.
There must be several minutes left of the ten the big clock had marked
as she neared the platforms. Recalling its friendly face she saw also
that of the little waiter at the buffet who had tried to persuade her to
take wine and murmured too late that there was no extra charge for it,
very gently. Rallying the remainder of her strength she dropped her
things on the platform with a decisiveness she tried just in vain to
scorn, and stood still and looked about amongst the hurrying passengers
and saw passing by and going ahead to the movement of an English stride
the familiar, blessed outlines of a Burberry. Ignoring the near train
the man was crossing a pool of lamplight and making for the dark
unlikely platform over the way. She caught up her bags and followed and
in a moment was at peace within the semi-darkness of the further
platform amongst people she had seen this morning at Victoria, and the
clangorous station was reduced to an enchanting background for confident
behaviour.
All these people were serene; had come in groups, unscathed, knowing
their way, knowing how to quell the bloused fiends into helpfulness. But
then, also, the journey to them was uniform grey, a tiresome business to
be got through; not black and sudden gold. Yet even they were relieved
to find themselves safely through the tangle. They strode unnecessarily
about, shouted needlessly to each other; expressing travellers’ joy in
the English way.
There seemed to be plenty of time and for awhile she strolled delighting
in them, until the sight of an excited weary child, in a weatherproof
that trailed at its heels, marching sturdily about adream with pride and
joy perfectly caricaturing the rest of the assembly, made her turn away
content to see no more, to hoist up her baggage and clamber after it
into cover, into the company of her own joy.
Into a compartment whose blinds were snugly drawn upon soft diffused
light falling on the elegance of dove-grey repp and white lace that had
been the surprise and refreshment of this morning’s crowded train, but
that now, evening-lit and enclosed, gave the empty carriage the air of a
little salon.
Installed here, with fatigue suddenly banished and the large P.L.M.
weaving within the mesh of the lace its thrilling assurance of being
launched on long continental distances, it was easy to forgive the
coercion that had imposed the longer sea-route for its cheapness and the
first-class ticket for the chance of securing solitude on the night
journey.
And indeed this steaming off into the night, that just now had seemed to
be the inaccessible goal and end of the journey, was only the beginning
of its longest stretch; but demanding only endurance. With hurry and
uncertainty at an end there could be nothing to compare with what lay
behind; nothing that could compare with the state of being a helpless
projectile that had spoiled Dieppe and made Paris a nightmare.
Yet Dieppe and Paris and the landscape in between, now that they were
set, by this sudden haven, far away in the past, were already coming
before her eyes transformed, lit by the joy that, hovering all the time
in the background, had seen and felt. France, for whose sake at once she
had longed to cease being a hurrying traveller robbed right and left of
things passing too swiftly, had been seen. Within her now, an
irrevocable extension of being, was France.
France that had spoken from its coast the moment she came up from the
prison of the battened-down saloon; the moment before the shouting
fiends charged up the gangway; spoken from the quay, from the lounging
blue-bloused figures, the buildings, the way the frontage of the town
met the sky and blended with the air, softly, yet clear in its softness,
and with serenity that was vivacious, unlike the stolid English peace.
And later those slender trees along the high bank of a river, the way
they had of sailing-by, mannered, _coquettish_; awakening affection for
the being of France.
And Paris barely glimpsed and shrouded with the glare of night ... the
emanation even of Paris was peace. An emanation as powerful as that of
London, more lively and yet more serene. Serene where gracious buildings
presided over the large flaring thoroughfares, serene even in the
dreadful by-streets.
And that woman at the station. Black-robed figure, coming diagonally
across the clear space yellow in gaslight against the background of
barriered platforms, seeming with her swift assured gait, bust first,
head reared and a little tilted back on the neck, so insolently
feminine, and then, as she swept by, suddenly beautiful; from head to
foot all gracefully moving rhythm. _Style_, of course, redeeming
ugliness and cruelty. She was the secret of France. France concentrated.
Michael, staying in Paris, said that the French are indescribably evil
and their children like monkeys. He had fled eagerly to England. But
Michael’s perceptions are moral. France, within his framework, falls
back into shadow.
The train carrying her through beloved France and away from it to a
bourne that had now ceased to be an imagined place, and become an idea,
useless, to be lost on arrival as her idea of France had been lost, was
so quiet amidst its loud rattling that the whole of it might be asleep.
No sound came from the corridor. No one passed. There was nothing but
the continuous rattling and the clatter of gear. The world deserting her
just when she would have welcomed, for wordless communication of the joy
of achievement, the sight and sound of human kind.
Twelve hours away, and now only a promise of daylight and of food, lay
Berne. Beyond Berne, somewhere in the far future of to-morrow afternoon,
the terminus, the business of finding and bargaining for a sleigh—the
last effort.
A muffled figure filled the doorway, entered the carriage, deposited
bags. A middle-aged Frenchman, dark, with sallow cheeks bulging above a
little pointed beard. Thinking her asleep he moved quietly, arranging
his belongings with deft, maturely sociable hands. From one of them a
ring gleamed in the gaslight. He showed no sign of relief in escaping
into silence, no sign of being alone. Conversation radiated from him.
Where, on the train, could he have been so recently talking that at this
moment he was almost making remarks into his bag?
She closed her eyes, listening to his sounds that sent to a distance the
sounds of the train. He had driven away also the outer spaces. The grey
and white interior spoke no longer of the strange wide distances of
France. He was France at home in a railway carriage, preparing to sleep
until, at the end of a definite short space of hours, the Swiss dawn
appeared at the windows. Before he came the night had stretched ahead,
timeless.
A moment’s stillness, and then a sound like the pumping of nitrous-oxide
into a bag. She opened her eyes upon him seated opposite with cheeks
distended and eyes strained wide above indeed a bag, held to his lips
and limply flopping. Bracing herself to the presence either of a lunatic
or a pitiful invalid believing himself unobserved, she watched while
slowly the bag swelled up and took, obedient to an effort that seemed
about to make his eyeballs start from his head, the shape of a cushion,
circular about a flattened centre. Setting it down in the corner
corresponding to that where lay her own head, he took off his boots,
pulled on slippers and pattered out into the corridor where he became
audible struggling with a near ventilator that presently gave and
clattered home. Tiptoeing back into the carriage where already it seemed
that the air grew close, he stood under the light, peering upwards with
raised arm. A gentle click, and two little veils slid down over the
globe and met, leaving the light quenched to a soft glimmer: beautiful,
shrouding hard outlines, keeping watch through the night, speaking of
night and travel, yet promising day and the end of travel.
But he had not done. He was battling now with the sliding door. It was
closing, closed, and the carriage converted into a box almost in
darkness and suddenly improper. With a groaning sigh he flung himself
down and drew his rug to the margin of the pale disc that was his face
and that turned sharply as she rose and passed it to reach the door, and
still showed, when the corridor light flowed in through the opened door,
a perfect astonishment. His inactivity, while she struggled out with her
baggage into the inhospitable corridor checked the words with which she
would have explained her inability to remain sealed for the night in a
small box. As she pushed the door to she thought she heard a small
sound, a sniggering expletive, mirth at the spectacle of British
prudery.
She was alone in the corridor of the sleeping train, in a cold air that
reeked of rusting metal and resounded with the clangour of machinery.
Exploring in both directions she found no sign of an attendant, nothing
but closely shrouded carriages telling of travellers outstretched and
slumbering. Into either of these she felt it impossible to break. There
was nothing for it but to abandon the hope of a night’s rest and drop to
a class whose passengers would be numerous and seated. The train had
gathered a speed that flung her from side to side as she went. In two
journeys she got her belongings across the metal bridge that swayed
above the couplings, and arrived with bruised arms and shoulders in
another length of corridor, a duplicate in noise and cold emptiness of
the one she had left. Everywhere shrouded carriages. But something had
changed, there was something even in the pitiless clangour that seemed
to announce a change of class.
The door she pushed open revealed huddled shapes whose dim faces,
propped this way and that, were all relaxed in slumber. There was no
visible vacant place, but as she hesitated within the emerging reek a
form stirred and sat forward as if to enquire; and when she struggled in
with her bags and her apology the carriage came to life in heavily
draped movement.
She was seated, shivering in a fog of smells, but at rest, escaped from
nightmare voyaging amongst swaying shadows. The familiar world was about
her again and she sat blessing the human kindliness of these sleeping
forms, blessing the man who had first moved, even though his rousing had
proved to be anxiety about the open door which, the moment she was
inside, he had closed with the gusty blowings of one who takes refuge
from a blizzard.
But the sense of home-coming began presently to fade under the pressure
of suffering that promised only to increase. She had long ceased to
wonder what made it possible for these people to add wraps and rugs to
the thick layers of the stifling atmosphere and remain serene. The
effort was no longer possible that had carried her through appearances
into a sense of the reality beneath. She saw them now as repellent
mysteries, pitiless aliens dowered with an unfathomable faculty for
dispensing with air. With each breath the smells that had greeted her,
no longer separately apparent, advanced in waves whose predominant
flavour was the odour of burnt rubber rising from the grating that ran
along the middle of the floor and seemed to sear the soles of her feet.
Getting beneath them her rolled rug she abandoned all but the sense of
survival and sank into herself, into a coma in which everything but the
green-veiled oscillating light was motionless forever. Forever the night
would go on and her head turn now this way now that against the harsh
upholstery.
* * * * *
The train was slowing, stopping. Its rumbling clatter subsided to a
prolonged squeak that ended on a stillness within which sounded one
against the other the rapid ticking of a watch and a steady rhythmic
snore. No one stirred, and for a moment there was nothing but these
sounds to witness that life went on. Then faintly and as if from very
far away she heard the metallic clangours of a large high station and
amidst them a thin clarion voice singing out an indistinguishable name.
Some large sleeping provincial town signalling its importance; a
milestone, marking off hours passed through that need not be braved
again. Yet when the train moved on it seemed impossible even to imagine
the ending of the night. She had no idea of how long she had sat hemmed
and suffering, with nothing in her mind but snatches of song that would
not be dismissed, with aching brow and burning eyeballs and a
ceaselessly on-coming stupor that would not turn to sleep. And at the
next stop with its echoing clangour and faintness of clarion voices she
no longer desired somehow to get across the encumbered carriage and
taste from a corridor window the sweet fresh air of the railway station
so freely breathed by those who were crying in the night.
* * * * *
A numbness had crept into the movement of the train, as though, wearying
it had ceased to clatter and were dropping into a doze. It was moving so
quietly that the ticking of the watch again became audible. The wheels
under the carriage seemed to be muffled and to labour, pushing heavily
forward ... _Snow_. The journey across France ending on the heights
along its eastern edge. Her drugged senses awoke bewailing Paris,
gleaming now out of reach far away in the north, challenging with the
memory of its glimpsed beauty whatever loveliness might be approaching
through the night.
* * * * *
Again outside the stopping train a far-off voice but this time a jocund
sound, ringing echoless in open air. In a moment through a lifted window
it became a rousing summons. Blinds went up, and on the huddled forms
emerging serene and bright-eyed from their hibernation a blueish light
came in. The opened door admitted crisp sounds close at hand and air,
advancing up the carriage.
Upon the platform the air was motionless and yet, walked through, an
intensity of movement—movement upon her face of millions of
infinitesimal needles attacking. Mountain air “like wine,” but this
effervescence was solid, holding one up, feeding every nerve.
A little way down the platform she came upon the luggage, a few trunks
set side by side on a counter, and saw at once that her portmanteau was
not there. Anxiety dogging her steps. But this air, that reached, it
seemed, to her very spirit, would not let her feel anxious.
The movements of the people leaving the train were leisurely, promising
a long wait. Most of the passengers were the English set free, strolling
happily about in fur-coats and creased Burberrys. English voices took
possession of the air. Filled it with the sense of the incorrigible
English confidence. And upon a table beyond the counter stood rows and
rows of steaming cups. Coffee. Café, mon dieu! Offered casually, the
normal beverage of these happy continentals.
The only visible official stood at ease beyond the table answering
questions, making no move towards the ranged luggage. He looked very
mild, had a little blue-black beard. She thought of long-forgotten
Emmerich, the heavy responsible pimpled face of the German official who
plunged great hands in amongst her belongings. Perhaps the customs’
officers were yet to appear.
Fortified by coffee she strolled up and made her enquiry in French, but
carefully in the slipshod English manner. For a moment her demand seemed
to embarrass him. Then, very politely:
“_Vous arrivez, madame?_”
“_De Londres._”
“_Et vous allez?_”
“_À Oberland._”
“_Vous n’avez qu’a monter dans le train_,” and hospitably he indicated
the train that stood now emptied, and breathing through its open doors.
Walking on down the platform she caught through a door ajar in the
background a glimpse of a truckle bed with coverings thrown back. Here
as they laboured forward through the darkness the douanier had been
sleeping, his station ready-staged for their coming, a farcical
half-dozen trunks laid out to represent the belongings of the trainful
of passengers. Appearances thus kept up, he was enjoying his rôle of
pleasant host. Tant mieux, tant very much mieux. One could enjoy the fun
of being let out into the night.
The solid air began to be intensely cold. But in its cold there was no
bitterness and it attained only her face, whose shape it seemed to
change. And all about the station were steep walls of starless darkness
and overhead in a blue-black sky, stars oddly small and numerous; very
sharp and near.
When the train moved on night settled down once more. Once more there
was dim gaslight and jolting shadows. But the air was clearer and only
two passengers remained, two women, each in her corner and each in a
heavy black cloak. Strangers to each other, with the length of the
carriage between them, yet alike, indistinguishable; above each cloak a
plump middle-aged face not long emerged from sleep: sheened with the
sleep that had left the oily, glinting brown eyes. Presently they began
to speak, with the freemasonry of women unobserved, socially off duty.
Their voices frugal, dull and flat; the voices of those who have
forgotten even the desire to find sympathy, to find anything turned
their way with an offering.
They reached details. One of them was on her way home to a place with a
tripping gentle name, a fairy keep agleam on a lakeside amidst
mountains. To her it was dailiness, life as now she knew it, a hemmed-in
loneliness. Visitors came from afar. Found it full of poetry. Saw her
perhaps as a part of it, a figure of romance.
When their patient voices ceased they were ghosts. Not even ghosts, for
they seemed uncreated, seemed never to have lived and yet to preside
over life, fixed in their places, an inexorable commentary. Each sat
staring before her into space, patient and isolated, undisguised
isolation. To imagine them alert and busied with their families about
them made them no less sad. Immovable at the centre of their lives was
loneliness, its plaints silenced, its source forgotten or unknown.
Of what use traveller’s joy? Frivolous, unfounded, dependent altogether
on oblivions.
One of them was rummaging in a heavy sack made of black twill and corded
at the neck. Toys, she said, were there—“_pour mes p’tits enfants_.”
“_Ça porte beaucoup de soins, les enfants_,” said the other, and
compressed dry lips. The first agreed and they sat back, each in her
corner, fallen into silence. Children to them seemed to be not persons
but a material, an unvarying substance wearily known to them both and to
be handled in that deft adjusting way of the French. Satisfied with this
mutual judgment on life, made in camera, they relapsed into
contemplation, leaving the air weighted with their shared, secretly
scornful, secretly impatient resignation.
Yet they were fortunate. Laden with wealth they did not count. It spoke
in their complacency. Aspiration asleep. They looked for joy in the
wrong place. In this they were humanity, blindly pursuing its way. Their
pallid plump faces, so salient, could smile impersonally. Their heads
were well-poised above shapely subdued bodies.
* * * * *
Now that it was empty and the blinds drawn up, the carriage seemed all
window, letting in the Swiss morning that was mist opening here and
there upon snow still greyed by dawn. Through the one she had just
pushed up came life, smoothing away the traces of the night. She lay
back in her corner and heard with closed eyes the steady voice of the
train. The rattle and clatter of its night-long rush through France
seemed to be checked by a sense of achievement, as if now it took its
ease, delighting in the coming of day, in the presence of this
Switzerland for whose features it was watching through the mist.
Incredible that in this same carriage where now she was at peace in
morning light she had sat through a flaming darkness, penned and
enduring. Lifting weary eyes she boldly surveyed it, saw the soilure and
shabbiness the gaslight had screened, saw a friend, grimed with
beneficent toil, and turned once more blissfully towards the window and
its view of thin mist and dawn-greyed snowfields.
* * * * *
The leap of recognition, unknowing between the mountains and herself
which was which, made the first sight of them—smoothed snow and crinkled
rock in unheard-of unimagined tawny light—seem, even at the moment of
seeing, already long ago.
They knew, they smiled joyfully at the glad shock they were, sideways
gigantically advancing while she passed as over a bridge across which
presently there would be no return, seeing and unseeing, seeing again
with the first keen vision.
They closed in upon the train, summitless, their bases gliding by, a
ceaseless tawny cliff throwing its light into the carriage, almost
within touch; receding, making space at its side for sudden blue water,
a river accompanying, giving them gentleness who were its mighty edge;
broadening, broadening, becoming a wide lake, a stretch of smooth
peerless blue with mountains reduced and distant upon its hither side.
With the sideways climbing of the train the lake dropped away, down and
down until presently she stood up to see it below in the distance, a
blue pool amidst its encirclement of mountain and of sky: a picture
sliding away, soundlessly, hopelessly demanding its perfect word.
* * * * *
“_Je suis anglaise_,” she murmured as the window came down into place.
“_Je le crois, madame. Mais
comment-voulez-vous-mon-dieu-vous-autres-anglais-qu’on-chauffe-les-coupés?_”
She was left to pictures framed and glazed.
* * * * *
Berne was a snowstorm blotting out everything but small white
green-shuttered houses standing at angles about the open space between
the station and the little restaurant across the way, their strangeness
veiled by falling flakes, flakes falling fast on freshly fallen snow
that was pitted with large deep-sunken foot-prints. The electric air of
dawn had softened, and as she plunged, following the strides of a row of
foot-prints, across to her refuge, it wrapped her about, a pleasant
enlivening density, warmed by the snow. Monstrous snowstorm, adventure,
and an excuse for shirking the walk to the Bridge and its view of the
Bernese heights. She was not ready for heights. This little secret tour,
restricted to getting from train to breakfast and back again to the
train, gave her, with its charm of familiar activity in a strange place,
a sharp first sense of Switzerland that in obediently following the
dictated programme she would have missed. But coming forth,
strengthened, once more into the snow she regretted the low
walking-shoes that prevented the following up of her glad meeting with
the forgotten details of the continental breakfast, its tender-crusted
rolls, the small oblongs of unglistening sugar that sweetened the
life-giving coffee, by an exploration of the nearer streets.
* * * * *
Presently their talk fell away and the journeying cast again its full
spell. Almost soundlessly the train was labouring along beside a ridge
that seemed to be the silent top of the world gliding by, its narrow
strip of grey snow-thick sky pierced by the tops of the crooked stakes
that were a fence submerged. From time to time the faint clear sound of
a bell, ting-ting, and a neat toy station slid by half buried in snow.
* * * * *
“I don’t dislike those kind of breakfasts myself,” she said and turned
her face to the window. Her well-cut lips had closed unpressing,
flowerlike. Both the girls had the slender delicate fragility of
flowers. And strength. Refined and gentle, above a strength of which
they were unaware. They were immensely strong or they would not appear
undisturbed by their long journeying, would not look so exactly as if
they were returning home in an omnibus from an afternoon’s shopping in
their own Croydon.
* * * * *
They had come so far together that it would seem churlish, with the
little terminus welcoming the whole party, to turn away from them. And
she liked them, was attached to them as fellow adventurers, fellow
survivors of the journey. The falling into the trap of travellers’
freemasonry was inevitable: a fatal desire to know the whence and the
whither, and, before you are aware of it you have pooled your enterprise
and the new reality is at a distance. But so far it had not come to
that. There were no adieux. They had melted away, they and their things,
lost in the open while she, forgetful of everything but the blessed
cessation, had got herself out of the train.
The station was in a wilderness. High surrounding mountains making it
seem that their half-day’s going up and still up had brought them out
upon a modest lowland. There was no sign from where she stood of any
upward track. Sheds, dumped upon a waste of snow beyond which mountains
filled the sky and barred the way.
Fierce-looking men in blue gaberdines and slouch hats, lounging about.
One of these must be attacked and bargained with for a sleigh. But there
were no sleighs to be seen, nothing at all resembling a vehicle, unless
indeed one braved the heights in one of those rough shallow frameworks
on runners, some piled with hay and some with peeled yellow timbers,
neatly lashed. Perhaps a sleigh should be ordered in advance? Perhaps
here she met disaster....
The man knew her requirements before she spoke and was all hot-eyed
eagerness, yet off-hand. Brutish, yet making her phrases, that a London
cabby would have received with deference, sound discourteous. In his
queer German he agreed to the smaller sum and turned away to
expectorate.
The large barn-like restaurant was empty save for a group of people at
the far end, forgotten again and again as she sat too happy to swoop the
immense distance between herself and anything but the warm brownness of
the interior and its strange quality, its intensity of welcoming
shelter—sharp contrast with the bleak surrounding snow. Switzerland was
here, already surrounding and protecting with an easy practised hand.
And there was a generous savouriness.... She could not recall any
lunching on an English journey affording this careless completeness of
comfort.
Incompletely sharing these appreciations her tired and fevered body
cowered within the folds of the beneficent fur-coat seeking a somnolence
that refused to possess it. Fever kept her mind alert, but circling at a
great pace round and round amidst reiterated assertions. Turn and turn
about they presented themselves, were flung aside in favour of what
waited beyond, and again thrust themselves forward, as if determined, so
emphatic they were, not only to share but to steer her adventure. And
away behind them, standing still and now forever accessible, were the
worlds she had passed through since the sleet drove in her face at
Newhaven. And ahead unknown Oberland, summoning her up amongst its
peaks.
And hovering vehement above them all hung the cloud of her pity for
those who had never bathed in strangeness—and its dark lining, the
selfish congratulation that reminded her how at the beginning of her
life, in the face of obstructions, she had so bathed and now under
kindly compulsion was again bathing. And again alone. Loneliness, that
had long gone from her life, had come back for this sudden voyaging to
be her best companion, to shelter strangeness that can be known only in
solitude.
In a swift glimpse, caught through the mesh woven by the obstinate
circlings of her consciousness, she saw her time in Germany, how perfect
in pain and joy, how left complete and bright had been that piece of her
life. And in Belgium—in spite of the large party. Yet even the party,
though they had taken the edge from many things had now become a rich
part of the whole. But the things that came back most sharply had been
seen in solitude: in those times of going out alone on small
commissions, the way the long vista of boulevard seemed to sing for joy,
the sharp turn, the clean pavé and neat bright little shops; the
charcuterie just round the corner, the old pharmacien who had understood
and quickly and gravely chloroformed the kitten quite dead; the long
walk through the grilling lively Brussels streets to get the circular
tickets—little shadow over it of pain at the thought of the frightened
man who believed it sinful to go to mass and saw the dull little English
Church as light in a pagan darkness; the afternoon alone in the polished
old salon while the others were packing for the Ardennes tour just
before the great thunderstorm, bright darkness making everything gleam,
the candles melting in the heavy heat, drooping from their sconces,
white, and gracious in their oddity, against the dark panelling: rich
ancient gloom and gleam and the certainty of the good of mass, of the
way so welcome and so right as an interval in living it stayed the
talkative brain and made the soul sure of itself. That moment in
Bruges—after the wrangling at the station, after not wanting to go
deliberately to see the Belfry, after feeling forever blank in just this
place that was fulfilling all the so different other places, showing
itself to be their centre and secret, while aunt Bella bought the prawns
and we all stood fuming in the sweltering heat—of being suddenly struck
alive, drawn running away from them all down the little brown street—the
Belfry and its shadow, all its might and sweetness and surroundedness,
safe, before they all came up with their voices and their books.
And oh! that first glimpse that had begun it all, of Brussels in the
twilight from the landing window; old peaked houses, grouped irregularly
and rising out of greenery, gothic, bringing happy nostalgia. Gothic
effects bring nostalgia, have a deep recognisable quality of life. A
gothic house is a person, a square house is a thing....
In silence and alone; yet most people prefer to see everything in
groups, collectively. They never lose themselves in strangeness and wake
changed.
That man is cheerfully bearing burdens. Usually in a party there is one
who _is_ alone. Harassed, yet quietly seeing.
He was smiling, the smile of an old friend. With a sharp effort she
pushed her way through, wondering how long she had sat staring at them,
to recognition of the Croydon party. Who else indeed could it be? She
gathered herself together and instantly saw in the hidden future not the
sunlit mountains of her desire but for the first time the people already
ensconced at the Alpenstock, demanding awareness and at least the
semblance of interest. Sports-people, not only to the manner born—that,
though they would not know it, was a tie, a home-tie pulling at her
heart—but to the manner dressed, making one feel not merely inadequate
but improperly hard-up. But since she was to live on a balcony? And
there was the borrowed fur-coat ... and the blue gown.
The words sung out by the Croydon father were lost amongst their echoes
in the rafters. She heard only the English voice, come, as she had come,
so far and so laboriously. Her gladly answering words were drowned by
the sudden jingling of sleighbells at the door near by.
* * * * *
Behind the sturdy horse, whose head-tossings caused the silvery clash of
bells was the sleigh of _The Polish Jew_, brought out of the darkness at
the back of the stage and brightly coloured: upon a background of
pillar-box red, flourishing gilt scrolls surrounded little landscape
scenes painted upon its sides in brilliant deep tones that seemed to
spread a warmth and call attention to the warmth within the little
carriage sitting compact and low on its runners and billowing with a
large fur rug.
As unexpected as the luxurious vehicle was the changed aspect of the
driver. Still wearing smock and slouch hat he had now an air of gravity,
the air of a young student of theology. And on his face as he put her
into the sleigh was a look of patient responsibility. He packed and
arranged with the manner of one handling valuables, silently; the Swiss
manner perhaps of treating the English, acquired and handed down through
long experience of the lavish generosity of these travellers from whom
it was useless to expect an intelligible word. But there was contempt
too; deep-rooted, patient contempt.
This was luxury. There was warmth under her feet, fur lining upon the
back of the seat reinforced by the thickness of the fur-coat and all
about her the immense fur rug. There was nothing to fear from the air
that presently would be in movement, driving by and growing colder as
the sleigh went up into the unknown heights. Away ahead the Croydon
party made a compact black mass between the two horses of their larger
sleigh and the luggage standing out behind in unwieldy cubes just above
the snow. Their driver was preparing to start. On all the upward way
they would be visible ahead, stealing its mystery, heralding the hotel
at the end.
They were off, gliding swiftly over the snow, gay voices mingling with
the sound of bells, silvery crashings going to the rhythm of a soundless
trit-trot. Every moment her own horse threw up a spray of tinkles
promising the fairy crashing that would ring upon the air against the
one now rapidly receding. The mountains frowning under the grey sky and
the snowfields beyond the flattened expanse round the station came to
life, listening to the confidently receding bells.
The Croydon party disappeared round a bend and again there was silence
and a mighty inattention. But her man, come round from lashing on her
luggage, was getting into his seat just as he was, coatless and
gathering up the reins with bare hands.
“Euh!”
The small sound, like a word spoken _sotto voce_ to a neighbour, barely
broke the stillness, but the sleigh leapt to the pull of the horse, and
glided smoothly off. Its movement was pure enchantment. No driving on
earth could compare to this skimming along on hard snow to the note of
the bells that was higher than that of those gone on ahead and seemed to
challenge them with an overtaking eagerness. Gay and silvery sweet, it
seemed to make a sunlight within the sunless air and to call up to the
crinkled tops of the mountains that were now so magnificently in
movement.
“Euh-euh!”
On they swept through the solidly impinging air. Again the million
needles attacking. In a moment they were round the bend and in sight of
the large sleigh, a moving patch upon the rising road.
“Euh-euh-euh,” urged the driver laconically, and the little sleigh flew
rocking up the slight incline. They were overtaking. The heavier note of
the bells ahead joined its slower rhythm to their swift light jinglings.
The dark mass of the Croydon party showed four white faces turned to
watch.
“You are well off with your fur-coat,” cried the father as her sleigh
skimmed by. They had looked a little crouched and enduring. Not knowing
the cold she had endured in the past, cold that lay ahead to be endured
again, in winters set in a row.
Ringing in her head as she sped upwards along the road narrowing and
flanked by massive slopes whose summits had drawn too near to be seen,
were the shouted remarks exchanged by the drivers. They had fallen
resonantly upon the air and opened within it a vision of the sunlit
heights known to these men with the rich deep voices. But there was the
hotel....
After all no one was to witness her apprenticeship. And to get up within
sight of the summits was worth much suffering. Suffering that would be
forgotten. And if these were Oberland men, then there was to be
_ski-running_ to-morrow. Si-renna, what else could that mean? Patois,
rich and soft. Doomed to die. Other words gathered unawares on the way
came and placed themselves beside those ringing in her ears.
Terminations, turns of sound, upon a new quality of voice. Strong and
deep and ringing with a wisdom that brought her a sense of helpless
ignorance. The helpless ignorance of town culture.
* * * * *
The thin penetrating mist promised increasing cold. The driver flung on
a cloak, secured at the neck but falling open across his chest and
leaving exposed his thinly clad arms and bare hands.
She pulled high the collar of her fur-coat, rimy now at its edges, and
her chin ceased to ache and only her eyes and cheekbones felt the thin
icy attacking mist that had appeared so suddenly. The cold of a few
moments ago numbing her face had brought a hint of how one might freeze
quietly to death, numbed and as if warmed by an intensity of cold; and
that out amongst the mountains it would not be terrible. But this raw
mist bringing pain in every bone it touched would send one aching to
one’s death, crushed to death by a biting increasing pain.
She felt elaborately warm, not caring even now how long might go on this
swift progress along a track that still wound through corridors of
mountains and still found mountains rising ahead. But night would come
and the great shapes all about her would be wrapped away until they were
a darkness in the sky.
If this greying light were the fall of day then certainly the cold would
increase. She tried to reckon how far she had travelled eastwards, by
how much earlier the sun would set. But south, too, she had come....
* * * * *
The mist was breaking, being broken from above. It dawned upon her that
they had been passing impossibly through clouds and were now reaching
their fringe. Colour was coming from above, was already here in dark
brilliance, thundery. Turning to look down the track she saw distance,
cloud masses, light-soaked and gleaming.
And now from just ahead high in the mist, a sunlit peak looked down.
Long after she had sat erect from her warm ensconcement, the sunlit
mountain corridors still seemed to be saying watch, see, if you can
believe it, what we can do. And all the time it seemed that they must
open out and leave her upon the hither side of enchantment, and still
they turned and brought fresh vistas. Sungilt masses beetling variously
up into pinnacles that truly cut the sky high up beyond their
high-clambering pinewoods, where their snow was broken by patches of
tawny crag. She still longed to glide forever onwards through this
gladness of light.
But the bright gold was withdrawing. Presently it stood only upon the
higher ridges. The colour was going and the angular shadows, leaving a
bleakness of white, leaving the mountains higher in their whiteness. The
highest sloped more swiftly than the others from its lower mass and
ended in a long cone of purest white with a flattened top sharply aslant
against the deepening blue; as if walking up it. It held her eyes, its
solid thickness of snow, the way from its blunted tower it came
broadening down unbroken by crag, radiant white until far down its
pinewoods made a gentleness about its base. Up there on the quiet of its
topmost angle it seemed there must be someone, minutely rejoicing in its
line along the sky.
A turn brought peaks whose gold had turned to rose. She had not eyes
enough for seeing. Seeing was not enough. There was sound, if only one
could hear it, in this still, signalling light.
The last of it was ruby gathered departing upon the topmost crags,
seeming, the moment before it left them, to be deeply wrought into the
crinkled rock.
At a sharp bend the face of the sideways-lounging driver came into
sight, expressionless.
“_Schön, die letzte Glüh_,” he said quietly.
When she had pronounced her “_Wunderschön_,” she sat back released from
intentness seeing the scene as one who saw it daily; and noticed then
that the colour ebbed from the mountains had melted into the sky. It was
this marvel of colour, turning the sky to molten rainbow, that the
driver had meant as well as the rubied ridges that had kept the sky
forgotten.
Just above a collar of snow, that dipped steeply between the peaks it
linked, the sky was a soft greenish purple paling upwards from
mauve-green to green whose edges melted imperceptibly into the deepening
blue. In a moment they were turned towards the opposite sky, bold in
smoky russet rising to amber and to saffron-rose expanding upwards; a
high radiant background for its mountain, spread like a banner, not
pressed dense and close with deeps strangely moving, like the little sky
above the collar.
The mountain lights were happiness possessed, sure of recurrence. But
these skies, never to return, begged for remembrance.
The dry cold deepened, bringing sleep. Drunk, she felt now, with sleep;
dizzy with gazing, and still there was no sign of the end. They were
climbing a narrow track between a smooth high drift, a greying wall of
snow, and a precipice sharply falling.
An opening; the floor of a wide valley. Mountains hemming it, exposed
from base to summit, moving by as the sleigh sped along the level to
where a fenced road led upwards. Up this steep road they went in a slow
zig-zag that brought the mountains across the way now right now left,
and a glimpse ahead against the sky of a village, angles and peaks of
low buildings sharply etched, quenched by snow, crushed between snow and
snow, and in their midst the high snow-shrouded cone of a little church;
Swiss village, lost in wastes of snow.
At a tremendous pace they jingled along a narrow street of shops and
châlets. The street presently opened to a circle about the little church
and narrowed again and ended, showing beyond, as the sleigh pulled up at
the steps of a portico, rising ground and the beginning of pinewoods.
CHAPTER II
She followed the little servant, who had darted forth to seize her
baggage, into a small lounge whose baking warmth recalled the worst of
the train journey; seeming—though, since still one breathed, air was
there—like an over-heated vacuum.
The brisk little maid, untroubled, was already at the top of a short
flight of wide red-carpeted stairs, and making impatient rallying
sounds—like one recalling a straying dog. Miriam went gladly to the
promise of the upper air. But in going upwards there was no relief.
Glancing, as she passed at the turn of the stairs a figure standing in a
darkness made by the twilight in the angle of the wall, she found the
proprietress receiving her; a thick rigid figure in a clumsy black
dress, silent, and with deep-set glinting eyes hostile and suspicious
stirring a memory of other eyes gazing out like this upon the world, of
peasant women at cottage doors in German villages, peering out with evil
eyes, but from worn and kindly faces. There was nothing kindly about
this woman, and her commonness was almost startling, dreary and meagre
and seeming to be of the spirit.
She blamed for the unmitigated impression the fatigue she was silently
pleading whilst she searched for the mislaid German phrases in which to
explain that she had chosen the cheaper room. She found only the woman’s
name: Knigge. This was Frau Knigge, at once seeming more human, and
obviously waiting for her to speak.
Suddenly, and still unbending from her rigid pose, she made statements
in slow rasping English and a flat voice, that came unwillingly and told
of vanished interest in life. Life, as she spoke, looked terrible that
could make a being so crafty and so cold, that could show to anyone on
earth as it showed to this woman.
Admitting her identity, seeing herself as she was being seen, Miriam
begged for her room, hurrying through her words to hide the thoughts
that still they seemed to reveal, and that were changing, as she heard
the sound of her own voice, dreadfully, not to consideration for one
whose lot had perhaps been too hard to bear, but to a sudden resentment
of parleying, in her character as Roman citizen, with this peasant whose
remoteness of being was so embarrassing her.
The woman’s face lit up with an answering resentment and a mocking
contempt for her fluent German. Too late she realised that Roman
citizens do not speak German. But the details were settled, the
interview was at an end, and the woman’s annoyance due perhaps only to
the choice of the cheaper room. When she turned to shout instructions to
the maid she became humanity, in movement, moving in twilight that for
her too was going on its way towards the light of to-morrow.
When the door was at last blessedly closed upon the narrow room whose
first statements miscarried, lost in the discovery that even up here
there was no change in the baked dry air, she made for the cool light of
the end window but found in its neighbourhood not only no lessening but
an increase of the oppressive warmth.
The window was a door giving on to a little balcony whose wooden paling
hid the floor of the valley and the bases of the great mountains across
the way. The mountains were now bleak white, patched and streaked with
black, and as she stood still gazing at them set there arrested and
motionless and holding before her eyes an unthinkable grey bitterness of
cold, she found a new quality in her fast closed windows and the
exaggerated warmth. Though still oppressive they were triumphant also,
speaking a knowledge and a defiance of the uttermost possibilities of
cold.
Cold was banished, by day and by night. For a fortnight taken from the
rawest depths of the London winter there would be no waste of life in
mere endurance.
She discovered the source of the stable warmth in an unsightly row of
pipes at the side of the large window, bent over like hairpins and
scorching to the touch. The concentrated heat revived her weary nerves.
At the end of the coil there was a regulator. Turning it she found the
heat of the pipes diminish and hurriedly reversed the movement and
glanced out at the frozen world and loved the staunch metallic warmth
and the flavour of timber added to it in this room whose walls and
furniture were all of naked wood.
Turning to it in greeting she found it seem less small. It was small but
made spacious by light. Light came from a second window that was now
calling—a small square beside the bed with the high astonishing smooth
billow of covering oddly encased in thin sprigged cotton—offering
mountains not yet seen.
The way to it was endless across the short room from whose four quarters
there streamed, as she moved, a joy so deep that she brought up opposite
the window as if on another day of life and glanced out carelessly at a
distant group of pinnacles darkening in a twilight that was not grey but
lit wanly in its fading, by snow.
The little servant came in with the promised tea and made, as she set it
upon the little table with the red and white check cover of remembered
German cafés, bent over it in her short-skirted check dress and squab of
sleek flaxen hair, a picture altogether German. She answered questions
gravely, responsibility speaking even in the smile that shone from her
plump toil-sheened young face, telling the story of how she and her
like, permanently toiling, were the price of happiness for visitors. But
this she did not know. She was happy. Liked being busy and smiling and
being smiled at and shutting the door very carefully.
Some movement of hers had set swinging an electric bulb hanging by a
cord above the little table. Over the head of the bed there was another.
Light and warmth in profusion—in a cheap room in a modest hotel.
Switching on the light that concentrated on the table and its loaded
little tray and transformed the room to a sitting-room, “I’m in
Switzerland,” she said aloud to the flowered earthenware and bright
nickel, and sat down to revel in freedom and renewal and at once got up
again realising that hurry had gone from her days and flung off her
blouse and found hot water set waiting on the washstand and was
presently at the table in négligé and again ecstatically telling it her
news.
The familiar sound of tea pouring into a cup heightened the surrounding
strangeness. In the stillness of the room it was like a voice announcing
her installation, and immediately from downstairs there came as if in
answer the sound of a piano, crisply and gently touched, seeming not so
much to break the stillness as to reveal what lay within it.
She set down her teapot and listened and for a moment could have
believed that the theme was playing itself only in her mind, that it had
come back to her because once again she was within the strange happiness
of being abroad. Through all the years she had tried in vain to recall
it, and now it came, to welcome her, piling joy on joy, setting its seal
upon the days ahead and taking her back to her Germany where life had
been lived to music that had flowed over its miseries and made its
happinesses hardly to be borne.
For an instant she was back in it, passing swiftly from scene to scene
of the months in Waldstrasse and coming to rest in a summer’s evening:
warm light upon the garden, twilight in the saal. Leaving it she turned
to the other scenes, freshly revived, faithfully fulfilling their
remembered promise to endure in her forever, but each one as she paused
in it changed to the summer’s evening she had watched from the darkening
saal, the light upon the little high-walled garden, making space and
distance with the different ways it fell on trees and grass and
clustering shrubs, falling full on the hushed group of girls turned
towards it with Fräulein Pfaff in their midst disarmed to equality by
the surrounding beauty, making a little darkness in the summer-house
where Solomon shone in her white dress. And going back to it now it
seemed as though some part of her must have lived continuously there so
that she was everywhere at once, in saal and garden and summer-house and
out, beyond the enclosing walls, in the light along the spacious
forbidden streets.
She relived the first moment of knowing gladly and without feeling of
disloyalty how far a Sommerabend outdoes a summer’s evening, how the
evening beauty was intensified by the deeps of poetry in the Germans all
about her, and remembered her fear lest one of the English should sound
an English voice and break the spell. And how presently Clara Bergmann,
unasked, had retreated into the shadowy saal and played this ballade and
in just this way, the way of slipping it into the stillness.
“_Man soll sich des Lebens freuen, im Berg und Thal. In so was kann sich
ein’ Engländerin nie hineinleben._”
Perhaps not, but in that small group of English there had been two who
would in spite of homesickness have given anything just to go on, on any
terms, existing in Germany.
It is their joy; the joyful rich depth of life in them.
And this ballade was joy. Eternal Sommerabend; and now to-morrow’s Swiss
sunlight. Someone there was downstairs to whom it was a known and
cherished thing, who was perhaps wise about it, wise in music and able
to place it in relation to other compositions.
Its charm she now saw, coming to it afresh and with a deepened
recognition, lay partly in the way it opened: not beginning, but
continuing something gone before. It was a shape of tones caught from a
pattern woven continuously and drawn, with its rhythm ready set,
gleaming into sight. The way of the best nocturnes. But with nothing of
their pensiveness. It danced in the sky and tiptoed back to earth down
the group of little chords that filled the pause, again sprang forth and
up and came wreathing down to touch deep lower tones who flung it to and
fro. Up again until once more upon down-stepping chords it came into the
rhythm of its dance.
It was being played from memory, imperfectly, by someone who had the
whole clear within him and in slowing up for the complicated passages
never stumbled or lost the rhythm or ceased to listen. Someone choosing
just this fragment of all the music in the world to express his state:
joy in being up here in snow and sunlight.
* * * * *
When the gown was on, the creasing was more evident; all but the
enlivening strange harmony of embroidered blues and greens and mauves
was a criss-cross of sharp lines and shadows.
For the second time the long loud buzzing of the downstairs bell
vibrated its summons through the house.
Standing once more before the little mirror that reflected only her head
and shoulders she recreated the gown in its perfection of cut, the soft
depths of its material that hung and took the light so beautifully.
“Your first Switzerland must be good. I want your first Switzerland to
be good.” And then, in place of illuminating hints, that little diagram
on the table: of life as a zig-zag. Saddening. Perhaps he was right.
Then, since the beginning had been so good, all a sharp zig, what now
waited downstairs, heralded by the creased dress, was a zag, equally
sharp.
The dining-room, low ceiled and oblong, was large and seemed almost
empty. Small tables set away towards a window on the right and only one
of them occupied, left clear the large space of floor between the door
at which she had come in and a table, filling the length of the far side
of the room where beside a gap in the row of diners a servant stood
turned towards her with outstretched indicating hand.
No one but the servant had noticed her entry. Voices were sounding,
smooth easy tones leaving the air composed, as she slipped into her
place in a light that beside the unscreened glare upstairs was mellow,
subdued by shades. The voices were a man’s across the way—light and
kindly, ’Varsity, the smiling tone of one who is amiable even in
disagreement—and that of the woman on her left, a subdued deep bass.
Other voices dropped in, as suave and easy, and clipping and slurring
their words in the same way; but rather less poised.
The tone of these people was balm. Sitting with eyes cast down aware
only of the subdued golden light, she recalled her fleeting glimpse of
them as she had crossed the room, English in daily evening dress, and
was carried back to the little world of Newlands where first she had
daily shared the evening festival of diners dressed and suave about a
table free of dishes, set with flowers and elegancies beneath a clear
and softly shaded light: the world she had sworn never to leave. She
remembered a summer morning, the brightness of the light over her
breakfast tray and its unopened letters and her vow to remain always
surrounded by beauty, always with flowers and fine fabrics, and space
and a fresh clean air always close about her, playing their part that
was so powerful.
And this little wooden Swiss hotel with its baked air and philistine
fittings was to provide thrown in with Switzerland, more than a
continuation of Newlands—Newlands seen afresh with experienced eyes.
The clipped, slurred words had no longer the charm of a foreign tongue.
Though still they rang upon the air the preoccupations of the man at the
wheel: the sound of “The Services” adapted. But clustered in this small
space they seemed to be bringing with them another account of their
origin, to be showing how they might come about of themselves and vary
from group to group, from person to person—with one aim: to avoid
disturbing the repose of the features. Expression might be animated or
inanimate, but features must remain undisturbed.
Then there is no place for clearly enunciated speech apart from oratory;
platform and pulpit. Anywhere else it is bad form. Bad fawm.
She felt she knew now why perfect speech, delightful in itself, always
seemed insincere. Why women with clear musical voices undulating, and
clean enunciation, are always cats; and the corresponding men,
ingratiating and charming at first, turn out sooner or later to be
charlatans.
The nicest people have bad handwriting and bad delivery.
But all this applied only to English, to Germanics; that was a queer
exciting thing, that only these languages had the quality of aggressive
disturbance of the speaking face: chin-jerking vowels and aspirates,
throat-swelling gutturals ... force and strength and richness, qualities
innumerable and more various than in any other language.
Quelling an impulse to gaze at the speakers lit by discovery, she gazed
instead at imagined faces, representative Englishmen, with eyes and
brows serene above rapid slipshod speech.
Here too of course was the explanation of the other spontaneous forms of
garbling, the extraordinary pulpit speech of self-conscious and
incompletely believing parsons, and the mincing speech of the genteel.
It explained “nace.” Nice, correctly spoken, is a convulsion of the
lower face—like a dog snapping at a gnat.
She had a sudden vision of the English aspirate, all over the world,
puff-puff-puffing like a steam-engine, and was wondering whether it were
a waste or a source of energy, when she became acutely aware of being
for those about her a fresh item in their grouping.
It was a burden too heavy to be borne. The good Swiss soup had turned
her bright fever of fatigue to a drowsiness that made every effort to
sit decently upright end in a renewed abject drooping that if only she
were alone could be the happy drooping of convalescence from the
journey.
Their talk had gone on. It was certain that always they would talk.
Archipelagoes of talk, avoiding anything that could endanger continuous
urbanity.
In the midst of a stifled yawn the call to a fortnight’s continuous
urbanity fell upon her like a whip. Dodging the blow she lolled
resistant to the sound of bland voices. An onlooker, appreciative but
resistant; that, socially, would be the story of her stay. A docile
excursion, even if they should offer it, into this select little world,
would come between her and her Switzerland. Refusal clamoured within her
and it was only as an after-thought that she realised the impossibility
of remaining for a fortnight without opinions.
The next moment, hearing again the interwoven voices as a far-off unison
of people sailing secure on smooth accustomed waters, she was bleakly
lonely; suppliant. Nothing showed ahead but a return with her fatigue to
sustain the silence and emptiness of a strange room. She was turning to
glance at the woman on her left when the deep bass voice asked her
casually if she had had a good journey. Casual cameraderie, as if
already they had been talking and were now hiding an established
relationship under conventionalities.
The moment she had answered she heard the university voice across the
way remark, in the tone of one exchanging notes with a friend after a
day’s absence, that it was a vile journey, but all right from Berne
onwards, and looked up. There he was, almost opposite, Cambridge, and
either history or classics, the pleasant radiance of _lit. hum._ all
about him, and turned her way bent a little, as if bowing, and as if
waiting for her acknowledgment—with his smile, apology introduction and
greeting beaming together from sea-blue eyes set only ever so little too
closely together in a neatly tanned narrowly oval face—before regaining
the upright.
Her soft reply, lost in other sounds, made a long moment during which,
undisturbed by not hearing, he held his attitude of listening that told
her he was glad of her presence.
The close-set eyes meant neither weakness nor deceit. Sectarian eyes,
emancipated. But his strength was borrowed. His mental strength was not
original. An uninteresting mind; also he was a little selfish, with the
selfishness of the bachelor of thirty—but charming.
The party was smaller than she had thought. The odd way they were all
drawn up at one end of the table made them look numerous. Spread out in
the English way they would have made a solemn dinner-party, with large
cold gaps.
Someone asked whether she had come right through and in a moment they
were all amiably wrangling over the pros and cons of breaking the
journey.
Staring from across the table was a man alone, big oblong foreigner
dwarfing his neighbours, and piteous, not to be looked at as the others
could who fitted the scene; not so much sitting at table with the rest
as set there filling a space. His eyes had turned towards a nasal voice
suddenly prevailing; sombre brown, wistfully sulking below eyebrows
lifted in a wide forehead that stopped unexpectedly soon at a straight
fence of hair. Oblong beard reaching the top of stiff brown coat.
Russian, probably the Chopin player.
“Anyone’s a fool who passes Parrus without stopping off at least a few
hours.”
A small man at the end of the row, opaque blue eyes in a peaky face,
little peaked beard, neat close-fitting dress clothes. Incongruous
far-travelled guest of little Switzerland.
He was next the window, with the nice man on his right. Then came the
big Russian exactly opposite and again naïvely staring across, and
beyond him a tall lady in a home-made silk blouse united by a fichu to
the beginning of a dark skirt; coronet of soft, coiled white hair above
a firmly padded face with polished skin, pink-flushed, glimmering into
the talk, that was now a debate about to-morrow’s chances, into which
sounded women’s voices from the table behind, smooth and clear, but
clipped, free-masonish like the others. To the right of the coronetted
lady an iron-grey man, her husband, gaunt and worn, with peevishly
suffering eyes set towards the door on the far side of the room.
Fastidious eyes, full of knowledge, turned away. He was the last in the
row and beyond him the table stretched away to the end wall through
whose door the servants came and went. His opponents were out of sight
beyond the bass-voiced woman on the left, whose effect was so strangely
large and small: a face horse-like and delicate, and below her length of
face increased by the pyramid of hair above her pointed fringe, a
meeting of old lace and good jewellery.
To her own right the firm insensitive hand, that wore a signet ring and
made pellets of its bread, belonged to just the man she had imagined,
dark and liverish, but with an unexpectedly flattened profile whose
moustache, dropping to sharp points, gave it an expression faintly
Chinese; a man domestic but accustomed to expand in unrestricted
statement, impatiently in leash to the surrounding equality of exchange.
Beyond him his wife, sitting rather eagerly forward, fair and plump,
with features grown expressionless in their long service of holding back
her thoughts, but, betraying their secret in a brow, creased faintly by
straining upwards as if in perpetual incredulity of an ever-present
spectacle, and become now the open page of the story the mouth and eyes
were not allowed to tell.
At her side a further figure and beyond it the head of the table
unoccupied, leaving the party to be its own host.
The atmosphere incommoding the husband, who at a second glance seemed to
call even pathetically for articulate opposition, was that of a
successful house-party, its tone set by the only two in sight who were
through and through of the authentic brand: the deep-voiced woman and
the nice man. The invalid and his wife belonged to that inner circle.
But they were a little shadowed by his malady.
It was an atmosphere in which the American and the Russian were ill at
ease, one an impatient watchfulness for simpler, more lively behaviour
and the other a bored detachment, heavily anchored, not so much by
thoughts as by hard clear images left by things seen according to the
current formula of whatever group of the European intelligentsia he
belonged to.
He was speaking softly through the general conversation to the nice man,
with slight deprecating gestures of eyebrows and shoulders, in his eyes
a qualified gratitude. The nice man spoke carefully with head turned and
bent, seeking his words. French, with English intonation. All these
people, however fluently, would talk like that. All of them came from a
world that counted mastery of a foreign tongue both wonderful and
admirable—but ever so little _infra dig_.
* * * * *
“Won’t you come in heah for a bit?”
Drugged as she felt with weariness she turned joyfully into a room
opening in the background of the hall whence the deep bass voice had
sounded as she passed. A tiny salon, ugly; maroon and buff in a thick
light. Plush sofa, plush cover on the round table in the centre, stiff
buff-seated “drawing-room” chairs; a piano. It was from this dismal
little room the Chopin had sounded out into the twilight.
There she was, alone, standing very thin and tall in a good, rather
drearily elderly black dress beside a cheerless radiator, one elbow
resting on its rim and a slender foot held towards it from beneath the
hem of a slightly hitched skirt: an Englishwoman at a fireside.
“My name’s Harcourt, M’zz Harcourt,” she said at once.
Books were set star-wise in small graded piles about the centre of the
table, the uppermost carrying upon their covers scrolls and garlands of
untarnished gilt. The one she opened revealed short-lined poems set
within yet more garlands, appealing; leaves and buds and birds lively
and sweet about the jingling verse. Swiss joy in deep quiet valleys
guarded by sunlit mountains. Joy of people living in beauty all their
lives; enclosed. Yet making rooms like this.
But it held the woman at the radiator, knowing England and her sea, and
whose smile looking up she met, watching, indulgent of her détour and,
as too eagerly she moved forward, indulgent also of that. Here, if she
would, was a friend, and, although middle-aged, a contemporary
self-confessed by a note in her voice of impatience over waste of time
in preliminaries.
But Mrs. Harcourt did not know how nimbly she could move, might think it
strange when presently her voice must betray that she was already
rejoicing—defying the note of warning that sounded far away within
her—in a well-known presence, singing recklessly to it the song of new
joy and life begun anew that all the way from England had been gathering
within her.
The announcement of her own name made the woman again a stranger, so
much was she a stranger to the life belonging to the name, and brought
into sudden prominence the state of her gown, exposed now in its full
length. She recounted the tragedy and saw Mrs. Harcourt’s smile change
to real concern.
Here they were, alone together, seeming to have leapt rather than passed
through the early stages.
Like love, but unobstructed. A balance of side-by-side, not of
opposition. More open than love, yet as hidden and wonderful; rising
from the same depth.
“Hold it in front of the waydiator. Vat’ll take ’em out a bit. Such a
poo’hy gown.” She moved a little back from the row of pipes.
Going close to the radiator Miriam moved into a fathomless gentleness.
But it was also a demand, so powerful that it was drawing all her being
to a point. All that she had brought with her into the room would be
absorbed and scattered, leaving her robbed of things not yet fully her
own.
The warning voice within was crying aloud now, urging her not only to
escape before the treasures of arrival and of strangeness were lost
beyond recovery, but to save also the past, disappeared round the corner
yet not out of sight but drawn closely together in the distance, a
swiftly moving adventure, lit from point to point by the light in which
to-day she had bathed forgetful.
Even a little talk, a little answering of questions, would falsify the
past. Set in her own and in this woman’s mind in a mould of verbal
summarisings it would hamper and stain the brightness of to-morrow.
She found herself hardening, seeking generalisations that would cool and
alienate, and was besieged by memories of women whom she had thus
escaped. And of their swift revenge. But this woman was not of those who
avenge themselves.
Hesitating before the sound of her own voice, or the other which would
sound if this second’s silence were prolonged, she was seized by revolt:
the determination at all costs to avoid hearing in advance, in idle
words above the ceaseless intercourse of their spirits, about Oberland;
even from one whose seeing might leave her own untouched.
To open the way for flight she remarked that it must be late.
“About nine. You’re dead beat, I can see. Ought to go to bed.”
“Not for worlds,” said Miriam involuntarily.
Mrs. Harcourt’s face, immediately alight for speech, expressed as she
once more took possession of the radiator and looked down at it as into
a fire, willingness to stand indefinitely by.
“Everyone’s gone to bed. Bein’ out all day in vis air makes you sleepy
at night.”
Remembering that of course she would speak without gaps, Miriam glanced
at the possibility of pulling herself together for conversation.
“I been pottering. My ski are at Zurbuchen’s bein’ repaired.”
“But what a _perfect_ Swiss name. Like oak, like well-baked bread.”
To get away now. Sufficient impression of the Alpenstock people
perpetually strenuous, living for sport, and, redeeming its angularity,
the rich Swiss background: Zurbuchen. But Mrs. Harcourt’s glance of
surprised delight—there was amusement too, she didn’t think Swiss names
worth considering—meant that she was entertained, anticipating further
entertainment; to which she would not contribute.
“No. I’m supposed to sit about and rest. Overwork.”
“You won’t. Lots of people come out like vat. You’ll soon find resting a
baw out heah.”
“Should like a little sleep. I’ve had none for two nights.”
“Stop in bed to-morrow. Have your meals up.”
“Mm....”
For a moment Mrs. Harcourt waited, silent, not making the movement of
departure that would presently bring down the shadow of returning
loneliness her words had drawn so near; keeping her leaning pose, her
air of being indefinitely available.
The deep bell of her voice dropped from its soft single note to a murmur
rising and falling, a low narrative tone, hurrying.
Through the sound still coming and going in her mind of the name Mrs.
Harcourt had so casually spoken, bringing with it the sunlit mountains
and the outer air waiting in to-morrow, Miriam heard that the people at
the Alpenstock were all right—with the exception of the two sitting at
dinner on Mrs. Harcourt’s left, “outsiders” of a kind now appearing in
Oberland for the first time. Saddened by their exclusion, embarrassed by
unconscious flattery, Miriam impulsively asked their name and glowed
with a sudden vision of Mrs. Corrie, of how she would have embraced this
opportunity for wicked mondaine wit. Mrs. Harcourt, for a moment
obediently reflecting, said she had forgotten it but that it was
somefing raver fwightful. Everyone else, introduced by name, received a
few words of commendation—excepting the Russian and the American. The
Russian would be just a foreigner, an unfortunate, but the American
surely must be an outsider? Insincerely, as if in agreement with this
division of humanity by exclusion, she put in a question, and while Mrs.
Harcourt pulled up her discourse to say, as if sufficiently, that he was
staying only a couple of days and passed on to summon other hotels to
the tribunal, she was glad that the Russian had been left untouched.
Harry Vereker, fine, a first-class sportsman and altogether nice chap,
was already lessened, domesticated, general property in his niceness;
but the Russian remained, wistfully alone: attractive.
“.... hidjus big hotel only just built; all glass and glare. It’ll be
the ruin of Oberland. No one’ll come here next year.”
Though still immersed in her theme Mrs. Harcourt was aware, when next
she glanced to punctuate a statement, if not exactly that instead of the
object she offered it was herself and her glance that was being seen—the
curious steeliness of its indignation—at least of divided attention, a
sudden breach in their collaboration; and immediately she came to the
surface, passing without pause to her full bell note, with an enquiry.
Hoping to please. But why hoping to please?
This abrupt stowing away of her chosen material might be a simple
following of the rules of her world; it suggested also the humouring of
a patient by a watchful nurse, and since she had the advantage of not
being in the depths of fatigue this perhaps was its explanation; but
much more clearly it spoke her years of marriage, of dealing with
masculine selfishness. And she was so swift, so repentant of her long,
enjoyable excursion, that it was clear she had suffered masculine
selfishness gladly. Neither understanding nor condemning. It had not
damaged her love and she had suffered bitterly when it was removed.
Suffering was pleading now in her eyes off their guard in this
to-and-fro of remarks that was a little shocking: the reverberation of a
disaster.
Now that it was clear that her charming behaviour from the first might
be explained by the attraction there was for her in a mannish mental
hardness, that she sought in its callousness both something it could
never give, as well as entertainment, and rest from perpetual feeling,
she ceased to be interesting. She herself made it so clear that she had
nothing to give. Offering her best help, what in the way of her world
would be most useful to one newly arrived, she was yet suppliant; and
afraid of failure, haunted by the fear of a failure she did not
understand and that was perhaps uniform in her experience.
Miriam found her own voice growing heavy with the embarrassment of her
discoveries and her longing to break this so eagerly woven entanglement.
Trying again for cooling generalities she had the sense of pouring words
into a void. The gentle presence hovered there, played its part,
followed, answered, but without sharing the effort to swim into the
refreshing tide of impersonality; without seeing the independent light
on the scraps of reality she was being offered. No wonder perhaps: they
were a little breathless. She was scenting apology and retreat. And did
not know that it was retreat not at all from herself, but from her
terrible alacrity and transparence: the way the whole of her was at once
visible. All her thoughts, her way of thinking in words, in set phrases
gathered from too enclosed an experience. Enclosed. To be with her was
enclosure. The earlier feeling of being encompassed that was so welcome
because it was so womanly, so exactly what a man needs in its character
of kindly confessor and giver of absolution in advance, had lost value
before the discovery of this absence of vistas, this frightful sense of
being shut in with assumptions about life that admit of no question and
no modification.
Again the dead husband intruded; his years of life at this woman’s side,
his first adoration of her, and then his weariness, fury of weariness
whose beginnings she felt herself already tasting, so that for sheer
pity she was kept in her place, effusive, unable to go.
But at the moment of parting Mrs. Harcourt became again that one who had
waited, impatient of wasting time in formalities. Her smile glanced out
from the past, revealing the light upon her earlier days. It was a
greeting for to-morrow rather than a good-night.
Going up to the little bedroom that was now merely a refuge off-stage,
she found it brightly lit in readiness for her coming, summery bright
all over, the light curtains drawn and joining with the unvarnished wood
to make an enclosure that seemed to emulate the brightness of the Swiss
daylight. The extravagant illumination, the absence of glooms and
shadows, recalled the outdoor scene and something of this afternoon’s
bliss of arrival and the joy that had followed it, when music sounded up
through the house, of home-coming from long exile. Switzerland waited
outside—enriched by her successful début—with its promise that could not
fail. Meanwhile there was the unfamiliar enchantment of moving
comfortably in a warm bedroom, not having the wealth one brought
upstairs instantly dispersed by the attack of cold and gloom. The
temperature was lower than before, pleasant, no longer oppressive; and
more hospitable than a fire whose glow was saddened by the certainty
that in the morning it would be an ashy desolation.
The moment the basket chair received her the downstairs world was about
her again; circling, clamorous with the incidents of her passage from
lonely exposure to the shelter of Mrs. Harcourt’s so swiftly offered
wing, from beneath which, with its owner assured of the hardness of what
it sheltered, she could move freely forth in any direction.
The two Le Mesras—that was her pronunciation of Le Mesurier?—Three
Chators. Mrs. Sneyde and Maud Something at the little table behind ...
Hollebone. Maud Hollebone. The American, leaving. Interest hesitated
between Harry Vereker already a little diminished, and the Russian: the
reincarnated, attractive, ultimately unsatisfactory Tansley Street
foreigner?
Someone was tapping at the door. She opened it upon Mrs. Harcourt
offering a small tray, transformed to motherliness by a voluminous
dressing-gown.
When she had gone she vanished utterly. There she was, actually in the
next room, yet utterly forgettable. And yet she threw across the days
ahead a strange deep light.
The steaming chocolate and the little English biscuits disappeared too
quickly, leaving hunger.
The French window was made fast by a right-angle hand-piece, very stiff,
that gave suddenly with a dreadfully audible clang. The door creaked
open. Racing the advancing air she was beneath the downy billow before
it reached her. It took her fevered face with its batallions of needles,
stole up her nostrils to her brain, bore her down into the uttermost
depths of sleep.
CHAPTER III
From which she awoke in light that seemed for a moment to be beyond the
confines of earth. It was as if all her life she had travelled towards
this radiance, and was now within it, clear of the past, at an ultimate
destination.
How long had it been there, quizzically patient, waiting for her to be
aware of it?
It was sound, that had wakened her and ceased now that she was looking
and listening; become the inaudible edge of a sound infinitely far away.
Brilliant light, urgently describing the outdoor scene. But she was
unwilling to stir and break the radiant stillness.
Close at hand a bell buzzed sharply. Another, and then a third far away
down the corridor. People ringing their day into existence, free to ring
their day into existence when they pleased. She was one of them; and for
to-day she would wait awhile, give the bell-ringers time to be up and
gone down to breakfast while she kept intact within this miracle of
light the days ahead that with the sounding of her own bell would be
already in process of spending.
But perhaps there was a time-limit for breakfasts?
Screwing round to locate the bell with the minimum of movement she
paused in sheer surprise of well-being. Of the shattering journey there
was not a trace. Nor of the morning weariness following social
excitements.
Sitting up to search more effectually she saw the source of her
wakening, bright gold upon the mountain tops: a smiling challenge, as
if, having put on their morning gold, the mountains watched its effect
upon the onlookers.
* * * * *
She was glad to be alone on the scene of last night’s dinner-party; to
be in the company of the other breakfasters represented only by depleted
butter-dishes and gaps in the piles of rolls, and free from the risk of
hearing the opening day fretted by voices set going like incantations to
exorcise the present as if it had no value, as if the speakers were not
living in it but only in yesterday or to-morrow.
And when there came a warning swift clumping of hob-nailed boots across
the hall, across the room, she demanded Vereker, oddly certain that even
at this late hour still somehow it would contrive to be he.
And there he was, lightly clumping round the table-end to his place,
into which he slipped smiling his greeting, boyishly. Not at all in the
self-conscious Englishman’s manner of getting himself seated when others
are already in their places: bent, just before sitting down, forward
from the waist and in that pose—hitching his trousers the
while—distributing his greetings, and so letting himself down into his
chair either with immediate speech or a simulated air of preoccupation.
Vereker flopped and beamed at the same moment, unfeignedly pleased to
arrive. Knickerbockers; but that was not the whole difference. He was
always unfeignedly pleased to arrive?
He began at once collecting food and spoke with gentle suddenness into a
butter-dish:
“I hope you had a good night?”
His talk made a little symphony with his movements which also were
conversational, and he looked across each time he spoke, but only on the
last word; a swift blue beam. In the morning light he seemed
younger—perhaps a champion ski-er at the end of his day is as tired as a
hard-worked navvy?—and a certain air of happy gravity and the very fair
curly hair shining round its edges from recent splashings, gave him, in
his very white, very woolly sweater, something of the look of a newly
bathed babe in its matinée jacket—in spite of the stern presence, above
the rolled top of his sweater, of an inch of stiff linen collar highly
glazed.
He was of a type and of a class, and also, in a way not quite clear, a
tempered, thoroughly live human being; something more in him than fine
sportsman and nice fellow, giving him weight. Presently she found its
marks: a pleat between the brows and, far away within his eyes even when
they smiled, a sadness; that sounded too in his cheerful voice, a
puzzled, perpetual compassion.
For the world? For himself?
But these back premises were touched with sunlight. Some sense of things
he had within him that made him utterly _kind_.
“Isn’t it extraordinary,” she said, hoping to hide the fact that she had
missed his last remark, “the way these people leave the lights switched
on all the time, everywhere.”
“Cheap electricity,” he said as if in parenthesis, and as if
apologetically reminding her of what she already knew—“Water power. They
pay a rate and use as much as they like.”
In all his answers there was this manner of apologising for giving
information. And his talk, even the perfect little story of the local
barber and the newspapers, which he told at top pace as if grudging the
moment it wasted, was like a shorthand annotation to essential unspoken
things, shared interests and opinions taken for granted. Talking with
him she no longer felt as she had done last night either that she was at
a private view of an exclusive exhibition, or gathering fresh light on
social problems. There was in him something unbounded, that enhanced the
light reflected into the room from the sunlit snow. His affectionate
allusion to his Cambridge brought to her mind complete in all its
parts—together with gratitude for the peace he gave in which things
could expand unhindered—her own so sparse possession: her week-ends
there with the cousins, their blinkered, comfort-loving academic
friends, the strange sense of at once creeping back into security and
realising how far she had come away from it; their kindnesses, their
secret hope of settling her for life in their enclosed world, and their
vain efforts to mould her to its ways; and then the end, the growing
engrossments in London breaking the link that held her to them and to
the past they embodied—and Cambridge left lit by their sweet
hospitality, by the light streaming on Sunday afternoons through King’s
Chapel windows; the Backs in sunlight, and a memory of the halting
little chime.
When she told him of the things that Cambridge had left with her, she
paused just in time to escape adding to them the gait of the
undergraduates: the slovenly stride whose each footfall sent the chin
forward with a hen-like jerk.
He agreed at once with her choice, but hesitated over the little chime.
“It might have been a new church. I never saw it. But if you had once
heard it you _couldn’t_ forget it.”
It was absurd to be holding to her solitary chime in face of his four
years’ residence. But it seemed now desperately important to state
exactly the quality she had felt and never put into words. She sat
listening—aware of him waiting in a sympathetic stillness—to each note
as it sounded out into the sky above the town, making it no longer
Cambridge but a dream-city, subduing the graceless modern bricks and
mortar to harmony with the ancient beauty of the colleges—until the
whole was a loveliness beneath the evening sky—and presently found
herself speaking with reckless enthusiasm.
“_Don’t_ you remember the four little gentle tuneless phrases, of six
and seven notes alternately, one for each quarter, and at the hour
sounding one after the other with a little pause between each, seeming
to ask you to look at what it saw, at the various life of the town made
suddenly wonderful and strange; and the last phrase, beginning with a
small high note that tapped the sky, and wandering down to the level and
stopping without emphasis, leaving everything at peace and very
beautiful.”
“I think I _can’t_ have heard it,” he said wistfully and sat
contemplative in a little pause during which it occurred to her,
becoming aware of the two of them talking on and on into the morning
that it rested with her to wind up the sitting; that he might perhaps,
if not quite immediately, yet in intention be waiting for her to rise
and spare him the apparent discourtesy of pleading an engagement. Even
failing the engagement they could not sit here forever, and the
convention of his world demanded that she should be the first to go.
She had just time to note coming from far away within herself a defiance
that would sooner inflict upon him the discomfort of breaking the rule
than upon herself the annoyance of moving at its bidding, when he looked
across and said with the bowing attitude he had held last night as he
spoke and waited for her to become aware of him: “May I put you up for
the ski-club?”
It was, of course, his business to cultivate new people, and, if they
seemed suitable, to collect them....
She smiled acknowledgment and insincerely pleaded the shortness of her
stay. All she could do, short of blurting out her poverty which he
seemed not to have seen.
But a fortnight was, he declared, the ideal time: time to learn and to
get on well enough to want to come out again next year; and hurried on
to promise a fellow sufferer, a friend coming up, for only a few days,
from the South, who would be set immediately to work and on whose
account he was committed to-day to trek down to the station.
“We were,” he said, for the first time looking across almost before he
spoke, and with the manner now of making a direct important
communication, “at Cambridge together.”
A valued friend, being introduced, recommended, put before himself.
Warmth crept into his voice, and lively emphasis—compressed into a small
note of distress. That note was his social utmost, for gravity and for
joy; recalling Selina Holland—when she was deeply moved: a wailing tone,
deprecating, but in his tone was more wistfulness, a suggestion too of
anxiety. It had begun when he spoke of Pater’s Renaissance Studies, but
had then merely sounded into the golden light, intensifying it. Now it
seemed to flout the light, flout everything but his desire to express
the absent friend.
“That was some years ago. Since then he has been a very busy man, saying
to this one go and he goeth ...” He smiled across as if asking her to
share the strangeness of his friend’s metamorphosis.
“You’ve not seen him since?”
“Not since he bought his land.”
“He’s a landowner,” she said, and fell into sadness.
“He is indeed, on quite a big scale, and a very hardworking one.”
“A farmer,” murmured Miriam, “that’s not so bad.”
“It’s very arduous. He is always at his post. Never takes a holiday. For
three winters I’ve tried to get him up here for a week.”
“Absolute property in land,” she said to the sunlit snow, “is a crime.”
Before her, side by side with a vision of Rent as a clutching monster
astride upon civilisation, was a picture of herself, suddenly hitting
out at these pleasant people, all, no doubt, landowners. It was only
because the friend had been presented to her in the distance and with as
it were all his land on his back that this one article of the Lycurgan
faith of which she had no doubt, had at all reared itself in her mind.
And as it came, dictating her words while she stood by counting the
probable cost and wondering too over the great gulf between one’s most
cherished opinions about life and one’s sense of life as it presents
itself piecemeal embodied in people, she heard with relief his unchanged
voice:
“Oh, please tell me why?”
And turned to see him flushed, smiling, pardoning her lapse, apologising
for pardoning it, and altogether interested.
“It’s a whole immense subject and I’m not a specialist. But the theory
of Rent has been worked out by those who are, by people sincerely trying
to discover where it is that temporarily useful parts of the machinery
of civilisation have got out of gear and become harmful. _No_ one ought
to have to pay for the right to sit down on the earth. _No_ one ought to
be so helplessly expropriated that another can _buy_ him and use him up
as he would never dream of using up more costly material—horses for
instance.”
“You are a socialist?”
Into her answer came the sound of a child’s voice in plaintive
recitative approaching from the hall.
“Daphne in trouble,” he said, “you’ll tell me more, I _hope_,”—and
turned his pleading smile to meet people coming in at the door. They
clumped to the small table nearer the further window and she caught a
sideways glimpse before they sat down: a slender woman with red-gold
hair carrying a bunchy little girl whose long legs dangled against her
skirt—Mrs. Sneyde, the grass-widow, and, making for the far side of the
table a big buoyant girlish young woman—uninteresting—the sister-in-law,
Maud Hollebone.
The child’s “so bitter, _bitter_ cold,” sounded clear through the
morning greetings in which she took no part. Her voice was strange, low
and clear, and full of a meditative sincerity. Amidst the interchange of
talk between Vereker and the two women it prevailed again: a plaintive
monologue addressed to the universe.
The grating of a chair and there she was confronting the talking
Vereker, who was on his feet and just about to go. She stood gazing up,
with her hands behind her back. A rounded face and head, cleanly
revealed by the way the fine silky brown hair was strained back across
the skull; bunchy serge dress and stiff white pinafore. Pausing, Vereker
looked down at her.
“You going out, Vereker?”
“Not yet.”
“Your friend coming? Not telegraphed or anything?”
“He’s coming all right, Daphne. He’ll be here to-night. You’ll see him
in the morning.”
“You’ll be writing your letters till you start?”
“I may.”
“Then I’ll come and sit in your room till my beecely walk.”
She rapped out her statements—immediately upon his replies, making him
sound gentle and slow—from the childish, rounded face that was serenely
thinking, full of quick, calm thought. Regardless talk was going forward
at the other table to which, her business settled, she briskly returned.
* * * * *
The little wooden hall was like a summer-house that was also a
sports-pavilion. Against the wall that backed the dining-room stood
bamboo chairs uncertain, as if, belonging elsewhere and having been told
not to block the gangway by moving into the open, they did not know what
they were for. The table to which they belonged stood boldly in the
centre and held an ash-tray. Between it and the front door from above
which the antlered head of a chamois gazed down upon the small scene,
the way was clear, but the rest of the floor space was invaded on all
sides by toboggans propped against the wall or standing clear with boots
lying upon them, slender boots gleaming with polish and fitted with
skates that appeared to be nothing but a single brilliant blade. Against
one wall was a pair of things like oars. Ski? But thought of as attached
to a human foot they were impossibly long.
From a hidden region away beyond the angle of the staircase came
servants’ voices in staccato, and abrupt sounds: the sounds of their
morning campaign, giving an air of callous oblivion to the waiting
implements of sport, and quenching, with the way they had of seeming to
urge the residents forth upon their proper business outdoors, the
hesitant invitation of the chairs.
Beyond the dining-room and this little hall, whose stillness murmured
incessantly of activities, there was no refuge but the dejected little
salon.
Filled with morning light it seemed larger, a little important and quite
self-sufficient, giving out its secret strangeness of a Swiss room, old;
pre-existing English visitors, proof, with its way of being, set long
ago and unaltered, against their travelled hilarity. The little parlour
piano, precious in chosen wood highly polished, with faded yellow keys
and faded silk behind its trellis, was full of old music, seemed to
brood over the carollings of an ancient simplicity unknown to the modern
piano whose brilliant black and white makes it sound in a room all the
time, a ringing accompaniment to the life of to-day.
But into this averted solitude there came to her again the sense of time
pouring from an inexhaustible source: gentle, marvellous, unutterably
_kind_. It came in through the window whose screened light, filling the
small room and halting meditatively there, seemed to wait for song.
Drawing back the flimsy curtain from the window, she found it a door
giving on a covered balcony through whose panes she saw wan sunless
snowfields and beyond them slopes, patched with black pinewoods and
rising in the distance to a high ridge, a smooth bulging thickness of
snow against deep blue sky. The dense pinewoods thinned and as they
climbed into small straggling groups with here and there a single file
of trees, small and sharp-pointed, marching towards the top of the
ridge.
Beautiful this sharp etching far-off of keen black pines upon the
sunless snow and strange the clear deep blue of the sky. But mournful;
remote and self-sufficient. Switzerland averted and a little
discouraging.
The balcony extended right and left and a glimpse away to the left of
mats hanging out into the open and a maid pouncing forth upon them with
a beater sent her to the right, where the distance was obscured by a
building standing at right angles to the house, a battered barn-like
place, unbalconied, but pierced symmetrically by little windows; châlet,
warm rich brown, darkened above by its sheltering, steeply jutting roof
... beautiful. Its kindliness extended all about it, lending a warmth
even to the far-off desolate slopes.
A door at her side revealed the dining-room lengthwise and deserted, and
then she was round the angle of the house and free of its secret: its
face towards the valley that was now a vast splendour of sunlight.
Every day, through these windows that framed the view in strips this
light would be visible in all its changings. Standing at the one that
glazed the great mountain whose gold had wakened her she discovered that
the balcony was a verandah, had in front of it a railed-in space set
with chairs and tables. In a moment she was out in the open light, upon
a shelf, within the landscape that seemed now to be the whole delight of
Switzerland outspread before her eyes.
Far away below, cleft along its centre by the irregular black line of
its frozen river was the wide white floor of the valley, measuring the
mountains that rose upon its hither side.
Those high, high summits, beetling variously up into the top of the sky,
with bright patches of tawny rock breaking through their smooth
whiteness against its darkest blue, knew nothing of the world below
where their mountains went downward in a great whiteness of broadening
irregular slopes that presently bore pines in single file upwards
advancing from the dense clumps upon the lower ridges, and met in an
extended mass along the edge of the valley floor.
Here and there, clear of the pinewoods, and looking perilously high and
desolate, a single châlet made a triangular warm brown blot upon the
dazzling snow.
In this crystal stillness the smallest sound went easily up to the high
peaks; to the high pure blue.
Turning to bless the well-placed little hotel she met a frontage of
blank windows, each with its sharply jutting balcony, jaws, dropped
beneath the blind stare of the windows set forever upon a single scene.
Hotel; queer uncherished thing. No one to share its life and make it
live.
On a near table was a folded newspaper, thin, heavily printed,
continental. Switzerland radiant all about her and the Swiss world
within her hands—a reprieve from further seeing and a tour, into the
daily life of this country whose living went on within a setting that
made even the advertisements look lyrical.
The simple text was enthralling. For years she had not so delighted in
any reading. In the mere fact of the written word, in the building of
the sentences, the movement of phrases linking part with part. It was
all quite undistinguished, a little crude and hard; demanding, seeming
to assume a sunny hardness in mankind. And there was something missing
whose absence was a relief, like the absence of heaviness in the air.
Everything she had read stood clear in her mind that yet, insufficiently
occupied with the narrative and its strange emanations, caught up single
words and phrases and went off independently touring, climbing to fresh
arrangements and interpretations of familiar thought.
And this miracle of renewal was the work of a single night.
The need for expression grew burdensome in the presence of the empty
sun-blistered tables. Perhaps these lively clarities would survive a
return journey through the hotel?
Voices sounded up from below, from the invisible roadway. English
laughter, of people actively diverting themselves in the winter
landscape. Far away within each one was the uncommunicating English
spirit, heedless, but not always unaware, filling its day with habitual,
lively-seeming activities. The laughter sounded insincere; as if defying
a gloom it refused to face.
They passed out of hearing and the vast stillness, restored, made her
look forth: at a scene grown familiar, driving her off to fresh seeking
while it went its way towards the day when she would see it for the last
time, giving her even now as she surveyed its irrevocably known beauty,
a foretaste of the nostalgia that must rend her when once more she was
down upon the plains.
But that time was infinitely far away beyond the days during which she
was to live perpetually with this scene that clamoured now to be
communicated in its first freshness.
* * * * *
The writing at top-speed of half-a-dozen letters left arrival and
beginning in the past, the great doorway of the enchantments she had
tried to describe safely closed behind her, and herself going forward
within them. With letters to post she must now go forth, secretly, as it
were behind her own back, into Oberland; into the scene that had seemed
full experience and was but its overture.
The letters were disappointing. Only in one of them had she escaped
expressing yesterday’s excited achievements and set down instead the
living joy of to-day. And this for the one to whom such joy was
incredible. But all were warm with affection newly felt. The long
distance not only made people very dear—in a surprising way it
re-arranged them. Foremost amongst the men was Densley of the warm heart
and wooden head wildly hailed. His letter, the last and shortest, wrote
itself in one sentence, descriptive, laughing, affectionate. How it
would surprise him....
Life, she told herself as she crossed the hall trying to drown the
kitchen sounds by recalling what had flashed across her mind as she
wrote to Densley, is eternal because joy is. “Future life” is a
contradiction in terms. The deadly trap of the adjective. _Pourquoi
dater?_ Even science insists on indestructibility—yet marks for
destruction the very thing that enables it to recognise
indestructibility. But it had come nearer and clearer than that.
Fawn-coloured woolly puppies, romping in the thick snow at the side of
the steps as though it were grass, huge, as big as lion cubs, with large
snub faces, and dense short bushy coats trying to curl, evenly all over
their tubby tumbling bodies ... St. Bernards, at home in their snow.
They flung themselves at her hands, mumbling her gloves, rolling over
with the smallest shove, weak and big and beautiful and with absurd
miniature barkings.
* * * * *
The hotel was at the higher end of the village and from its steps she
could see down the narrow street to where the little church and its
white cloaked sugar-loaf spire obscured the view and away to the right
set clear of the village and each on the crest of a gentle slope, the
hotels, four, five, big buildings, not unbeautiful with their peaked
roofs and balconies and the brilliance of green shutters on their white
faces. And even the largest, Mrs. Harcourt’s ‘hidjus big place’
recognisable by its difference, a huge square plaster box, patterned
with rows and rows of uniform windows above which on its flat roof a
high pole flaunted a flag limp in the motionless air, looked small and
harmless, a dolls’ house dumped casually, lost in the waste of snow.
If these hotels were full, there were in the village more visitors than
natives. But where were they? The vast landscape was empty. From its
thickly mantled fields came the smell of snow.
Lost when she went down the street in a maze of fugitive scents within
one pervading, and that seemed to compose the very air: the sweet deep
smell of burning pinewood. Moving within it as the crowded little shop
windows went by on either hand were the smells of dried apples and straw
and a curious blending of faint odours that revealed themselves—when
presently summoning an excuse for the excitement of shopping, at the
cost of but a few of the multitude of small coins representing an
English sovereign, she gained the inside of the third general store
between the hotel and the church—as the familiar smell of mixed
groceries; with a difference: clean smells, baked dry. No prevailing
odour of moist bacon and mouldering cheese; of spilt paraffin and musty
sacking, and things left undisturbed in corners. No dinginess. And
though shelves and counter were crowded, every single thing gleamed and
displayed itself with an air.
But there were no Swiss biscuits. Only a double row of the familiar
square tins from Reading, triumphantly displayed by the gaunt
sallow-faced woman whose ringing voice was as disconcertingly at
variance with her appearance as was her charmed manner with the eager
cunning that sat in her eyes. She asked for soap and the woman set wide
the door of an upright glass case in which were invitingly set forth
little packets bearing names that in England were household words.
She glanced back at the biscuits. Petit-Beurre were after all foreign
and brought with them always the sight of Dinant and its rock coming
into view, ending the squabble about the pronunciation of _grenouille_,
as the Meuse steamer rounded the last bend. But catching sight above the
biscuits of a box of English nightlights she chose a piece of soap at
random and fought while she responded to the voluble chantings
accompanying the packing of her parcel, with the nightmare vision of
bedrooms _never_ bathed in darkness, of people _never_ getting away into
the night, people insisting, even in rooms where brilliance can be
switched on at will, on the perpetual presence of the teasing little
glimmer; people who travel in groups and bring with them so much of
their home surroundings that they destroy daily, piecemeal, the sense of
being abroad.
Regaining the street in possession of a replica of the tablet she had
unpacked last night, she found that the busy midst of the village lay
just ahead where the way widened to encircle the little church. Many
shops, some of them new-built, with roomy windows, and the lifeless
impersonal appearance of successful provincial stores. There were more
people here, more women in those heavy black dresses and head-shawls,
more bloused and bearded men, crossing the snowy road with swift
slouching stride. A post-office, offering universal hospitality.
As if from the bright intense sunlight all about her, a ray of thought
had fallen upon the mystery of her passion for soap, making it so clear
in her mind that the little ray and the lit images waiting for words
could be put aside in favour of the strange dingy building breaking the
line of shops, looking like a warehouse, its small battered door, high
up, approached by a flight of steps leading from either side whose
meeting made a little platform before the door. Rough sleds were drawn
up round about the entrance, making it central in the little open space
about the church, the perpetual head-tossings of the horses filling the
bright air with showers of tinkles. It could hardly be a café; yet two
men had just clattered down the steps flushed and garrulous. Strange
dark-looking hostelry within which shone the midday sun of these rough
men living in far-away châlets among the snow.
It was not only the appeal of varying shape and colour or even of the
many perfumes each with its power of evoking images: the heavy
voluptuous scents suggesting brunette adventuresses, Turkish cigarettes
and luxurious idleness; the elusive, delicate, that could bring
spring-time into a winter bedroom darkened by snow-clouds. The secret of
its power was in the way it pervaded one’s best realisations of everyday
life. No wonder Beethoven worked at his themes washing and re-washing
his hands. And even in merely washing with an empty mind there is a
_charm_; though it is an empty charm, the illusion of beginning, as soon
as you have finished, all over again as a different person. But all
great days had soap, impressing its qualities upon you, during your most
intense moments of anticipation, as a prelude. And the realisation of a
good day past, coming with the early morning hour, is accompanied by
soap. Soap is with you when you are in that state of feeling life at
first hand that makes even the best things that can happen important not
so much in themselves as in the way they make you conscious of life, and
of yourself living. Every day, even those that are called ordinary days,
with its miracle of return from sleep, is heralded by soap, summoning
its retinue of companion days.
To buy a new cake of soap is to buy a fresh stretch of days. Its little
weight, treasure, minutely heavy in the hand, is life, past present and
future compactly welded.
Post-office offering universal hospitality more vitally than the little
church. A beggar could perhaps find help in a church more easily than in
a post-office. Yet the mere atmosphere of a post-office offered
something a church could never give. Even to enter it and come away
without transactions was to have been in the midst of life. And to
handle stamps, and especially foreign stamps, was to be aware of just
those very distances the post had abolished.
The priced goods in the windows were discouragingly high. One window
behind whose thick plate glass were set forth just a few things very
tastefully arranged, showed no prices at all and had the ominous note of
a west-end shop. Next door was a windowful that might have been
transplanted from Holborn so much steel was there, such an array of
rectangular labels and announcements. Skates and skates and skates. Then
a chemist’s and an inspiration, though the window showed nothing but a
perforated screen and the usual coloured bottles bulging on a shelf
above.
The counter was stacked with wares from Wigmore Street. Even the
tooth-brushes were those of the new shape devised in Cavendish Square.
The chemist was a bald preoccupied man speaking English abruptly. She
came away with a jar of Smith’s cream, her shopping done and the face of
the clock sticking out above the watchmaker’s telling her it was nearly
noon. The little clock on the church said a quarter past eleven and
glancing back at the watchmaker’s, now in the rear, she saw the reverse
dial of the outstanding clock marking half past eleven. And Switzerland
was the land of watchmakers.... Her own watch said one o’clock, English
time. Then it was noon. But this far world was not three minutes
distance from the Alpenstock. There was still half-an-hour.
The post-office was a sumptuous hall. Little tables stood about
invitingly set with pens and ink. No railed counter; a wooden partition
extending to the ceiling; a row of arched pigeon-holes, all closed. Like
a railway booking-office on Sunday, between trains—blankly indifferent
to the announcement of the presence of a customer made by the clumping
of her boots upon the wooden floor. And when presently—having gone the
round of the posters, brilliant against the white-washed walls, all so
much brighter and so much less bright than reality, all resounding with
a single deep charm, bringing assurance of possessing, in one journey
and one locality, the being of the whole—she tapped at a little shutter,
it flew up impatiently, revealing an affronted young man in a blue
cotton overall, glaring reproachfully through spectacles. The stamps
handed over, the little door shot back into place with a bang, as if
cursing an intruder.
The open spaces called for a first view before the sense of its being no
longer morning should have robbed them of intensity. But where the
street joined the roadway there was a little shop, full sunlight falling
on its window, whose contents were a clustered delight and each separate
thing more charming than its neighbour.
Two women approaching along the road preceded by English voices
distracted her, for a moment, with the strangeness of their headdress—a
sort of cowl. In a moment they passed with dangling clinking skates, and
her intention of getting a good view from behind was diverted back to
the shop window, by “tourist-trap” interpolated in a tone meant to be
inaudible, in the dissertation of the one holding forth in a voice not
unlike Mrs. Harcourt’s, about a hotel “packed like a bee-hive and
swarming with influenza.”
It was true. The shop was full of Swiss brummagem. She fastened on it
the more eagerly. Little expensive cheap things whose charm was beyond
price. Small clumsy earthenware, appealingly dumpy, flower patterned
upon a warm creamy background; painted wooden spoons. Little brooches
and trinkets innumerable. Cow-bells. Some small thing for everybody and
a problem solved at the cost of a few marks.
Turning away she caught sight of an old woman amazingly wrapped up,
peering at her from inside a little booth set down in the snow on the
other side of the way. A shelf laden with small things in carved wood
protruded in front. She crossed to look at them. Silently with slow
fumbling movements the old woman displayed her wares. Bears. Bears on
ski, on toboggans, bears in every kind of unbearlike attitude. Intricate
model châlets, useless and suggesting, imagined in England, nothing but
the accumulation of dust. But there was an owl, with owlish dignity,
very simply and beautifully carved. Her eyes returned to it and the old
woman put forth an aged freckled hand and grasped its head, which went
easily back upon a hinge and left revealed a clean white china inkwell.
“Kipsake,” said the old woman huskily.
“_Danke schön. Ich komme wieder_,” smiled Miriam escaping, followed by
hoarse cacklings of praise.
Out upon the roadway fenced between dazzling snowfields, the end of the
valley came into sight, new, but faintly reproachful, having waited too
long, and complaining now about the lateness of the hour. Certainly it
was worthy of a whole self, undistracted. But there was to-morrow, many
to-morrows. She had done with the street and the shops save as a
corridor, growing each day more dear, to daily fulfilment of the promise
of this prospect whose beauty she was clearly recognising. And more than
its beauty. Its great, great power of assertion, veiled for the moment
by distractions, but there. Wonderfully beautiful was the speech and
movement of the far-off smooth pure ridge of snow, rising high against
the deepest blue of the sky, linking twin peaks.
Some of the near slopes were dotted with people, tiny figurines
mitigating the snowfields and the towering mountains: the sounds of
English voices ringing out infinitesimal in the wide space, yet filling
it. Shutting out the scene, yet intensifying it; bringing gratitude for
their presence.
That remained even after the quaint peaked hoods of brilliant white or
mauve, the effective skirts and jerseys of a group of women passing in
the roadway had rebuked with their colours, clean and sharp against the
snow, her tweed that in London had seemed a good choice, and her London
felt hat.
But though the clever clothes of these people brought a sense of exile
they were powerless to rouse envy or any desire. Envy was impossible in
this air that seemed, so sharp was every outline, to be no longer
earth’s atmosphere but open space, electric.
Perhaps even this morning there was time to get clear, to be if only for
a few moments, along some side track alone with the landscape, walking
lightly clad in midsummer sun through this intensity of winter.
The road was dropping and growing harder. No longer crunching under her
feet, the snow beaten flat showed here and there dark streaks of ice,
and her puttee-bandaged legs, flexible only at the knees, felt like
sticks above her feet lost and helpless in the thick boots that seemed
to walk of themselves.
The dropping road took a sharp turn towards the valley, showing ahead a
short empty stretch and another sharp turn, revealing it as the winding
trail up which she had come last night. On the right it was joined by a
long track running steeply down into a wilderness of snow in the midst
of whose far distances appeared high up a little bridge half hidden
amongst pines. The track was dotted with pigmy forms.
“_Ash_-tongue!” A fierce hoarse voice just behind, and joining it
another, clear and ringing: “_Ach_-tooooong.”
Plunging into the roadside drift she turned in time to see a toboggan
bearing upon it a boy prone, face foremost eagerly out-thrust, shoot
down the slanting road, take the bend at an angle that just cleared the
fence and dart at a terrific pace down the slope towards the wilderness;
followed by the girl with the ringing voice, lightly seated, her
toboggan throwing her up as it bumped skimming from ridge to ridge down
the uneven road. She took the bend smoothly with space to spare and flew
on down the slope with lifted chin and streaming hair. Both mad.
Children of the reckless English who had discovered the Swiss winter.
This terrific scooting was not the tobogganing of which she had heard in
London. Two more figures were coming, giving her excuse to wait lest
they were coming her way and watch their passing from the drift that was
like warm wool, knee-deep. They were women, coming slowly, paddling
themselves along with little sticks. They took the bend with ironic
caution and went on down the slope, still furiously stabbing the snow
with their little sticks, their high, peaked cowls making them look like
seated gnomes.
Aware of intense cold invading her feet, she plunged out into the road
and was beating her snow-caked puttees when an intermittent grinding
sound approaching brought her upright: an aged couple side by side,
white-haired and immensely muffled, sitting very grave and stern behind
the legs protruding stiffly on either side the heads of their toboggans
and set from moment to moment heels downwards upon the road to check a
possible increase of their slow triumphant pace. Triumph. Behind the
sternness that defied the onlooker to find their pose lacking in dignity
was triumph. Young joy; for these who might well be patrolling in
bath-chairs the streets of a cathedral town.
And they left the joyous message: that this sport, since pace could so
easily be controlled, might be tested at once, alone, without
instruction, this very afternoon. A subtle change came over the
landscape, making it less and more; retiring a little as who should say:
then I am to be henceforth a background, already a mere accessory, it
yet challenged her vow, an intimidating witness.
Along the empty stretch towards the valley the blazing sun blotted out
the distance so that it was pleasant to turn the next corner and be
going again towards the expanse that ended at the white high-hung
collar. The fresh stretch of gently sloping road was longer than the one
above it and walking freely here she found that her gait had changed,
that she was planking along in a lounging stride which brought ease to
her bandaged legs and made more manageable her inflexible feet. With a
little practice, walking could be a joy. Walking in this scene, through
this air, was an occupation in itself. And she was being assailed by the
pangs of a piercing hunger. Obtrusive; insistent as the hunger of
childhood.
It would take a little longer to go back. It would be wise to turn now.
At the corner ending this stretch. Suddenly it seemed immensely
important to discover what there was round the corner. From the angle of
the turning she could see the little bridge far away to the right, in
profile, with pines stretching along the bank of what it spanned, that
showed a little further on as a thin straight line steeply descending to
join the serpentine that cut the white floor of the valley. Away to the
right of the bridge straggling leafless trees stood in a curve. Behind
them something moved; coming and going across the gaps between their
trunks. Skaters.
Then for the girl and boy that reckless rush was just a transit; a means
of getting to the rink, as one might take a bus to a tennis-court.
A voice greeted her from behind, surprising in its level familiarity
until the finished phrase revealed the American, to whom, turning to
find him standing before her, his toboggan drawn to heel by its rope,
she gave the smile, not for him, the lover’s smile reviewing, as they
passed her in inverse rotation while she made the long unwelcome journey
into his world of an American in Europe, her morning’s gatherings.
But he had received it, was telling her that already she looked
splendid, adding that when folks first came up they looked, seen beside
those already there, just gass’ly. And for a moment the miscarriage was
painful: to have appeared to drop even below his own level of
undiscriminating hail-fellow-well-met. And for a fraction of a second as
he stood before her in his correct garb she transformed him into an
Englishman condemning her foolish grin—but there was his queer little
American smile, that came to her from a whole continent and seemed to
demand a larger face and form, a little smile dryly sweet, as
misdirected as her own and during which they seemed to pour out in
unison their independent appreciations and to recognise and greet in
each other, in relation to the English world out here, fellow voyagers
in a strange element.
It healed her self-given stripes that were, she reflected as they went
on together up the hill, needless, since to him, as an American, her
greeting would seem neither naïve nor bourgeois. For all Americans are
either undisturbedly naïve and bourgeois or in a state of merely having
learned, via Europe, to be neither. And this man, now launched in speech
revealed himself by the way he had of handling his statements, as so far
very much what he had always been.
Strange that it was always queer people, floating mysterious and
intangible in an alien element who gathered up, not wanting them,
testimonies that came from her of themselves.
All the way back to the Alpenstock he pursued his monologue,
information, and in an unbroken flow that by reason of its temperature,
its innocence of either personal interest or benevolent intention, left
her free to wander. There was in his narrow, unresonant voice only one
shape of tone: a discouraged, argumentative rise and fall, very slight,
almost on two adjacent notes, colourless; as of one speaking almost
unawares at the bidding of an endless uniform perception. She heard it
now as statement, now merely as sound and for a moment as the voice of a
friend while after informing her that he had done the valley run and
climb each morning and taken to-day a last turn to add yet one more
layer to his week’s sunburn, he remarked that the long zig-zag was
commonly deserted in the forenoon, folks mostly taking the other track,
either to the rink, or further to the made run, or way beyond that to
the ski-ing slopes.
* * * * *
When she was clear of the shop and crossing the road with the toboggan
slithering meekly behind, the invisible distant slopes seemed lonely and
her plan for getting immediately away to them postponed itself in favour
of enjoying for a while the thrilled equilibrium with everything about
her that was the gift of the slight pull on the cord she was trying to
hold with an air of preoccupied negligence. Turning leisurely back from
the short length of street ahead that too soon would show the open
country, she came once more into the heart of the village and paid an
unnecessary visit to the post-office, heard the toboggan pull up against
the kerb and knew as she turned to abandon the cord that she had tasted
the utmost of this new joy, and that when once more the cord was in her
hands she must go forth and venture.
Out on the road beyond the village the pleasant even slithering
alternated with little silent weightless runs, that at first made her
glance back to see if the toboggan were still there. These little runs,
increasing as the road began to slope came like reminders of its
character, assertions of its small willingness for its task, enhancing
its charm, calling her to turn and survey as she went its entrancing
behaviour of a little toboggan.
But presently, and as if grown weary of gentle hints and feeling the
necessity of stating more forcibly the meaning of its presence out here
in the glittering stillness, it took a sudden run at her heels. Moving
sideways ahead she reduced it to its proper place in the procession
until the distance between them set it once more in motion. Overtaking
her it made a half turn, slid a little way broadside and pulled up,
facing her, in a small hollow, indignant. In the mercifully empty yet
not altogether unobservant landscape it assumed the proportions of a
living thing and seemed to say as she approached: “You _can’t_ bring me
out here and make a fool of me.” And indeed, even with no one in sight,
she could not allow herself to walk down the slope with the toboggan
ahead and pulling like a dog.
She might go back, make a détour on the level round about the village,
turn the afternoon into a walk and postpone until to-morrow the
adventure for which now she had neither courage nor desire. In choosing
the time when there would be fewest people abroad she had forgotten that
it was also the lowest point of the day. Even this first day had a
lowest point. And belated prudence, reminding her that she had come away
to rest, cast a chill over the empty landscape, changing it from reality
to a picture of a reality seen long ago. At the sight of it she turned
and went a few paces up the gradient and perched and gathered up the
length of cord, and life came back into the wastes of snow, the
mountains were real again, quiet in the motionless afternoon light, and
the absurd little toboggan a foe about to be vanquished.
It slid off at once, took a small hummock askew, righted itself, to a
movement made too instinctively to be instructive, and slid onwards
gathering pace.
But ecstasy passed too swiftly into awareness of the bend in the road
now rushing up to meet her ignorance. Ramming her heels into the snow
she recovered too late with a jolting pang in both ankles and a headlong
dive into this morning’s drift, a memory of what she should have done
and stood up tingling with joy in the midst of the joyous landscape
stilled again that had flown with her and swooped up as she plunged, and
was now receiving her exciting news.
The backward slope invited her to return and go solemnly, braking all
the way and testing the half-found secret of steering. But the bend
tempted her forward. A single dig on the left when she reached it and
she would be round in face of the long run down to the level.
But the dig was too heavy and too soon and landed her with her feet in
the drift and the toboggan swung broadside and all but careering with
her backwards along the steepness that lay, when once more she faced it,
a headlong peril before the levels leading on and up to the little
bridge could come to bring rescue and peace.
Pushing carefully off, sliding with bated breath and uncomfortably
rasping heels, down and down, making no experiments and thankful only to
feel the track slowly ascending behind her she remained clenched until
only a few yards were left down which with feet up she slithered
deliriously and came to rest.
It was done. She had tobogganed herself away from Oberland into the
wilderness, the unknown valley waiting now to be explored, with the
conquered steed trailing once more meek and unprotesting in the
background. The afternoon was hers for happiness until hunger, already
beginning its apparently almost continuous onslaught, should make
welcome the triumphant climb back to Oberland and tea upon the
promontory.
The high bridge that in the distance looked so small and seemed to span
smallness was still small, a single sturdy arch; but beneath it dropped
a gorge whose pines led down to a torrent, frozen; strange shapes of
leaping water arrested, strangely coloured: grey in shadow, black in
deep shadow, and here and there, caught by the light, a half-transparent
green.
There was a great fellowship of pines clustered on either bank and
spreading beyond the bridge to a wood that sent out a rising arm
blocking the view of the valley and the pass. They made a solitude down
here above the silenced waters. The backward view was closed by the
perilous slope whose top was now the sky-line, leaving Oberland far away
out of sight in another world.
The track through the wood, wide and level for a while with pointed
pines marching symmetrically by, narrowed to a winding path that took
her in amongst them, into their strange close fellowship that left each
one a perfect thing apart. Not lonely, nor, for all the high-bulging
smoothness of snow in which it stood, cold. It was their secret,
pine-breath, that brought a sense of warm life, and their
close-clustered needles. Out on the mountain-sides they looked black and
bleak, striving towards the sun until they were stayed by the upper
cold. Seen close they were a happy company bearing light upon the green
burnish of their needles and the dull live tints of their rough stems.
And very secret; here thought was sheltered as in a quiet room.
Out in the immense landscape, in the down-pouring brilliance of pure
light, thought was visible. Transparent to the mountains who took its
measure and judged, yet without wounding, and even while they made it
seem of no account, a small intricate buzzing in the presence of mighty,
simple statement sounding just out of reach within the air, and invited
thoughtless submission to their influence as to a final infinite good
that would remain when they were no more seen, there was pathos in their
magnificence; as if they were glad even of one small observing speck,
and displayed gently the death they could deal, and smiled in their
terrifying power as if over an open secret.
And to walk and walk on and on amongst them, along their sunlit
corridors with thought shut off and being changed, coming back refreshed
and changed and indifferent, was what most deeply she now wanted of
them.
The track climbed a ridge and there below were the American’s wide
snowfields.
Before she was assured by the doffed cap outheld while he made his
salutation—the sweeping foreign _coup de chapeau_ that was so decisive a
politesse compared to the Englishman’s meagre small lift; and yet also
insolent—she was rejoicing in the certainty that the bearded figure in
spite of the English Norfolk suit and tweed cap, was the big Russian. He
alone, at this moment, of all the people in the hotel would be welcome.
Remote, near and friendly as the deepest of her thoughts, and so far
away from social conventions and the assumptions behind conventions, as
to leave all the loveliness about her unchanged—and yet trailing an
absurd little toboggan, smaller, and, in contrast with his height, more
ridiculous an appendage than her own. He plunged down the ridge in the
English style, by weight and rather clumsily, and in a moment was by her
side at the head of the run that went, pure white and evenly flattened,
switch-backing away across the field out of sight.
In a slow mournful voice that gave his excellent French a melancholy
music he asked her if she had already tested the run and became when he
had heard the short tale of her adventure impatiently active. Her
toboggan, he said, and raised its fore-part and bent scanning, was too
large, too heavy and with runners not quite true. It would be better for
the moment to exchange. Try, Try, he chanted with the true Russian
nonchalance and, abandoning his own went off down the gentle slope on
the discredited mount that she might now blame for her mysterious swerve
at the bend.
After the gentle drop, carrying him over the first small rise as if it
were not there, he flew ahead gathering swiftness with each drop, away
and away until at last he appeared a small upright figure far away on
the waste of snow.
The run compared with what she had already attempted seemed nothing at
all. The drops so slight that once or twice she was stranded on a ridge
and obliged to push off afresh. And the light little toboggan,
responding to the slightest heel-tap upon the hard pressed snow, taught
her at once the secret of steering. And when at last full of the joy of
fresh conquest she was pulled up by the loose snow at the end of the
run, she was eager only to tramp back and begin again. But tramping at
her side he tore her triumph to shreds. Silently she tried to imagine
the toboggan having its own way uncontrolled for the whole of that
sweeping trek, for the two quite steep drops towards the end.
The second time he started her in advance and remained behind shouting,
his voice rising to a crescendo at the first steepness: “_Il n’y a pas
de danger!_” With an immense effort she restrained her feet and entered
paradise.
“_Ça ira, ça ira_,” he admitted smiling when once more they were side by
side. They tramped back in silence, under the eyes as they approached
the ridge of a group newly appeared upon its crest and from which when
they drew near a voice came down in greeting. She looked up to see the
Croydon family, all very trim in sporting garb and carrying skates,
gathered in a bunch, at once collectively domestic and singly restive.
They smiled eagerly down at her and she read in the father’s twinkling
gaze that she was providing material for Croydon humour, so distinctly
and approvingly, was it saying in the Croydon way: “You’ve not lost much
time,” and so swiftly, having told her in response to her own greeting
that the rink was within five minutes easy walking, did he turn and
disappear with his family in tow down the far side of the ridge.
The third run left her weary and satisfied. Again they were tramping
back side by side, and although her experience of Russians had taught
her that gratitude was out of place and enthusiasm over simple joys a
matter for half-envious contempt, her thankfulness and felicity,
involuntarily eloquent, treated him, marching tall and sombre at her
side upon feet that in spite of the enormous boots showed themselves
slender and shapely terminations of a well-hung frame, as if he had been
of her own English stock; let him see the value, to herself, of his
kindly gift. All she lived for now, she told him, was to rush,
safe-guarded by a properly-mastered technique, at the utmost possible
speed through this indescribable air, down slopes from which the
landscape flew back and up. He smiled down, of course, the half
incredulous smile. Of course bored, giving only part of a dreamy
attention to all this raving.
“_C’est bon pour la santé_,” he murmured as she paused.
What did he know of santé, unless perhaps he had been in prison? He
might be a refugee; an anarchist living in Switzerland.
When he, too, turned out to be now returning in search of tea and they
were climbing the slope towards Oberland, their toboggans colliding and
bumping along as best they might at the ends of cords twisted together
round the wrist of his gloveless hand, she remarked by way of relieving
a silence he did not seem to think it necessary to break, that the Swiss
winter must be less surprisingly beautiful to Russians than to the
people of the misty north. He agreed that doubtless this was so and
gloomily asked her if she had been in Russia. He agreed with everything
she said about his country as seen from a distance, but without interest
and presently, as if to change the subject, declared that he knew
nothing of Russia and Russians.
His voice sounded again too soon to give her time to select a
nationality that should soften the disappointment of losing him as a
Russian, and in a moment he was talking of Italy, and the Italy she knew
by so many proxies dead and living was stricken out of her mind, to give
place to the unknown Italy who had produced this man, simple and
sincere, gloomy and harsh-minded, playing Chopin with all his heart. But
when presently she learned that he was a business man on holiday from
Milan, her Italy returned to her. He was from a world that everywhere
was the same, a world that existed even within Italy.
And at dinner again he sat apart wrapped in his gloom until again
Vereker was rescuing him with speech and he was responding in the
withheld, disclaiming Russian way.
A Latin consciousness was, in this group, something far more remote than
a Russian would have been, and she wondered what it was that behind
Vereker’s unchanging manner was making his half of the bridge upon which
they met. Music perhaps, if Vereker, with eyes candid and not profound
and not deep-set, were musical. She caught a few words. It was the
weather. Do Italians discuss the weather? Was Guerini, behind his
gratitude in being rescued from isolation, wondering at the Englishman’s
naïveté? Vereker was not showing off his French. He was being courteous,
being himself. No one, except when he could seize a chance the American,
made any sort of parade. Nor was it that they made a parade of not
making a parade. Talk with them was easy because it was quite naturally
serene. No emphasis. No controversy. The emergence of even a small
difference of opinion produced at once, on both sides, a smiling
retreat. Deep in his soul the American must certainly be smiling at this
baffling urbanity. English correctness and hypocrisy. Here was the
original stuff from which the world-wide caricatures were made.
And talk with these people always ended in a light and lively farewell,
a manner of dropping things that handed a note of credit for future
meetings. A retreat, as from royalty, backwards. A retreat from the
royal game of continuous courtesy.
And together with the surprise of discovering—when having departed
upstairs she was drawn down to the little salon by the sound of the
Chopin ballade—not the Italian but Vereker at the piano in the empty
room, was the boon of his composure. Of his being and continuing to be
after she had slipped into the room and reached a chair from which she
could just see him in profile, so quietly engrossed. A little strung, as
though still the phrases that yesterday he had so carefully recaptured
might again elude him; but listening. Led on, and listening and in the
hands of Chopin altogether.
Seated thus exposed he was slender, delicate, musicianly; only the line
of his jaw gave him an appearance of strength; and perhaps the close
cropping of his hair so that of what would have been a flamboyant mass
only crisp ridges were left, close against a small skull, like Cæsar’s.
His spruceness and neatness made stranger than ever the strange variance
between the stiff, magpie black and white of dress clothes, and the
depth and colour of music.
He played the whole ballade; sketchily where the technical difficulties
came thick and fast, but keeping the shape, never losing the swinging
rhythm.
Its concluding phrases were dimmed by the need of finding something to
say that should convey her right to say anything at all; but when the
last chord stood upon the air, the performance seemed to have been a
collaboration before which they now sat equally committed. And when his
face came round, its smile was an acknowledgment of this.
For an instant she felt that nothing could fit but a gratefully
affectionate salute and then a “How’s old So-and-So in these days?”
after the manner of men of his type drifting happily about upon the
surfaces of life. And when she said: “You got the whole of it this
time,” it was as if the unexpressed remainder had indeed passed across
to him, as if she were the newly-arrived friend whose presence somewhere
upstairs had made him so radiant during dinner and afterwards sent him
to pour out his happiness in the deserted little salon.
“After a fashion,” he said with the little flicker of the eyelids that
was his way, from sixth-form or from undergraduate days, of sustaining
for further speech the pose of his turned head and smiling face:
“There’s no one like him, is there?”
“You were playing last evening just after I came. For a moment I
couldn’t believe that ballade was actually here. I heard it long ago,
and never since, and I’ve never been able to recall the theme.”
“I’m _so_ glad,” he said with his little note of distress. “I’ve been
trying for _days_ to get it all back.”
For him, too, it came out of a past, and brought that past into this
little Swiss room, spread it across whatever was current in his life,
showed him himself unchanged. And in that past they had lived in the
same world, seen and felt in the same terms the things that are there
forever before life has moved. So far they were kindred. But since then
she had been flung out into another world; belonged to the one in which
he had gone forward only through an appreciative understanding of its
code, of what it was that created its self-operating exclusiveness. He
did not yet know that she stood outside the charmed circle, had been
only an occasional visitor, and that now, visiting again after years of
absence, she was hovering between the desire to mask and remain within
it and her proper business as a Lycurgan: to make him aware of the
worlds outside his own, let him see that his innocent happiness was kept
going by his innocent mental oblivion.
And whilst they called up cherished names and collided in agreement she
wondered what these people who lived in exile from reality could find in
their music beyond escape into the self for whom in their state of
continuous urbane association there was so little space; and presently
became aware of lively peace filling the intervals between their to and
fro of words, distracting attention from them, abolishing everything but
itself and its sure meaning: so that into this Swiss stillness of frost
without and electricity within nothing had been present of the
Switzerland that had brought them both here, and now suddenly came back,
enhanced, a single unbounded impression that came and was gone, that was
the face of its life now begun in her as memory.
She read her blissful truancy in his eyes, his recognition of their
having fallen apart, but not of its cause, which he thought was perhaps
the monotony of their continuous agreement, and was now swiftly seeking
a fresh bridge that in an instant, since clearly he intended to prolong
the sitting, he would, deferentially flickering his eyelids, take
courage to fling.
But into the little pause came the sound of footsteps approaching
through the hall, and an intensity of listening that was their common
confession of well-being and was filling them with a wealth of eager
communication that must now be postponed until to-morrow. But to-morrow
the college friend would be in possession; there was only this evening,
a solitary incident. Perhaps the door would open upon someone who would
straightway withdraw, leaving the way open for the waiting conversation.
And the college friend had come only for a few days ...
But this falling from grace was rebuked by the reminder of Vereker’s
all-round niceness. He would, of course, retain the intruder. If it were
a man there would be three-cornered talk enlivened by what was being
sacrificed to it. But with the opening of the door, as she raised her
eyes towards it and caught in passing a glimpse of him upon his music
stool, out of action and alone, she saw that dear and nice as he was,
had always been, he could not fully engage her, was real to her on a
level just short of reaching down to the forces of her nature; was
pathetically, or culpably, a stranded man; subsisting.
Guerini: huge, filling the doorway, hesitating for a moment and
retreating, quietly closing the door, but not before Vereker wheeling
round on his music-stool, had seen his departing form.
It was his unexpectedness, the having forgotten him so that he came like
an apparition, that had sent him away. Even so, a woman of the world
would have promptly become a smiling blank and suitably vocal; or
withdrawn and expressionless in the manner of a hotel guest only partly
in possession of a room now to be partly taken over by another. But she
had left her thoughts standing in her face, leaving Vereker, who had
turned just too late, to be hostess.
Wheeling back to face her, he was again the gentle companion from the
past. In his elegant sunny voice he was recalling their morning’s talk,
begging at once with his despairing little frown, for more light on the
subject of property in land. It was clear that these things had never
come his way. It was after all not his fault that his education had held
his eyes closed, that they had since been kept closed by wealth and ease
taken for granted. And in his way he had kept fine. His adoration for
his gods of art and literature was alive and genuine—and he was a
sportsman. It was difficult face to face with his gentle elegance to
remember that he was distinguishing himself in an exacting sport.
Repentant of her condemnation she set forth the steps of the reasoning
and the groups of facts, saw him eagerly intent—not upon herself but
upon this new picture of life, wrestling step by step with what he saw
far off—and presently had the joy of seeing him see how economic
problems stood rooted in the holding of land at rent. But he was only
one; there were thousands of men, nice men, needing only hints, as
blinkered as he.
CHAPTER IV
Hurrying through her dressing to keep the appointment that had not been
made and whose certainty in her own mind was challenged in vain by all
the probabilities, she opened her door upon the silent corridor;
stillness and silence as if everyone else in the hotel had been spirited
away leaving clear, within the strange surroundings in which for a while
she was set down, the familiar pathway of her life. And when she reached
the dining-room the sight of them there, side by side at breakfast in
the brilliant morning light with no one else in the room save herself
approaching, had for a moment the hard unreality of things deliberately
arranged. She saw them very clearly and it was as if neither of them
were there; as if they were elsewhere each on his own path from which
this tacit meeting was a digression.
But before she was half-way to the table they were rising. Their
breakfast over, they were going off into their day. She was too late;
her haste was justified of its wisdom. Reaching her place, she murmuring
a casual greeting, turned away towards the spaces of her own day
opening, beyond this already vanishing small disappointment, as brightly
as the light shining in from the sunlit snow.
They halted a moment while Vereker introduced his friend to whose
height, as she sat down to the table, she glanced up to meet the intent
dark gaze of a man on guard. She was already far away, and in the
instant of her hurried astonished return to face for the first and
perhaps the last time this man who was challenging her, the eyes were
averted and the two men sat down: to freshly broken rolls and steaming
cups.
The little self-arranged party was secure in the morning stillness that
was the divine invisible host equally dear to all three. Happy in this
fulfilment of premonition, she sat silent, delighting in the challenge
left, miscarried and superfluous upon the empty air, wickedly delighting
in the friend’s discomfort in following the dictates of the code
forbidding him again to look across until she should have spoken, and
confining his large gaze within the range of his small immediate
surroundings. Refusing rescue, she busied herself with breakfast,
enjoying his large absurdity, free, while he paid the well-deserved
penalty of his innocently thwarted attack, to observe to her heart’s
content.
He sat taking sanctuary with Vereker—who at his sunny best was making
conversation about the trials in store—slightly turned towards him and
away from the barred vista across which no doubt, before she came in,
his large gaze had comfortably extended; responding now and again with
thoughtful groans.
Beside Vereker’s sunburned fairness he was an oiled bronze; heavy good
features, heavy well-knit frame. Lethargic, or just a very tired man on
a holiday, bemused by his sudden translation. Superficially he was
formidable, “strong and silent.” His few remarks, thrown into the talk
that Vereker kept up while he waited for his two friends to fraternise
and admire each other, came forth upon a voice deliberately cultivated
since his undergraduate days, a ponderous monotone, the voice of a man
infallible, scorning argument, permanently in the right. Its sound was
accompanied by a swaying movement from side to side of his body bent
forward from the hips: suggesting some big bovine creature making up its
mind to charge.
She recalled other meetings with his kind, instant mutual dislike and
avoidance. This time there was no escape. She was linked to him by
Vereker, obliged by Vereker to tolerate his presence, sit out his
portentousness and be aware, since Vereker found him so very fine, of
the qualities hidden within. Courage of course, tenacity, strength to
adventure in strange places. Were such things enough to justify this
pose of omniscience? With that pose it was forever impossible to make
terms; and if this were not a single occasion, if there were further
meetings, there would sooner or later be a crossing of swords. She
considered his armoury.
Mentally it was a flimsy array; a set of generalisations, born of the
experience that had matured him and become now his whole philosophy,
simple and tested, immovable; never suspected of holding good only for
the way of living upon which it was based.
The fact of the existence of life had either never entered his head or
been left behind in the days before he crystallised. He had now become
one of those who say “our first parents” and see a happy protégé of an
entirely masculine Jehovah duped into age-long misery by the first of
the charmers. Homage and contempt for women came equally forth from him,
the manifest faces of his fundamental ignorance. The feminine world
existed for him as something apart from life as he knew it, and to be
kept apart. Within that world “charm” and “wit” drew him like magnets
and he never guessed their source; knew nothing of the hinterlands in
the minds of women who assumed masks, put him at his ease, appeared not
to criticize. And such women were the sum of his social knowledge. One
day he would be a wise old man “with an eye for a pretty face,” wise
with the wisdom that already was cheating him of life.
There was no hope for him. His youth had left him Vereker, his chum
whose sunny simplicity had always disarmed him, who did not resent his
portentous manner. From women he would have, till old age, flattery for
his strength. From his workers nothing but work, and respect for his
English justice and honesty. It was inconceivable that anyone should
ever pierce his armour; the ultimate male density backed by “means” and
“position.”
His pose had found its bourne in his present position of authority, his
state of being bound to present a god-like serenity; and it had become
so habitual that even when it was put out of action he could not
disencumber himself of it. At this moment, for lack of proper feminine
response from across the table, it was actually embarrassing him. To
proper feminine response, charming chatter or charming adoring silence
he would pay tribute, the half respectful, half condescending interest
of the giant in his hours of ease.
Unable any longer to endure silently, she rode across him with speech;
pictures, for Vereker, of her yesterday’s adventure. Lively and shapely,
inspired by the passage of wrath. Her voice had a bright hard tone,
recognisable as the tone of the lively talker.
She was aware of the friend accepting her as the bright hard mondaine;
at once attentive, his pose relaxed so far as to be represented only by
the eyebrows left a little lifted and still knitting his deliberately
contemplative brow. He was looking, poor dear, at the pictures, enjoying
them, their mechanism, their allusions. And she, for a weary empty
interval, was being a social success. It was a victory for the friend, a
bid for his approval.
Vereker was puzzled, meeting a stranger; a little taken aback. But when
grown weary of the game of brightly arranged exaggerations, she relapsed
into simplicity, he recovered at once and again brought forth his
ski-club. The friend sat by while one after another the persuasive
arguments came forth, smiling with the slightly lifted brow that was now
his apology for smiling at all.
And suddenly he was grave, intent as he had been at the first moment;
this time towards the door, outside which sounded Daphne’s eager
breathless voice and ceased in the doorway. Her swift slight footsteps
crossed the room and brought her to a standstill just in sight, gazing
at the stranger.
He remained grave, darkly gazing. Vereker, half-risen, eager to be off,
was looking at him in the manner of a hostess arrested in giving the
signal for departure. For a moment the man and the child stared at each
other, and then she moved stealthily, rounding the table-end. A light
came into his unsmiling face. With a rush she was upon him, mouth set,
eyes blazing, clenched fists beating upon his breast.
“_Eaden_,” she panted, “evil, _evil_ Eaden.”
There was no defence, no display of comic fear, no wrist-catching
dominance. And when she desisted and stood back still searching him with
grave face a little thrust forward in her eagerly-thinking way, he
turned more sideways from the table, to attend while hurriedly with the
air of one having other business on hand and no time to waste, she
catechised him. He answered simply, with just her manner of one cumbered
with affairs and eager nevertheless to contrive meetings; devouring all
the time with his eyes the strange hurried little face, the round wide
eyes set upon something seen afar.
They had recognised each other. To the rest of the party she was a
quaint, precocious child. This man saw the strange power and beauty of
the spirit shining in those eyes almost round, almost protruding, and,
if there had been in the blue of them, that toned so gently into the
pearly blue surrounding, a shade more intensity of colour, merely
brilliant.
“You _must_,” she said, her lips closing firmly on her ultimatum, head a
little out-thrust, hands behind back. “You’d better go now,” with a
glance at the group that had gathered round. She pattered swiftly away
to her table in the background.
“Daphnee’ll always get what she wants with her nagging,” said the Skerry
youth standing by.
“She will get what she wants with her beaux yeux,” said Miriam warmly,
and saw the little form panting along its ardent way up through life,
seeking and testing and never finding, in any living soul.
“_Yes_,” groaned Eaden and impatiently sighed away the wrath in his eyes
set upon the departing figure of the youth. Again they were lit and
gentle and as if still gazing upon Daphne. He sat for a moment, paying
tribute to a suddenly found agreement before joining Vereker held up at
the door in the little crowd of newly-arriving breakfasters.
* * * * *
It was something like cycling in traffic, only that this scattered
procession making for the rink seemed all one party. The _achtungs_ of
those starting on their journey from the top of the slope rising behind
her rang out like greetings, and the agonised shrieks coming up from
below as one and another neared the gap visible now in the distance as
an all-too-swiftly approaching confusion of narrowly avoided disasters,
were full of friendly laughter: the fearless laughter of those
experienced in collisions. For a moment she was tempted to steer into
the snow and wait until the road should be clear. But the sudden
sideways swerve of a toboggan just ahead called forth unawares her first
_achtung_. It rang, through the moment which somehow manœuvred her clear
of the obstacle, most joyously upon the air and hailed her—seeming to be
her very life sounding out into the far distances of this paradise,
claiming them as long ago it had claimed the far distances surrounding
outdoor games—and sent her forward one of the glad fellowship of
reckless tobogganners whom now unashamed she could leave to go along her
chosen way.
Ignoring yells from behind she slowed to pass the gap and its glimpse of
the descending track dotted with swiftly gliding humanity, took the
sharp bend beyond it and was out of sight careering down the first slope
of the valley run with sky and landscape sweeping upwards, mountains
gigantically sweeping upwards to the movement of her downward rush.
The dreaded bends arrived each too swiftly with its threat of revealing
upon the smooth length of the next slope an upward-coming sleigh or
village children steering down at large. Slope after slope showed clear
and empty, each steeper than the last, and here and there a patch of ice
sent her headlong, sent the landscape racing upwards until her heels
could find purchase for a steadying dig and bring back the joy of
steering forward forever through this moving radiance.
The fencing was growing lower, almost buried in deep snow. A sweeping
turn and ahead, at the end of a long smooth slope, the floor of the
valley, the end. From a drive of both heels she leaned back and shot
forward and flew, feet up, down and down through the crystal air become
a rushing wind, until the runners slurred into the soft snow, drove it
in wreaths about her, and slowed and stopped dead leaving her thrown
forward with the cord slack in her hands, feet down, elbows on knees
come up to meet them, a motionless triumphantly throbbing atom of
humanity in a stillness that at once kept her as motionless as itself to
listen to its unexpected voice: the clear silvery tinkle, very far away,
of water upon rock; some little mountain stream freed to movement by the
sun, making its way down into the valley. She listened for a while to
the perfect little sound, the way it filled the vast scene, and
presently turned to search the snowy levels, longing to locate it and
catch a glimpse, defying distance, of the sunlit runnel. The mountains
were cliffs upon the hither side, their shoulders and summits invisible
until one looked up to find them remote in the ascended sky.
Down here at their feet was _terra firma_, broad levels on either side
the windings of the frozen river that was trimmed here and there with
bare trees sparse and straggling, their gnarled roots protruding through
the snow that bulged its rim. A bird-cry sounded from a tree at the
roadside; on silent wings a magpie, brilliant in sunlit black and white
sailed forth and away across the wastes of snow. Birds and the tinkling
runnel, the sole inhabitants of this morning solitude.
* * * * *
Whose magic survived the long backward climb and the run down to the
rink amidst the sociable echoes of the morning’s tumult, survived the
knowledge that in the minds of these busy skaters it was merely the
bottom of the hill; nothing to do down there unless you were going on
down to the station to meet and sleigh up with someone newly arrived.
Here on their tree-encircled rink they were together all day as in a
room. Passing and re-passing each other all day long. Held together by
the enchantment of this continuous gliding. Everyone seemed to be
gliding easily about. Only here and there a beginner shuffled along with
outstretched jerking arms and anxious face. It was skating escaped from
the niggardly opportunities of England and grown perfect. Long sweeping
curves; dreaming eyes seraphic, even the sternest betrayed by the
enchantment in their eyes. There were many of these in this English
crowd. Many who knew there was absurdity in the picture of grown persons
sweeping gravely about for hours on end. Only a great enchantment could
keep them in countenance and keep them going on. Envy approached and
stared her in the face. But only for a moment. She could skate, rather
better than the beginners. In a day or two she could be sweeping
enchantedly about. It was a temptation answered before it presented
itself, only presenting itself because it could move more quickly than
thought: to be racing about on a sled was a reckless flouting of the
prescribed programme, but innocent, begun in forgetfulness. To have come
and seen, to sit and stroll about each day just seeing, would have been
joy enough.
But when she looked across from the grey crowded rink and its belt of
ragged bare trees to the mountains standing in full sunlight and filling
half the opposite sky and saw away above the pinewoods ascending beyond
the little bridge the distant high white saddle of the pass with its
twin peaks rising on either side—they startled her with their heightened
beauty. These enchanted skaters, cooped upon their sunk enclosure had
enlivened the surrounding scene not only by bringing forgetfulness of
it, but because she knew the secret of their bliss, had shared long ago
the experience that kept them confined here all day.
Gliding, as if forever; the feeling, coming even with the first
uncertain balance, of breaking through into an eternal way of being. In
all games it was there, changing the aspect of life, making friends
dearer, making even those actually disliked dear, as long as they were
within the rhythm of the game. In dancing it was there. But most
strongly that sense of being in an eternal way of living had come with
skating in the foggy English frost. And this it must be that kept all
these English eagerly and shamelessly fooling about on bladed feet;
eternal life.
It might be wrong. Wells might be right. Golf. There must be a secret
too in golf. The mighty swipe, the swirl of the landscape about the
curving swing of the body, the onward march? All these must count even
if the players think only of the science of the game, only of excelling
an opponent. Even in safe and easy games there is an element of
eternity, something of the quality there must be in sports that include
the thrill of the life-risk. Savage sports. Fitness, the sense of
well-being of the healthy animal? But what _is_ health? What _is_ the
sense of well-being?
“We know _nothing_. That at least you must admit: that we walk in
darkness.”
“And proclaim ourselves enlightened by awareness of the fact.”
A figure swinging swiftly up the rink, a different movement cutting
across the maze of familiar movements, drawing her eyes to follow it
until it was lost and watch until again it came by: clothed in uniform
purplish brown close-fitting, a belted jerkin, trousers, slenderly
baggy, tapering down into flexibly fitting boots. A strong lissome body
that beautifully shaped its clothing and moved in long easy rushes,
untroubled by shackled feet.
He was not perhaps doing anything very wonderful, just rushing easily
about, in the manner of a native of some land of ice and snow. But he
transformed the English skaters to jerking marionettes, clumsily
clothed, stiff-jointed. Visibly jointed at neck and waist, at knees and
ankles and elbows. Their skating seemed now to be nicely calculated
mechanical balancing of jointed limbs, each limb trying to be
autonomous, their unity, such as it was, achieved only by methods
thought out and carefully acquired. They seemed to be giving exhibitions
of style, with minds and bodies precariously in tune. He was style
spontaneously alive. His whole soul was in his movements.
She made her way to a near bench under the trees to watch for him.
Sitting there with her feet upon the ice she became one with the
skaters, felt their efforts and controls, the demand of the thin hard
blade for the perpetual movements of loss and recovery. Not all were
English, skating with reservations. Here a little Frenchman with arms
folded on his breast came by as if dancing, so elegantly pointed were
the swinging feet above which gracefully he leaned now forward now back.
Effortlessly. In his stroke there was no jerk of a heavy-muscular drive,
yet he covered as much space as the English, and more quickly. Behind
him an Englishwoman with a bird’s-wing pointing back along the side of
her little seal cap, going perfectly gracefully in smooth slight sweeps;
serene.
Near at hand two men practised trick skating, keeping clear the space
about them with their whirling limbs. They swept about with eyes intent,
and suddenly one or other would twirl, describe a circle with an
outflung leg and recover, with an absurd hop. Clever and difficult no
doubt, but so very ugly that it seemed not worth doing. The stout man’s
hop seemed as though it must smash the ice. Between their dervish whirls
they talked. They were arguing. Amiably quarrelling; the occasional
hysterical squeal in the voice of the stout man revealing “politics.”
They were at loggerheads over the housekeeping, the lime-lit, well-paid,
public housekeeping, “affairs,” the difficult responsible important
business that was “beyond the powers of women,” that was also “dirty
work for which women were too good”; wrangling. The stout man executed a
terrific twirl and brought up facing his opponent who had just spoken.
He advanced upon him bent and sliding, arms dangling low: “Just _so_,”
he chanted amiably and, recovering the upright, presented a face really
foolish, a full-moon foolishness, kindly perfection of inability to see
further than his good British nose: “We’re back at what I told Hammond
this morning: we _can’t afford_ to ignore the _Trades Union
Secretaries_.” With a swift turn he was off before the other man could
respond, skating away beyond their enclosure, smiling his delight,
staring ahead, with wise eyes, at nothing at all but the spectacle of
his opponent caught out and squashed.
The spectacle of his complacency was profoundly disquieting. He was the
typical kindly good-natured John Bull. Gently nurtured, well-educated,
“intelligent,” ready to take any amount of time and trouble in “getting
at facts” and “thinking things out.” And he was a towering bully.
Somewhere within his naïve pugnacity was the guilty consciousness of
being more pleased in downing an opponent than concerned for human
welfare. There was no peace of certainty in him. He had scored and was
flushed with victory. And all over English politics was this perpetual
prize-fighting. The power of life and death was in the hands of men
playing for victory; for their own side.
Morning and evening in some hotel that big man’s voice boomed
incessantly. Behind it a kindly disposition and a set of fixed ideas. No
mind.
“Don’t you skeete?”
Making for the bench, bent forward to reach it hands first was the
younger Croydon girl; behind her the other, rallentando, balancing to a
standstill.
She had greeted them, ere she was aware, with the utmost enthusiasm.
Smiling in their way, a gentle relaxation of the features that left them
composed, they stood about her, pleased to see and greet a stranger who
was also an old friend, renewing their great adventure. At the same time
they were innocently rebuking her outbreak.
In her suburban past she had instinctively avoided their kind, scented a
snare in their refined gentility, liked them only for the way, in the
distance, going decorously in pretty clothes along tree-lined roadways,
they contributed to the brightness of spring. Meeting them out here,
representative of England, the middle-class counterparts, in their
ardent composure, of the hotel people who so strangely had received her
as a relative, she wanted in some way to put forth her claim as one who
knew of old their world of villa and garden, their gentle enclosed
world.
“It’s glorious; we’re having a lovely tame,” said the younger, looking
away down the rink: an English rose, thoroughly pretty in the
characterless English way, shapely sullen little face, frowning under
the compulsion of direct statements. Her hair, that in the train had
been a neat bun, hung now in a broad golden plait to her waist where its
ends disappeared behind a large black bow like a bird with wings
outspread.
And now with one seated close on each side of her it was with difficulty
that she attended to their talk so clearly did it exhibit their world as
a replica of the one just above it: as a state of perpetual urbane
association; conformity to a code in circumstances more restricted, upon
a background more uniform, and searched by the light of a public opinion
that was sterner than the one prevailing above. All the bourgeois
philistine in her came forth to sun itself in their presence, zestfully
living their lives, loving their friends and relatives, ignoring
everyone who lived outside the charmed circle.
One against the other, they joyously relived the short time whose
sunburn had so becomingly accentuated their Blair Leighton fairness.
Their stories centred round the success or breakdown of the practical
jokes that seemed to be the fabric of life at their hotel ... all the
old practical jokes: even apple-pie beds. In and out of these stories
went Mr. Parry who was presently pointed out upon the ice; a stout
little dark man skating about at random, his movements visibly hampered
by the burden of his sociability, his eyes turning, to the detriment of
his steering, towards everyone he passed in his search for prey.
“He makes us all _roar_; every evening.”
There were others, some whose names and their rôles, as assistants or
willing victims of the schemes of Mr. Parry seemed sufficiently to
describe them, and, as central decoration in the picture, these two
girls newly arrived and certainly Mr. Parry’s most adored recruits,
ready trained by a brother in the science of practical joking, yet not
hoydenish; demure and sweet and, to his loneliness, the loneliness of an
undignified little man, not quite grotesque, and incapable of inspiring
romantic affection, figures of romance.
Growing weary of their inexhaustible theme—of waiting for the emergence
of some sign of consciousness of the passing moment, a dropping of
references backwards or forwards, that would leave them in league
together, there as individuals—she pressed them for personal impressions
of the adventure in its own right, the movement into strangeness, the
being off the chain of accustomed things. They grew vague, lost interest
and fell presently into a silence from which she pulled them by an
enquiry about the plait.
In the midst of the story of the plait and just as some people were
being pointed out who still thought them three sisters, two with their
hair up, and one with a plait who did not appear at dinner, came a
longing to escape, the sense of a rendez-vous being missed, with the
scene and the time of day. But her preparations for flight were stayed
by their payment for her interest in the plait. They plied her with
questions; presently they were offering to lend her skating-boots, and
choosing from amongst the guests at their hotel, people she would like.
They were pitying her, thinking that she must be having a poor time and
determined at once that she should do more than just stand upon the
edge, sunning herself in the glow of the life they were finding so
entrancing.
But her contemplation of the desert that must be, from their point of
view, the life of a woman obviously poor and apparently isolated, took
her for a moment far away, and when she returned the link between them
was snapped. Her silence had embarrassed their habit of rapid give and
take. Making vague promises, she took leave, rescued by their immediate
reversion to the forms of speech set for such occasions, from holding
forth upon the subject of the dead level of happiness existing all over
the world independent of circumstances. They would have thought her both
pious and insane.
* * * * *
All the afternoon they had been in harmony, strolling and standing about
together in the snow until there seemed nothing more to say; and after
each run there had been something more to say. Till Italy lost all
strangeness but its beauty and he had seemed a simpler Michael free from
Michael’s certainty that everyone in the world was marching to
annihilation. It was the discovery of a shared sense of life at first
hand that had made them not fear saying the very small things.
And suddenly there was a wall, dividing. No more communication possible;
the mountains grown small and bleak and sad and even now, in being alone
upon the promontory there was no peace, in all the wide prospect no
beauty.
Why was it so much a matter of life and death, for men as for women? Why
did each always gather all its forces for the conflict?
If all he said were a part of the light by which he lived he should have
been able to remain calm. But he had not remained calm. He had been
first uneasy, then angry, and then sorry for the destruction of their
friendship.
“The thing most needed is for men to _recognise_ their illusion, to
leave off while there is yet time their newest illusion of life as only
process. Leave off trying to fit into their mechanical scheme a being
who lives all the time in a world they have never entered. They seem
incapable of unthinking the suggestions coming to them from centuries of
masculine attempts to represent women only in relation to the world as
known to men.”
It was then he was angry.
“How else shall they be represented?”
“They _can’t_ be represented by men. Because by every word they use men
and women mean different things.”
Probably Italian women led men by the nose in the old way, the way of
letting them imagine themselves the whole creation. And indeed the
problem presently will be: how to save men from collapsing under their
loss of prestige. Their awakening, when it comes, will make them
pitiful. At present they are surrounded out in the world by women who
are trying to be as much like them as possible. That will cease when
commerce and politics are socialised.
“Art,” “literature,” systems of thought, religions, all the fine
products of masculine leisure that are so lightly called “immortal.” Who
makes them immortal? A few men in each generation who are in the same
attitude of spirit as the creators, and loudly claim them as humanity’s
highest spiritual achievement, condoning in those who produce them any
failure, any sacrifice of the lives about them to the production of
these crumbling monuments. Who has decreed that “works of art” are
humanity’s highest achievement?
Daphne, preceded by her hurried voice; followed by her maid carrying a
tray. She came swiftly in her manner of a small panting tug, eyes
surveying ahead with gaze too wide for detail.
“Put it there; near the lady.”
Hitching herself into a chair, she sighed deeply, but not to attract
attention, nor in the manner of a conversational opening. She had,
without self-consciousness, the preoccupied air of one who snatches a
tiresome necessary meal, grudging the expense of time. All her compact
stillness was the stillness of energy momentarily marking time. Her
face, distorted by efforts, mouth firmly closed, with a goodly bite of
the stout little roll, was busily thinking and talking. Continuous.
There was no cessation in her way of being, no dependence, none of the
tricks of appeal and demand that make most children so quickly
wearisome. Yet she was a baby sitting there; a lonely infant, rotund.
Her face came round, so perfectly impersonal in its gravity that Miriam
knew the irrepressible smile with which she met it for an affront, felt
herself given up to the child’s judgment, ready to be snubbed.
For a moment the round eyes surveyed her, deep and clear, a summer sea
in shadow, and then, with her head a little butted forward in the way
she had of holding it during her breathless sentences, she hurriedly
swallowed her mouthful and cried:
“You’re _nice_! I didn’t know!” Condemnation and approval together.
Scarcely daring to breathe she waited while the child drew near,
shouting for her maid who came grumbling and departed smiling when the
tables were drawn side by side.
“That’s-my-beecely-German-nurse-I-hate-her.”
“She talks German with you?”
“She talks. I don’t listen. She has a beecely voice. Vicky Vereker says
she can’t helper voice, can’t help being a silly stupid and Evil Eaden
didn’t say anything and Vicky said show him how she speaks.”
“And did you?”
“I should have been _sick_. Evil Eaden’s gone ski-ing again. Evil Eaden
likes Napoleon and Vicky doesn’t; he wouldn’t.”
“Why do you like Napoleon so much?”
“Because I like him because he’s the good dear little big one. Everybody
is the big silly small one almost.”
Meditating on Napoleon as a pattern for womanhood, Miriam heard the
returned ski-ers arrive upon the platform and watched the eager calm
little face that was still busily talking, for a sign.
“When I’ve done my beecely edjacation, when I go back to Indja,” it was
saying, looking out with blind eyes across the bright intolerable
valley.
Vereker’s voice, gently vibrant and sunny, sounded near by, and a deep
groan from Eaden just visible, collapsed in one of the small green
chairs.
“I’ve got to go now,” said Daphne, relinquishing her second roll and
sliding to the floor. Covering the small space with her little
quick-march, she pulled up in front of Eaden and stood surveying, hands
behind back, feet a little apart, head thrust forward. Napoleon in a
pinafore.
“You’re dead beat, that’s what you are.”
“Daphne, I am. I’m a broken man. Don’t pound me. But you may stroke me
if you like.”
On a table at his side stood a large brown bear on ski, his gift to her,
bought on his way home from the old woman at the corner and that now
they were surveying together. She had approached it with two little
eager steps and pulled up just short with her arms at her sides, volubly
talking just out of hearing but to his delight who heard and watched
her. Between her sallies she sought his face, to bring him to
contemplate and agree. Did it please her? She had not yet handled it.
Could anything please her? The giver and the giving were calling forth
her best, that moved him and Vereker as men are moved at the sight of
life in eager operation, spontaneous as they never seem to be,
commanding and leading them. Vereker was amused. Eaden disarmed and
delighted, protective of a splendour. Suddenly she seized the bear in
her arms and held it while she talked and put it carefully down and
looked back at it as she turned with her little quick-march to someone
calling from the house.
“It’s all right, Daphne.” Eaden’s voice eager, free of its drawl, crying
out in pity and wrath. He had leapt from his chair and was gathering and
fixing together the detached parts, bear and ski and pole found by
Daphne returned, lying as if broken upon the table at his side. She
stood speechless, a little forlorn child red-cheeked and tearful in
dismay. A little way off stood the Skerry youth with his grin.
CHAPTER V
What had brought this wakening so near to the edge of night? The
mountains were still wan against a cold sky, whitening the morning
twilight with their snow.
How long to wait, with sleep gone that left no borderland of drowsiness,
until the coming of their gold?
And in a moment she had seen forever the ruby gleaming impossibly from
the topmost peak: stillness of joy held still for breathless watching of
the dark ruby set suddenly like a signal upon the desolate high crag.
It could not last, would soon be plain sunlight.
Already it was swelling, growing brighter, clearing to crimson. In a
moment it became a star with piercing rays that spread and slowly tilted
over the upper snow a flood of rose.
Each morning this miracle of light had happened before her sleeping
eyes. It might not again find her awake. But it had found her awake,
carried her away in a moment of pure delight that surely was absolution?
And when presently the rose had turned to the familiar gold creeping
down to the valley it was more than the gold of yesterday. In watching
its birth she had regained the first day’s sense of endless time. To-day
was set in advance to the rhythm of endless light.
To-day was an unfathomable loop within the time that remained before the
end of Eaden’s visit, his short allowance that added, by being set
within it, to her own longer portion. His coming had brought the earlier
time to an end; made it a past, expanding in the distance. And beyond
his far-off departure was a group of days with features yet unseen.
Looking back upon that distant past it seemed impossible that the crest
of her first week was not yet reached.
Yet the few days that seemed so many had already fallen into a shape.
Morning blessedness of leisure smiled down upon by the mountains again
tawny in their sunlight, witnessed to by every part of the house
wandered through; rich sense of strength unspent; joy of mere going out
again into the wide scene, into the embrace of the crystal air; the
first breath of its piny scent, of the scent of snow and presently the
dry various scents confined within the little street, messengers of
strange life being lived close at hand; the morning dive into the baking
warmth of the post-office to find amongst the English vehement at their
pigeon-holes the sharpest sense of being out in the world of the free;
then the great event, the wild flight down to the valley’s sudden
stillness.
The afternoon with Guerini; but, after yesterday, there might be no
afternoon with Guerini: freedom instead, for fresh discovery until
tea-time, on the promontory in the midst of unpredictable groupings.
Sunset and afterglow, high day moving away without torment or regret;
the mountains, turning to a darkness in the sky; telling only of the
sure approach of the deep bright world of evening.
The gold-lit evening feast was still momentous, still under the spell of
the setting, the silent host who kept the party always new.
And it was in part the setting, the feeling of being out of the world
and irresponsible, that last night had kept Eaden a docile listener. He
had heard a little of the truth, at least something to balance the
misrepresentations of socialism in the Tory press. But he had heard in a
dream, outside life. Sitting on the stairs, huge in his meek correctness
of evening dress. There was, to be sure, in face of Vereker’s
determination, nothing else for him to do. But it was with one consent
that they had all three subsided on the wide stairs, secure from the
intrusions that menaced the little salon.
And it was only for a moment she had sunned herself in the triumph of
being claimed, forcibly enthroned in the sustaining blue gown upon the
red-carpeted stairs with the best of the hotel’s male guests a little
below on each side of her. After that moment there was only effort, the
effort to make things clear, to find convincing answers to Vereker’s
questions.
And there were no witnesses, only Guerini, coming from the salon and
apologetically past them up the stairs; and the maids, passing to and
fro.
There is no evening social centre in this hotel, no large room. That is
why these sports-people like it. The day is concentrated within the
daylight. The falling away after dinner is a turning towards the next
day’s work.
That Grindelsteig hotel must be rather fascinating. She thought I shared
her disapproval of people “running up and down balconies and in and out
of each other’s rooms all night long.” I did. Yet they are only carrying
out my principles....
She despises even those who come out for sport unless all day they are
risking life and limb. So fragile and brittle-looking, so Victorian and
lacy, yet living for her ski-parties with picked people from the other
hotels; going off at dawn, swallowed up until dinner-time and then,
straight to bed.
The social promise of the first evening has miscarried. The social
centre is the Oberland Ski-club; the rest, a mere putting in of time. I
am living on the outskirts, looking for developments in the wrong place;
have seen all there will be to see until the end of my stay.
Into the golden sunlight fell the clashing of morning sleighbells
describing the outdoor world. Listening to them she felt the vast
surroundings that lately had become a setting, owing part of its
entrancement to the delightful sense of success in a charming social
atmosphere, re-asserting themselves in their own right, accusing her of
neglect, showing the days winding themselves off to an end that would
leave her in possession only of the valley road and the fields beyond
the bridge.
The dawn had wakened to remind her. Watching the coming of the light she
had been restored to her first communion with it, back in the time when
the people downstairs had seemed superfluity, thrown in with the rest.
When all was over they would appear in the distance: bright figures of a
momentary widening of her social horizon, unforgotten, but withdrawn
into their own element; not going forward into her life as this winter
paradise would go forward, brightening her days with the possibility of
reunion.
This morning she would break the snare, be a claimant for a lunch
packet, an absentee for the whole day. With the coming of the far-off
afternoon, Guerini, looking down from his window on to the promontory
either to escape or to claim her company, would find no one there.
* * * * *
Even in terror there was gladness of swift movement that left her
pressed like a niched effigy into the wall of the drift as the beast
pranced by, revealing in its wake a slouching peasant; clear brilliant
eyes brooding amidst unkempt shagginess, pipe at an angle of jaunty
defiance to the steep his heedless tramping brought so near.
She was honourably plastered with snow and the precious package that had
leapt and might have hurled itself into the void was still safely on its
string about her neck, but the narrow rising path bereft of its secrecy
by evidence of homely levels above of field and farm was perhaps only a
highway for humiliating perils. More cows might be coming round the
bend; a whole herd. There might be—it would harmonise with the way life
always seemed to respond to deliberate activity with a personal
challenge—on this very day the dawn had drawn her away from beaten
tracks, a general turning out of cattle for an airing; mountain cattle,
prancing like colts.
Man and cow were now upon the widening path, approaching the sloping
field with the barn at the end, the cow trotting swiftly ahead, through
the half buried posts beside the sunken open gate, and now careering
hither and thither with flying tail, the powdery snow flung in wreaths
about its course. It was half mad of course, poor thing, with the joy of
release from one of those noisome steamy sheds whose reek polluted the
air surrounding them and saddened the landscape with reminder of the
price of happiness: oblivion of hidden, helpless suffering.
But in summer-time this air-intoxicated captive would stand knee-deep in
rich pasture; mild. Its colouring was mild, soft tan and creamy white,
in ill-arranged large blots; and with its short legs, huge bony mass of
head and shoulders from which the spine curved down as if sagging
beneath the weight of the clumsy body, it missed the look of breeding,
the even shape and colouring of lowland cattle. Its horns, too, had no
style, rose small and sharp from the disproportionate mass of skull.
* * * * *
Almost without warning, so slight in the dense pinewood was the sound of
its muffled gliding, the sled was upon her, heavy with piled logs and a
ruffian perched upon them: slithering headlong, fitting and filling the
banked path from side to side. Somehow she flung herself upon the
root-encumbered bank, somehow hitched her feet clear of the sled as it
rushed by. The villain, unmoved and placidly smoking, had not even
shouted.
No time to shout, no use _shouting_ she murmured breathless, smiling at
the absurd scene, a treasure now that danger was past, a glimpse into
local reality. But danger was past only for the moment. This pleasant
wide path she had mistaken for a woodland walk winding and mounting
safely amidst the peace of the pinewoods was a stern highway, almost a
railway; formed like a railway to the exact dimensions of its traffic.
Intently listening, going swiftly where the sides of the track were too
high for an escaping sprawl, she toiled on and up and came presently to
a gap and a view of the small hut seated clear of the pines, high
against the pure blue upon its curve of unblemished snow, come down now
nearly to her level and revealed as a châlet with burnished face,
inhabited: above its chimney the air quivered in the heat of a
clear-burning fire.
* * * * *
The hotel lunch, opened upon the trestle table, looked pert, a stray
intruder from the cheap sophisticated world of to-day into these rich
and ancient shadows. The old woman, but for her bell-like, mountainy
voice, was a gnarled witch moving amongst them, unattained by the cold
light from the small low windows that struck so short a way into the
warmly varnished interior.
And it seemed by magic that she produced the marvellous coffee in whose
subtle brewing was a sadness, the sadness of her lonely permanence above
the waste of snow and woods—old grandmother, a living past, her world
disappeared, leaving only the circling of the seasons about her emptied
being.
In this haunting presence the triumph of distance accomplished, the
delicious sense of known worlds waiting far below, world behind world in
a chain whose end was the far-off London she represented here in this
high remoteness, could not perfectly flourish, came in full only when
the silence had had time to fill itself with joy that was too strong to
be oppressed by the departed ancient voice that was like the echo of a
sound falling elsewhere.
* * * * *
Again, recalling the far-off morning, a dark barn-like room. But the
woman opened a door at the end of it, led the way through a passage
still darker: another door and she was out upon the edge of the world,
upon a dilapidated little grey balcony jutting over an abyss. As far as
sight could reach were sunlit mountain tops range beyond range till they
grew far and faint.
Faced alone, the scene, after the first moment’s blissfully ranging
perception, was saddened in its grandeur through the absence there of
someone else perceiving. Thousands, of course, had seen it from this
perch in the centre of the row of slummy little balconies. But so
splendid was the triumph of the unexpected mountains ranged and lit that
no company, even exclamatory, could break their onslaught. Alone, there
was too heavy a burden of feeling in the speechless company of this
suddenly revealed magnificence.
The woman coming out with the tea that one day she must take here
accompanied, was brisk about the view: an adjunct, thrown in gratis with
her refreshments which were good and which presently caused the
mountains, turned away from, to be felt preparing a friendliness;
becoming the last, best reward of her day’s accomplishments.
The way home down and down and across the levels to the rink and up the
little homely slope into Oberland would be a jog-trot taken half asleep
to the haven of things small and known amidst which she would sit
renewed, to-day’s long life-time stilled to a happy throbbing of the
nerves, a bemused beaming in the midst of friends. Its incidents blurred
that would come back one day clearer, more shining than all the rest?
Warned by a growing chill she turned to face the mountains in farewell
and found them lit by the first of the afterglow. Far away in the haze
beyond the visible distance a group of slender peaks showed faintly,
rose-misted pinnacles of a dream-city from whose spires would presently
gleam the rubies of farewell.
CHAPTER VI
The solitary excursion had made a gap in the sequence of days. Those
standing behind it were now far away, and yesterday had failed to bridge
the gap and join itself to their serenity. To-day looked shallow and
hurried, with short hours beyond it rushing ahead to pause in the
sunlight of the ski-fest and then to fly, helter-skelter towards the
end.
Eaden’s departure was helping time to hurry. In the distance it had
promised to leave things as they were before he came. But now that it
was at hand it seemed a sliding away of everything.
There was no depth in the morning light.
She turned to survey the scene on which it fell and saw the early gold
stealing faithfully towards the valley. Once Eaden had gone this
thinned-out urgency of time would cease. For everyone but Vereker his
going was only a removal of something grown familiar; a reminder, soon
forgotten, of the movement of time. Slight reminder. He reflected only
surfaces and was going away, unchanged, to reflect the surfaces of
another shape of life.
Yet last night he had talked. Had been less a passenger unable to take
root. It was he who had been the first to subside on the stairs—with a
groan for his hard day’s work. Perhaps the approach of his known life
had given him a moment of clairvoyance, showing its strangeness, the
strange fact of its existence.
Last night had been good, was showing now how very good it had been:
three friends glad to sit down together and presently talking, each
voice transformed, by the approach of the separation that would make it
cease to sound, to the strange marvel of a human voice. Everything said
had seemed important in its kindliness, and though there had been no
socialism he had talked at last of his peasants and his ceaseless
fighting with their ancient ways as though he wished to excuse himself
from accepting socialism, to point out its irrelevance to the life of
peasant and soil.
Industrial socialism had bored him. He thought its problems irrelevant,
raised by clever doctrinaires who had nothing to lose. She had failed
him by standing too much in one camp. The proper message for him came
from the people who saw land as the fundamental unit.
Tell him to look away from capital and wages. And read George. And the
Jewish land-laws, never surpassed.
“Good-bye. Please remember that work is an unlimited quantity.”
Then she remembered that this morning there would be a meeting at
breakfast. He and Vereker would be there together as on the first
morning; with time to spare.
But going into the dining-room she found his departure already in full
swing. He was talking, smiling across at Mrs. Sneyde and Miss Hollebone
with the eagerness of one who finds at the last moment the ice broken
and communication flowing the more easily for having been dammed up and
accumulating.
Sitting down unnoticed except by Vereker she presently heard Maud
Hollebone, to whom he had scarcely spoken, arranging, across the width
of the room, to hasten her departure.
They were going down to Italy together; as casually as guests leaving a
party and finding that their way home lies in the same direction will
share a hansom across London. To travelled people a journey to Italy was
as simple as crossing London. Was even a bore, a tiresome experience to
be got through as pleasantly as possible. Behind her manner of soncy,
quietly boisterous school-girl indifference Maud was pleased, but still
kept her poise, her oblivious independence—of what? On what, all the
time going about with Mrs. Sneyde, neglecting all opportunities for
recognising the existence of the house-party, aloof without being
stand-offish, was she feeding her so strongly-rooted life?
She was pleased of course to be carrying off as her escort the imposing
oiled bronze, now almost animated as he crossed to the little table to
discuss details and stood, a pillar of strength, at the disposal of the
two ladies now looking so small and Mrs. Sneyde, as she fired remarks at
him, so scintillating. She, no doubt, had her ideas and thought it an
excellent plan. But the sister already knew too late that it was not.
Had felt the project change during his approach with his week’s
happiness all about him, and realised now that she represented a
reprieve, was to be, by keeping Oberland before his eyes during part of
his long journeying, an extension of his holiday.
Standing at close quarters, already accustomed to her companionship, he
was aware, behind his animation, of sacrificing for the sake of it the
precious silent interval between his strenuous idling and the arduous
work ahead; was paying the price always paid for tumult half-consciously
insincere. The finding of Maud also immersed in the business of
departure and therefore seen in a flash of time as a comrade, had
enlivened him as one is enlivened by a greeting without regard to the
giver of it. That enlivening glow had already departed and he was left
reduced, with its results upon his hands.
It was settled. The elopement arranged and he, with his instructions,
moving off to clear her path. Perhaps secretly he was pleased after all.
Perhaps his life in the south was not a flight from society and he was
glad to be ever so slightly back again in its conspiracy to avoid
solitude. Glad to be walking again on those sunny levels where there is
never a complete break-off and departure. Never a void. Where even
sorrow and suffering are softened by beautiful surroundings.
Their windows, she reflected as Eaden, meeting the le Mesuriers at the
door was halted for farewells, even their hotel windows, give on to
beauty. And they can always move on. And soul-sickness, the suffering of
mind so often a result of fatigue and poor food and ugly surroundings,
was rare amongst them. They were cheerful and amused. If bored they
shift on and begin again. If bored by the life of society itself they
remain within it and cut figures as cynics.
“It’s only fair to warn you,” Maud was crying from her table, “that I’m
a vile fellow-traveller. Hate travelling.”
She rose and wandered to the window behind her table.
“You’re going to take away our property?”
Here she was, the unknown Miss Hollebone, close at hand, flopped in a
chair, school-girlish.
“Rather!”
Here in this warm circle was the old freemasonry of school-fellows, two
profiles slightly turned, abrupt remarks, punctuated by jabbings at
ink-stained desks, the sense of power and complete difference in
relation to a stuffy old world; sudden glances, perfect happiness.
Happiness that kept both quite still; hearing, feeling, seeing, in a
circle of light suddenly created, making possible only slight swift
words in whose echo one forgot which had spoken, which was which.
“What are we to do?” They faced each other to laugh delight.
“Don’t know. What we really want is _your_ socialism in _our_ world. The
socialist ways you have in your world without knowing it, because you
know no other ways.”
“You don’t object to us?”
“Good Lord, no! But just to cultivate you would be to go to sleep as you
are all asleep.”
“You a Londoner?”
“Till death us do part.”
“Lucky dog!”
Eaden was at her elbow to whom she turned with a guarded brightness,
slipped back into her own world, into the half-conscious conspiracy of
avoidance. Orderly world. A pattern world, life flowing in bright set
patterns under a slowly gathering cloud.
Its echoes followed Miriam into the deserted little salon. Through the
open door she heard a coming and going in the hall that at this hour
should be empty and eloquent of people spread far and wide in the
landscape. The bright pattern was flowing into a fresh shape, flowing
forward in its way, heedless of clouds, heedless of the rising tide. On
the little table was Daphne’s bear on ski, immortal.
And now in the hall the sound of her, demanding. Drawn to the door
Miriam saw Vereker taking the stairs two at a time, immersed in
friendship. And Eaden arrested in the middle of the hall by Daphne
up-gazing with white determined face.
“Look at me,” she was saying, and his down-bent face lost its smile.
“You’re not to go,” she said swiftly, in casual tone, and then
breathlessly, still searching his unmoved face, “You’re not to go.”
“That’s right, Daphne,” cried Vereker pausing on the stairs. “Make him
stay for the Fest, he wants to.”
Eaden watched her while she waited for Vereker’s footsteps to die away,
watched her in frowning concentration while her voice came again, the
voice of one who tells another’s woe: “Not for the Fest, but because if
you go away I shall die.”
Miriam turned swiftly back into the room, but she had seen the pain in
his face, seen him wince. Daphne on her last words had taken a little
impatient step and stood averted with clenched fists, and now their
voices were going together up the stairs, hers eagerly talking.
* * * * *
She made ready to go out amongst the mountains standing there in their
places as for countless ages they had stood, desolate, looking down upon
nothing.
A door opened at the far end of the corridor and Vereker’s footsteps
came swiftly trotting, went by and paused at a door further down: Maud
Hollebone’s, at which now he was urgently tapping. A few words at the
opened door and he had returned. A moment later came Maud, swishing
along at a run: for more discussion.
Her thoughts turned to the promontory within easy reach. But it would be
absurd to sit about visibly hung up by the bustle of events that were
not even remotely her events. It was too late to do the valley run and
walk back before lunch.
“I shall _die_.” Who was comforting Daphne? No one. No one could.
Somewhere outside she was disposed of, walking with her nurse,
uncomforted.
She peered into Daphne’s future, into the years waiting ahead, unworthy
of her.
Vereker’s door opened again, letting out the returning Maud; coming back
to go on with her packing, to talk to Mrs. Sneyde. The two of them,
surrounded by the opulence of wealthy packing, talking, skipping about
in talk: family affairs, and in both their minds Maud’s journey to Milan
with the mild and foolish bronze.
When the footsteps had passed she went out into the corridor and across
the space of sunlight streaming through Mrs. Harcourt’s door open upon
its empty room. Far away in the landscape, with those people from the
Kursaal, Mrs. Harcourt was forgetfully ski-ing, knowing nothing of all
this bustle.
But Maud’s door too was set wide. Her room deserted, neat and calm as
Mrs. Harcourt’s ... Where was Maud?
From the room beyond came Mrs. Sneyde, dressed for outdoors, brilliant
in green and gold, turning, coming forward with laughter and an
outstretched restraining hand, suppressing her laughter to speak in the
manner of one continuing a confidential talk; laughter remaining in her
eyes that looked, not at the stranger she addressed for the first time,
but away down the passage.
“I’ve just,” she whispered, “been in their room tyin’ up Daphne’s
finger. Cut it on one of their razors. The poor things were terrified.
Had her sittin’ on the table with her finger in a glass of water!
“No. It’s nothing; but those two great fellows were jibberin’ with
fright. She’s a little demon. Two towels on the floor. One all over
chocolate and the other bright with gore. They wanted to fetch old
stick-in-the-mud.”
“What a tragedy for Mr. Eaden’s last hours.”
“He’s not goin’; stayin’ for the Fest. Nobody’s goin’ but the dear
Skerrys.”
“Didn’t know they were going.”
“Nor nobody else. Till Ma suddenly began about her luggage. Wants to
save the sleigh fare. Vereker’s arranged it; the luggage is goin’ by the
Post and they’re toboggannin’; can’t you see them? ‘Whee don’t ye see
goodbee to Daphnee,’ says she to Tammas.”
Cruel, a little cruel.
“They found out a good deal about the peasants.”
“The _peasants_? The village desperadoes? _Is_ there anything to find
out about them?”
“The lives they lead.”
“Tammas been tryin’ to convert them? With his weak eyes? Through his
smoked glasses?”
“You know he smashed his glasses?”
“He would.”
“Yes. I heard his mother scolding him on the balcony and he slowly
trying to explain; all in that low tone, as if they were conspiring.”
“In an enemy camp. They were like that if you spoke to them. We all
tried; but by the time they’d thought and begun to answer you’d
forgotten what you said.”
“I suddenly remembered some glasses I’d been advised to bring. They
seemed astonished and suspicious and yet eager. ‘Try them on, Thomas,’
she said.”
“Tree them on, Tammas. I hear her.”
“And yesterday he handed them back jammy round the edges. I thought he
was tired of them. They said nothing about going. But he told me about
the peasants.”
“They had jam teas, on their own, upstairs.”
“Anyhow, they got in touch with the natives.”
“I ain’t surprised. Natives themselves.”
“With the people in the châlet behind.”
“Old Methuselah? Not difficult if you smash things. The old boy mended
Daphne’s watch. Of course she went in to see him do it. Went in
jabberin’ German which she _won’t_ talk with Frederika. Was there an
hour till I went to fish her out. Couldn’t see her, my dear—couldn’t see
_anything_; smoke, like a fog, couldn’t _breathe_. Made her out at last
squatting close up to the filthy old villain on his bench. Lost, in the
insides of watches. She’s goin’ to be a watchmaker now.”
“It must be his son.”
“Who must?”
“The one Thomas told me of. A woodcutter. Terrible. In the snow. It’s
only on snow they can bring the wood down from the higher places.
Someone bought a high copse, cheaply, because the higher——”
“Higher you go, the fewer—now I know what that means.”
“The cheaper. Over two hours climb from here; somewhere across the
valley. And the men and sleds must be there by daylight.”
“Poor devils!”
“Yes. And the horses for the climbing must be fed two hours before the
start. Sometimes they have to feed them before three in the morning. One
lot of men was caught up there by an avalanche and were there four days
before they could be got down.”
“Ai-_eee_; don’t tell us.”
“At the best it’s dangerous work. They get maimed; lose their lives. All
the winter this is going on. We don’t read their papers, don’t know the
people and don’t hear of it.”
“Isn’t it just as well? _We_ can’t help it.”
“It ought to be done some other way. Men’s lives ought not to be so
cheap.”
“How did Tammas get all this learning?”
“Speaks German.”
“Jee-roozlum!”
“And French.”
“And Scotch. And having no one to talk Scotch to, talks to the peasants,
about their trees. Daphne _hates_ the trees.”
“_Hates_ them?”
“Would like to make a big bonfire and burn’m all up.”
Miriam was silent, searching the green eyes for Daphne.
“Yes, that’s Daphne. She’s mad about Napoleon. Reads all the books.
Has’m in her room. I have to expound when she gets stuck. Won’t say her
prayers till we’ve read a bit of Bony. Won’t say ‘make me a good girl.’
Says ‘make me a man and a sojer.’ She and Eaden are as thick as thieves.
He’s an angel to her. I’ve got to be _hoff_. Goin’ to the Curse-all for
lunch. Maud’s there. She’s goin’ south to-morrow with the Chisholmes.”
“Before the Fest?”
“Chisholmes have got to pick up their kid somewhere. Maud’s had enough
of Switzerland for this year.”
CHAPTER VII
The clouds were a rebuke; for being spell-bound into imagining this
bright paradise inaccessible. The world’s weather cannot be arranged as
a conversation with one small person. Then how did the rebuke manage to
arrive punctually at the serenest moment of self-congratulation? As if
someone were watching ...
She looked levelly across the sunny landscape and the clouds were out of
sight. But there was a movement in the air, a breeze softly at work
ousting the motionless Oberland air.
She walked ahead, further and further into the disconcerting change.
Everything was changed, the whole scene, reduced to homeliness. She
caught herself drooping, took counsel and stiffened into acquiescence:
“I might have known. I’m accustomed to this. It removes only what I
thought I couldn’t give up. Something is left behind that can’t be taken
away”—and heard at once within the high stillness the familiar sound of
life, felt the sense of it flowing warmly in along the old channels, and
heard from the past in various tones, amused, impatient, contemptuous:
“You _are_ philosophical.” Always a surprise. What did they mean with
their “philosophical”? The alternative was their way of going on
cursing, missing everything but the unfavourable surface.
Someone has said that there is nothing meaner than making the best of
things.
The clouds made soft patches of shadow upon the higher snow. Beside the
angular sharp shadows growing upon the northern slopes they were
blemishes, smudgy and vague. But free, able to move and flow while the
mountains stood crumbling in their places.
The clouds were beautiful, slowly drifting, leaving torn shreds upon the
higher peaks.
Upon the ridge beyond the cloaked silence of the little wood the breeze
blew steadily from across the levels—that were strangely empty; no sign
of moving specks making for the further ridge. Hurrying along the track
she recalled too late the slightness of the information upon which she
had built her idea of the golden scene; the gay throng, herself happily
in the midst.
Without a single clear idea of the direction she had trusted to the
bright magic to draw her to itself.
The subtly changed air and the melancholy clouds re-stated themselves,
became the prelude to disaster. The increasing wind and the cloud-bank
hiding the distant mountains were proclaiming the certainty of
punishment well-deserved: to wander at a loss and miss the Fest.
She glanced at her afternoon in retrospect: aimless walking in a world
fallen into greyness and gloom, into familiarity that was already
opening the door to the old friend, at whose heart lived a radiance
out-doing the beams shed by anticipation over unknown things.
But all the time the ski-ing which now she was not to see would be going
forward, mocking her until she could forget it; until the hours it
filled should have passed into others bright enough to melt regret.
Climbing the rise beyond the levels she was at once climbing up to find
the Fest, would plod the landscape until she found it, late, but still
in time to share and remember. She reached the crest beyond the
rise—there it was: a small shape, like an elongated horseshoe, upon a
distant slope. Black dots close-clustered in a strange little shape upon
the wastes of snow, defying the wastes of snow.
There was plenty of space. Gaps on each side of the track and even
towards the top of the rise where people were grouped more closely about
the comforting, the only festal sign, looking like an altar with its
gold-embroidered, red velvet frontal. Nothing could be seen behind its
shelf but a small hut upon the levels that extended backwards until the
pinewoods began with the rising mountain-side.
Where to stand? Up amongst the connoisseurs to see the start, half-way
down with a view of the ski-ers coming, or at the bottom of the row
amongst the black-clothed natives standing about in scattered groups in
the loose snow.
Choosing a place half-way down she became one of the gathered crowd of
Oberland visitors lining the smoothed and steeply sloping course. They
were all there. The black and distant dots had become people in every
fashion of sport’s-clothes, standing on skis, sitting on toboggans,
stamping about in the snow, walking up and down; and all waiting, all
looking betweenwhiles expectantly up the track towards the deserted
altar. There was a good deal of talking. Here and there the incessant
voices of men who make a hobby of talking. But most of them talked
intermittently, in the way of these leisured English who veil their
eagerness as they wait half apologetically and wholly self-consciously
for a show. There patiently they would wait, good-humoured, not deigning
to be disturbed, not suffering anything to disturb their pose of amused
independence that looked so like indifference and masked a warmth.
Just across the way was a stout lady in a seal-skin coat and curiously
different snow-boots. She sat sturdily bunched on her toboggan and they
stuck out in front of her, close-fitting, the rubber soles curving
sharply to the instep and neatly down again into the shape of a heel.
She clasped a camera and her sallow heavy face was drawn into a frown
that remained there while she turned towards a voice sounding from over
the way:
“.... and we’ll just be _here_ till judgment _day_.”
“I was told,” she answered at large with face upraised, deep furrows
from nose to chin giving strength to her hanging cheeks, “I was to see
sky-jumping, but I see no men on their skys to jump.”
American continuousness held up in Europe, brought to despair by the
spectacle of tolerance.
Sunlight had gone and on the slope of the breeze small snowflakes
drifted down to the snow. For a while it seemed as though the gathering
in the white wilderness were there in vain.
From the group of black figures at the top of the rise a deep Swiss
voice sang out an English name. Heads were craned forward, but the altar
remained empty. The confronted rows were transformed. Each life, risen
to gazing eyes, waited in a stillness upon the edge of time.
The knickerbockered tweed-clad form arrived upon the shelf from nowhere,
leaped, knees bent and arms outspread, forward through the air upon the
long blades that looked so like thin oars flattened out, came down, arms
in upward-straining arches, with a resounding whack upon the slope and
slid half-crouching, gaining the upright, fully upright with hooked arms
swinging, at full speed to the bottom of the hill, went off in a wide
curve and was stopped, swaying, just not falling, in wreaths of whirling
snow.
Achievement. Thrilling and chastening. Long ago someone had done this
difficult thing for the first time, alone, perhaps driven by necessity.
Now it was a sport, a deliberate movement into eternity, shared by all
who looked on. She felt she could watch forever. Cold had withdrawn from
the snow and from the drifting flakes. One after another the figures
appeared at the top of the rise and leapt, making the gliding race to
the sound of cheers that now broke forth each time the forward rush
followed the desperate dive. For those who crashed and rolled, slanting
ski and sloping helpless body rolling over and over down the slope,
there was comment of laughter silly and cruel. Yet one man sliced his
face with a ski-point and one had lain stunned at the bottom of the
slope ...
Vereker came at last, looking very young and lightly built, leaping
neatly and far, and gliding easily upright, to the accompaniment of
frantic cheering, at a splendid pace down the slope and far on into the
loose snow and round in a sweeping curve that encircled a distant
sapling and left him facing up the track half-hidden in a cloud of
churned-up snow.
He was the best. Length of jump, pace, style. The best of the English.
And kind life had led her to him for speech, for the recovery of shared
things; and was making now more memories that fitted with the rest.
Skied onlookers were planking sideways up and down the course,
flattening it. Snow still fell thinly. The distant mountains were lost
in mist. The forgotten scene was utterly desolate. Warmth flowing forth
from within made a summer in its midst.
“Tsoor-_boo_-chn!” The strong spell-binding peasant name filled out the
ringing cry. Switzerland was coming, bringing its so different life of
mountain and pinewood, its hardy strength, perhaps to outdo the English
in this brave game.
Here he came, in black against his snow, deep velvety black against the
snow, gliding past the little hut with a powerful different gait. It was
partly his clothes, the way they seemed all of one piece, closely
fitting, without angles. And his size, huge. From the edge of the shelf
he leapt high into the air and seemed to stand there against the sky, in
a dream. Down he swooped, sailing, dreaming, to the track, rose smoothly
from the terrific impact and smoothly went his way.
What could be more beautiful? He was heavy and solid, thickly built. But
with his shapely clothing and smooth rhythmic movement he made the
English graceless and their clothes deliberately absurd.
All the Swiss, though some were rough and ungainly, moved with that
strong and steady grace. But Zurbuchen was the best. It was he who would
live in her memory, poised against the sky like a great bird.
* * * * *
“You took photographs?”
“For him,” smiled Vereker with his quizzical affectionate glance. “To
remind him of what he has to do next year. But we’ll share them. Yours
will remind you that next year you won’t be let off.” Eaden remained
silent and expressionless.
“They will look strange amongst your cypress groves.”
“They will look passing strange.”
“You will come out again?” She wanted neither to know nor to seem to
want to know, but Vereker had left him there for a moment on her hands.
She was caught in the social trap. Expected, being a woman, not to walk
off alone, but to wait and provide, while she waited, suitable
entertainment, some kind of parlour trick. For a moment it seemed as
though he would not answer. He was silent and used to stillness, yet
embarrassed now by stillness in the presence of a perceiving witness.
Another woman would not seem to perceive. Would have given her question
the semblance of sincerity.
“No,” he said suddenly. “If I go away at all next year I shall go east.”
“When you’ve ’eard the East a-callin’....” She turned to look towards
the returning Vereker. Eaden gazed away towards the snowy distances. He
was taking his farewell. To-morrow he would be gone back to his chosen
isolation, uninfluenced. Tender-hearted lover of brave souls, of Daphne,
and who yet would bring so little to his love-making. He stood in his
heavy silence, heavy man’s silence of waiting for recognisable things.
“Yes, that man knew what he was talking about.” Suddenly his friendly
beam and a forward approaching step, a turning away, at the first hint
of something he had heard before, from his formal preoccupation,
preoccupation with a glimpse of the next break in his unknown southern
life. She had nothing more to say. Vereker was at hand who had held them
at truce together. But now without Vereker they were at truce, the only
kind of truce he could understand.
For a moment she was aware, far away in the future, of one of whom he
was the forerunner, coming into her life for mortal combat.
CHAPTER VIII
In spite of her contempt for tobogganing she was going warily, slowing
up a little at the bends, a gnome in an extinguishing cowl, Mrs.
Harcourt, carelessly carrying her long past and the short future that so
strangely she regarded as indefinite, looking forward, making plans for
next winter with eager school-girl eyes; carelessly bringing the life
she carried about with her down to the valley this afternoon with
brusque cameraderie, her day-time manner.
Her company added something to the joy of flying through the
backward-flowing landscape. But it was shortening the run and fitting it
within reduced surroundings—making it show as it showed to her within
her larger scale of movement.
Here already was the steepest bend of the run, with the patch of black
ice across its middle. Mrs. Harcourt had passed it safely and
disappeared. It was past and a group of people came into sight midway
down the next slope: two figures pushing off and Mrs. Harcourt at the
side of the track, dismounted, beating her skirt. She had collided,
managed to run into them; a collision and a humiliating smash ...
“Fools! Fooling all over v’place. Had to slam into v’side.”
“A blessing the fence is broken just here.”
“Not their fault I’m not smashed up. I was yellin’ for all I was worth.”
“It’s _really_ dangerous when you can’t see what’s ahead. Someone said
tobogganing accounts for more accidents than any other sport.”
“Don’t wonder, with so many idjuts about. Where’s Daphne?”
“Held up, poor little soul. A broken cord, just as they were starting;
the maid went in for another.”
“Paw kid. She’ll be too late. No good waiting.”
They mounted and sped off one behind the other through a scene that was
now the child’s vast desolation. In place of joyous flight, selfish, in
which Daphne had been forgotten, came now this absurd urgency to arrive.
Mrs. Harcourt felt it. She was sorry, in her kindliness, for Daphne’s
disappointment, but saw nothing of the uselessness of arriving without
her. Thought of nothing but herself, her determination, her hatred of
being beaten. This made a shelter. Under the shelter of Mrs. Harcourt’s
determination to be there because she had said she would be there it was
possible to be seen rushing uselessly to the last farewell.
Another bend. Beyond it a sleigh coming up and Mrs. Harcourt carefully
passing it and the other tobogganers drawn up in the snow. It was safely
past. Mrs. Harcourt was getting ahead. Going recklessly. Even for her
there was something more in this desperate urgency than the mere
determination to arrive.
If she too were to arrive it was now or never. Now, at once, in the
midst of this winding ice-patched roadway, she must give herself up to
what she had learned on the safe snowfields and never yet dared to try
here until the last clear slope was reached. Lifting her feet to the
bar, leaning back to swing free and steer by weight she let herself go.
The joy of flight returned, singing joy of the inaccessible world to
which in flight one was translated, bringing forgetfulness of everything
but itself. Bend after bend appeared and of itself her body swayed now
right now left in unconscious rhythm. The landscape flew by,
sideways-upwards, its features indistinguishable. She was movement,
increasing, cleaving the backward rushing air.
At the last slope she was level with Mrs. Harcourt, safely, triumphantly
returned to the known world, passing her, flying down so blissfully that
arrival would now be nothing but an end to joy. Flying down towards two
small figures standing on the level, turned this way, watching up the
incline down which speeded, superfluously, absurdly, just these two
women.
“Where’s Daphne?” said Eaden in his rich, indolent voice; looking over
their heads, staring up the slope.
While Mrs. Harcourt’s deep bass, still staccato with her anger, told the
brief tale, she watched the pain and wrath in his face, strong man’s
sympathy of pain with this child to whose spirit he gave homage, anger
with those who had deserted her. Her useless explanation flickered about
him unspoken, silenced by the pain she shared.
“It’s no good, old man,” said Vereker gently, watch in hand: “we must be
off.”
Formal hand-shaking. To Mrs. Harcourt’s padding of sociable remarks he
paid no heed, keeping his eyes still above her on the bend at the head
of the slope until he turned to tramp off with Vereker, to the sound of
Vereker’s kindly, sunny voice.
“Paw kid. Eaden was frightfully wrath. Thought we ought to have brought
her.”
“I couldn’t have dared, down those slopes, on a small single,” said
Miriam wearily. But the judge within stood firm. She had not thought of
trying.
The now distant men were marching swiftly, reaching the point where the
road sloped downwards; had reached it and were settling on their
toboggans. A face came round. Miriam looked back up the slope still
cruelly empty, and round again to see the men seated, gliding off,
lessening. Their caps vanished below the level of the ridge. And now the
upward slope held a single small toboggan coming headlong. Daphne had
made the run alone.
“How _dare_ you let him go?”
Miriam moved forward surprised by her own approach. Her mind was filled
with the simple selfish truth. The wrath-blazing eyes saw it, recognised
her for what she was and turned away to the wastes of snow:
“Eaden, my Eaden ... I shall _never_ see him again.” Tears flowed from
the wide eyes and swiftly down the face so little convulsed by grief
that bent her, standing there with arms sideways out as if to save her
from falling, to keep her upright, facing her loss, fists clenched to
fight her woe. Of themselves Miriam’s arms reached forth to stay the
torment.
Incredibly Daphne was clinging, sobbing with hidden face: “Do you love
me—do you love me?” She held her without speaking, silenced while still
the broken voice went on, by the sense of being carried forward into a
world known only by hearsay and that now was giving forth all about them
in the stillness its ethereal sounds—sounds she had sometimes felt
within a gentle wind.
Daphne’s head was raised and her flushed face busy in eager speech as
they went forward together over the snow. When presently she assured her
that one day Eaden would come back, the child pulled upon her arm and
spoke in a new way of her new love. She spoke no more of Eaden, walking
sturdily uphill, eagerly talking, sunned for a while in humble helpless
love that soon must be removed.
* * * * *
With Eaden’s departure holding Vereker away until to-morrow and Mrs.
Harcourt disappeared upstairs with all those who sought sleep and early
rising, the hotel was empty, strange again and going its independent way
as on the day of her arrival. The presence of Guerini hidden away in the
little salon where daily he had spent his unimaginable evening of a
Milan business man on holiday, increased its emptiness, made it as
desolate as the world of his thoughts.
He must have learned something in seeing her evening after evening—not
in the least goloshy in her blue gown of many colours—seated on the
crimson stairs between the two Englishmen, in seeing discussion prevail
over personalities; new world for him of men seeking, without
sentimental emotion, without polite contempt, conversation with a woman.
Had any light dawned in him? Would he show any grace of dawning light?
She went into the little salon and there he was, rising to greet her,
with the look of a man penned within an office, the look upon his low
Italian brow of worry left over from his daily life. He looked common
too, common and ordinary—she wondered now that she could ever have
mistaken him for a musician wandered from Russia. But beside the
pathetic appeal of his commonness, supporting it, was the appeal of his
disarray, his obvious gladness and relief, like Michael coming back
after a last, final explanation and dismissal, saying impenitently: “You
whipped me yesterday, to-day you must not whip.” He was extraordinarily
like Michael in his belief in the essential irrelevance of anything a
woman may say.
It was his last evening in Oberland and the first time they had found
themselves alone together since the afternoons in the snowfields that
were now so clearly in his mind as he stood still turning over those
hopeless little old Swiss books, but turned towards her as she ensconced
herself in the chair from which so long ago she had watched Vereker at
the piano. Yet their life together had gone on. The grim little room was
full of it.
Again she had that haunting sense of being a collection of persons
living in a world of people always single and the same. Mrs. Harcourt,
she reflected as she said the books were like faded flowers, was
fastidiously selective and always one person, one unfaltering aspect.
Vereker, Eaden, all the others. Yet the lives she lived with each one
were sharply separated lives, separable parts of herself, incompatible.
The life she lived with Guerini, beginning unconsciously that first
evening when he had turned upon her throughout dinner his brown stare,
hurrying forward during their afternoons in the snow, ending with their
quarrel, begun again with the reproachful gaze he had sent across the
table on the evening of her truancy, had persisted during the
intervening time and was now marching off afresh on its separate way.
It was clear that these close questionings held not only the remains of
his surprise over the nature of the things that had separated them but
also his determination to try to see these things as she saw them. They
revealed much pondering, not over the things in themselves but over
their power with her, and presently it was clear that he meant to see
her again. She sat ensconced, considering him, measuring the slow
movement of his thoughts, the swiftness of the impressions he was
drawing from his attention to every inflection of her voice.
She knew she ought to go, that she was building up with every moment she
stayed in the room a false relationship. The cordiality of her voice,
its dreamy animation, was not for him nor made by him. It told its tale
to her alone. His talk of London had taken her thoughts there and she
saw it afar, vivid with charmed and charming people. For the first time
she was seeing London as people whose secret had revealed itself during
this last two weeks, and was at this moment beginning consistently to
live her life there as in future it would be lived, as she had lived it,
but unconsciously and only intermittently, during the past year.
This man appealed, she realised it now, from the first to a person who
no longer existed, to a loneliness that during the past years had been
moving away from her life. It was only in its moving that she had
realised its existence. This man saw her still as lonely and
resourceless; and also as interesting, something new in his narrow
experience. He too was lonely, had an empty life, in the busy business
man’s way of having an empty life: no centre and a lonely leisure. And
he was more than half bent on offering her the chance that so often in
the past had been at her elbow, of pretending herself into a single
settled existence, a single world, safe. Even now it was a temptation.
But it was the Italian background that was the real temptation. As soon
as he talked of settling himself in London he was lessened, and the
temptation disappeared. Life as a single conversation in a single place
with the rest of the world going by might seem possible when thought of
in all the newness of Italy. In London it at once fell into proportion
and became absurd.
In London was Hypo, held up, at any rate saying he was held up, and not
now so much awaiting her decision as taking it for granted. A big
shadow, that might turn into sunshine. A gleaming shadow that lost its
brightness as she faced it. And, behind it, a world that perhaps took
most of its glamour from this uncertain shadow.
CHAPTER IX
It was an urgent tapping on the wall from Mrs. Harcourt’s side, and she
was speaking as she tapped. With half-opened eyes Miriam grew aware of
darkness, half-darkness of early morning, and listened through the
companion darkness within her of the knowledge that this was her last
whole day, to this strange clamour from the lady whose nightly presence
at her side had been for so long forgotten.
“Look out of ve window!”
Sitting up in bed she saw hanging in mid-air just outside the window a
huge crimson lamp, circular in a blue darkness. Sleepily she cried her
thanks and leaped awake to dwell with the strange spectacle, the gently
startling picture, in its sudden huge nearness, of the loveliness of
space. The little distant moon, enormous and rosy in blue mist, seemed
to float in the blue as in blue water, seemed to have floated close in
sheer unearthly kindliness, to comfort her thoughts on this last day
with something new and strange.
The day passed with heartless swiftness, savourless. Full of charms
whose spell failed under the coming loss.
CHAPTER X
And for the last morning again a strange surprise. Mountains and valley
were hidden behind impenetrable mist, even the nearest objects were
screened by the thickly falling snow. Alpine winter tremendously at
work, holding her fascinated at windows downstairs, upstairs; mighty
preparation for the beauty of days she would not see, robbing her of
farewell, putting farewell back into yesterday’s superficial seeing
which had not known it was the last.
But when she was forced to turn away to her packing she found, within
the light of this veiled world that cast within doors a strange dark
brilliance, something of the London gloom, and the enjoyment of a
concentrated activity that had always been one of the gifts of a London
fog. It was as if already she were translated, good-byes said and the
journey begun. The hours ahead became a superfluous time, to be spent in
a Switzerland whose charm, since London had reached forth and touched
her, had fallen into its future place as part of life: an embellishment,
a golden joy to which she would return.
And when she saw the guests assembled at lunch in full strength it was
as though having left them for good she returned for a moment to find
them immersed in a life to which she was a stranger. Confined by the
weather, they had produced the pile of letters waiting in the lounge and
were now rejoicing in unison over the snowfall. In speech and silence
each one revealed himself, but as a dream-revival of someone known long
ago; and in the dream it was again as on that first evening when she had
sat a listening outsider, fearing and hoping to be drawn in, and again
it was Mrs. Harcourt who, when her association with these people was
seeming to be a vain thing cancelled, drew her in with a question.
The short hour expanded. Once more she was caught into the medium of
their social vision, into the radiance that would shine unchanged when
she was gone and was the secret of English social life and could, if it
were revealed to every human soul, be the steering light of human life
throughout the world. These people were the fore-runners, free to be
almost as nice as they desired.
And then, with the suddenness of a rapid river, her coming freedom
flowed in upon her, carrying her outside this pleasant enclosure towards
all that could be felt to the full only in solitude amongst things whose
being was complete, towards that reality of life that withdrew at the
sounding of a human voice.
It was already from a far distance that, alone with her upon the
landing, she promised Mrs. Harcourt remembrance and letters, said
good-bye and saw once more her first diffident eagerness; felt that it
was she, withdrawn since the first days, who had yet lived her life with
her, transferred something of her being into the gathered memories and
would keep them alive, keep the mountain scene in sight near at hand.
Alone in her room still thinking of Mrs. Harcourt, she remembered from
“Ships that Pass in the Night” how on the last day all but one person
had forgotten the departing guest.
Then in getting up from lunch she had seen them all, unknowing, for the
last time—as yesterday the mountains. For all these people hidden away
in their rooms, immersed in their own affairs, she was already a figure
slid away and forgotten. With the paying of Frau Knigge’s bill her last
link with the Alpenstock had been snapped.
But when the coach-horn sounded and she went down into the hall, there
they all were, gathering round, seeing her off. Hurriedly, with the door
open upon the falling snow and the clashing of sleighbells, she clasped
for the first time strange and friendly hands, saw, in eyes met full and
near, welcome from worlds she had not entered. Beside the door she met
Daphne forgotten, who clutched and drew her back into the window space
for desperate clinging, and entreaties sounding lest for this new
slow-witted lover the searching gaze should not be enough.
It was not until she was inside the dark coach and its occupants had
thanked heaven she was English and let down a window, that she
remembered Vereker. He alone had made no farewell.
The coach pulled up outside the post-office and there he stood in the
driving snow, and all the way down the valley she saw them one by one
and saw him standing in great-coat and woollen helmet, heard his elegant
light distressful voice begging her to come out next year.
And brighter now than the setting they had charmed was the glow these
people had left in her heart. They had changed the aspect of life, given
it the promise of their gentle humanity, given her a frail link with
themselves and their kind.
She climbed into a carriage whose four corners were occupied and sat
down to the great journeying.
“History repeats itself.”
Looking up she found all about her the family from Croydon, met the
father’s quizzical brown eyes.
“Had a farewell kick-up at our place last night. We’re feeling the
effects. _You_ look very fit. Enjoyed yourself?”
“I’ve had a splendid time.”
“You collared the handsomest man in Oberland anyhow—that young giant of
a Russian.”
“Italian.”
“Bless my soul! Hear that, Doris?”
“We were up till _fave_ this morning,” said Doris.
The train moved off, but only Doris, once more grown-up with her hair in
a staid bun under her English winter hat, turned to watch the station
disappear.
“Want to go back, Doris?”
“Ah love,” she breathed devoutly, “could thou and aye with feete
conspire——”
Miriam joined the sister in intoning the rest of the lines.
“Ah Moon——” began Doris, and the brother leaned forward holding towards
her a gloved hand whose thumb protruded through a fraying gap:
“A little job for you in Paris.”
She regarded it undisturbed and turned away the scornful sweetness of
her face towards the window and the snowflakes falling thickly upon the
shroud of snow.
Transcriber’s Notes
The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical
errors were silently corrected. Further careful corrections, some after
consulting other editions, are listed here (before/after):
[p. 46]:
... “Schön, die letzte Gluh,” he said quietly. ...
... “Schön, die letzte Glüh,” he said quietly. ...
[p. 57]:
... “Man soll sich des Leben’s freuen, im Berg ...
... “Man soll sich des Lebens freuen, im Berg ...
[p. 57]:
... und Thal. In so wass kann sich ein’ Engländerin ...
... und Thal. In so was kann sich ein’ Engländerin ...
[p. 148]:
... his own path from which his tacit meeting ...
... his own path from which this tacit meeting ...
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