She appeared with the wine and bread.
'Would you like omelette after the beef?' she asked. 'Omelette with
cognac--I can make it _very_ good.'
I knew I should be spending too much, but I said yes. After all, why
should I not eat, after the long walk?
So she left me again, whilst I sat in the utter isolation and stillness,
eating bread and drinking the wine, which was good. And I listened for
any sound: only the faint noise of the stream. And I wondered, Why am I
here, on this ridge of the Alps, in the lamp-lit, wooden, close-shut
room, alone? Why am I here?
Yet somehow I was glad, I was happy even: such splendid silence and
coldness and clean isolation. It was something eternal, unbroachable: I
was free, in this heavy, ice-cold air, this upper world, alone. London,
far away below, beyond, England, Germany, France--they were all so
unreal in the night. It was a sort of grief that this continent all
beneath was so unreal, false, non-existent in its activity. Out of the
silence one looked down on it, and it seemed to have lost all
importance, all significance. It was so big, yet it had no significance.
The kingdom of the world had no significance: what could one do but
wander about?
The woman came with my soup. I asked her, did not many people come in
the summer. But she was scared away, she did not answer, she went like a
leaf in the wind. However, the soup was good and plentiful.
She was a long time before she came with the next course. Then she put
the tray on the table, and looking at me, then looking away,
shrinking, she said:
'You must excuse me if I don't answer you--I don't hear well--I am
rather deaf.'
I looked at her, and I winced also. She shrank in such simple pain from
the fact of her defect. I wondered if she were bullied because of it, or
only afraid lest visitors would dislike it.
She put the dishes in order, set me my plate, quickly, nervously, and
was gone again, like a scared chicken. Being tired, I wanted to weep
over her, the nervous, timid hen, so frightened by her own deafness. The
house was silent of her, empty. It was perhaps her deafness which
created this empty soundlessness.
When she came with the omelette, I said to her loudly:
'That was very good, the soup and meat.' So she quivered nervously, and
said, 'Thank you,' and I managed to talk to her. She was like most deaf
people, in that her terror of not hearing made her six times worse than
she actually was.
She spoke with a soft, strange accent, so I thought she was perhaps a
foreigner. But when I asked her she misunderstood, and I had not the
heart to correct her. I can only remember she said her house was always
full in the winter, about Christmas-time. People came for the winter
sport. There were two young English ladies who always came to her.
She spoke of them warmly. Then, suddenly afraid, she drifted off again.
I ate the omelette with cognac, which was very good, then I looked in
the street. It was very dark, with bright stars, and smelled of snow.
Two village men went by. I was tired, I did not want to go to the inn.
So I went to bed, in the silent, wooden house. I had a small bedroom,
clean and wooden and very cold. Outside, the stream was rushing. I
covered myself with a great depth of featherbed, and looked at the
stars, and the shadowy upper world, and went to sleep.
In the morning I washed in the ice-cold water, and was glad to set out.
An icy mist was over the noisy stream, there were a few meagre, shredded
pine-trees. I had breakfast and paid my bill: it was seven francs--more
than I could afford; but that did not matter, once I was out in the air.
The sky was blue and perfect, it was a ringing morning, the village was
very still. I went up the hill till I came to the signpost. I looked
down the direction of the Furka, and thought of my tired Englishman from
Streatham, who would be on his way home. Thank God I need not go home:
never, perhaps. I turned up the track to the left, to the Gothard.
Standing looking round at the mountain-tops, at the village and the
broken castle below me, at the scattered debris of Andermatt on the moor
in the distance, I was jumping in my soul with delight. Should one ever
go down to the lower world?
Then I saw another figure striding along, a youth with knee-breeches and
Alpine hat and braces over his shirt, walking manfully, his coat slung
in his rucksack behind. I laughed, and waited. He came my way.
'Are you going over the Gothard?' I said.
'Yes,' he replied. 'Are you also?'
'Yes' I said. 'We will go together.'
So we set off, climbing a track up the heathy rocks.
He was a pale, freckled town youth from Basel, seventeen years old. He
was a clerk in a baggage-transport firm--Gondrand Frères, I believe. He
had a week's holiday, in which time he was going to make a big circular
walk, something like the Englishman's. But he was accustomed to this
mountain walking: he belonged to a Sportverein. Manfully he marched in
his thick hob-nailed boots, earnestly he scrambled up the rocks.
We were in the crest of the pass. Broad snow-patched slopes came down
from the pure sky; the defile was full of stones, all bare stones,
enormous ones as big as a house, and small ones, pebbles. Through these
the road wound in silence, through this upper, transcendent desolation,
wherein was only the sound of the stream. Sky and snow-patched slopes,
then the stony, rocky bed of the defile, full of morning sunshine: this
was all. We were crossing in silence from the northern world to
the southern.
But he, Emil, was going to take the train back, through the tunnel, in
the evening, to resume his circular walk at Göschenen.
I, however, was going on, over the ridge of the world, from the north
into the south. So I was glad.
We climbed up the gradual incline for a long time. The slopes above
became lower, they began to recede. The sky was very near, we were
walking under the sky.
Then the defile widened out, there was an open place before us, the very
top of the pass. Also there were low barracks, and soldiers. We heard
firing. Standing still, we saw on the slopes of snow, under the radiant
blue heaven, tiny puffs of smoke, then some small black figures crossing
the snow patch, then another rattle of rifle-fire, rattling dry and
unnatural in the upper, skyey air, between the rocks.
'_Das ist schön_,' said my companion, in his simple admiration.
'_Hübsch_,' I said.
'But that would be splendid, to be firing up there, manoeuvring up in
the snow.'
And he began to tell me how hard a soldier's life was, how hard the
soldier was drilled.
'You don't look forward to it?' I said.
'Oh yes, I do. I want to be a soldier, I want to serve my time.'
'Why?'I said.
'For the exercise, the life, the drilling. One becomes strong.'
'Do all the Swiss want to serve their time in the army?' I asked.
'Yes--they all want to. It is good for every man, and it keeps us all
together. Besides, it is only for a year. For a year it is very good.
The Germans have three years--that is too long, that is bad.'