of climbers, tourists, shepherds; people singing, pipes playing, an
occasional horn, and even the puffing and whistling of at least several
funiculaires in the valley. But now all these are hushed and gone
away--dead. Only silence reigns. Even above, among the precipices and
ridges, there is no crack and thunder of falling stones, for the sun has
hardly time to melt their fastenings and send them down; no hiss of
sliding snow, no roar of avalanches. The very wind, too, whirring over
this upper world too softly cushioned with thick snow to permit
“noise”--even the wind is muted and afraid to cry aloud. I know nothing
more impressive than the silence that overwhelms the world of these high
slopes. The faint “sishing” of the ski as one flies over the powdery
snow becomes almost loud in the ears by comparison. And with this
silence that holds true awe comes that other characteristic of the
Winter Alps--their _immobility_; that is, I mean, of course, the
immobility of the various items that crowd their surface in summer with
movement. All the engines that produce movement have withdrawn deep
within their frozen selves, and lie smothered and asleep. The waving
grasses are still, beneath three metres of snow; the shelves that in
July so busily discharge their weights of snow into the depths stand
rigid and fastened to the cliffs by nails of giant ice. Nothing moves,
slides, stirs, or bends; all is inflexible and fixed. The very trees,
loaded with piled-up masses of snow, stand like things of steel pinned
motionless against the background of running slope or blue-black sky.
Above all, the tumbling waters that fill the hollows of all these upper
valleys with their dance of foam and spray, and with their echoing sweet
thunder, are silent and invisible. One cannot even guess the place where
they have been. Here sit Silence and Immobility, terrifically enthroned
and close to heaven.
The Alps, tainted in summer with vulgarity, in winter are set free; for
the hordes of human beings that scuttle about the fields at their base
are ignored by the upper regions. Those few who dare the big peaks are
perforce worthy, and the bold ski-runners who challenge the hazards of
the long, high courses are themselves, like the birds, almost a part of
the mountain life. The Alps, as a whole, retire into their ancient
splendour.
Yet their winter moods hold moments of tenderness as well, and of
colour, too, that at first the strong black and white might seem to
deny. The monotony of the snow-world comes to reveal itself as a
monotony of surface only, thinly hiding an exquisite variety. The
shading is so delicate, however, that it eludes capture by words almost.
Half unearthly seem to me sometimes the faint veils of tinted blues,
greys, and silvers that lie caught upon those leagues of upper snow;
half hidden in the cuplike hollows, nestling just beneath the curved lip
of some big drift, or sifted like transparent coloured powder over half
a hill when the sun is getting low. Under boulders, often, they lie so
deep and thick that one might pick them up with the hands--rich, dark
blues that seem almost to hold substance. And the purple troops of them
that cloak the snow to the eastward of the pine forests surpass anything
that summer can ever dream of, much less give. The long icicles that
hang from branch or edge of stones, sparkling in the sun while they drip
with sounds like the ticking of a clock, flash with crowded colours of a
fairy world. And at the centre of the woods there are blacks that might
paint all London, yet without suffering loss.
At dawn, or towards sunset, the magic is bewildering. The wizardry of
dreams lies over the world. Even the village street becomes
transfigured. These winter mountains then breathe forth for a moment
something of the glory the world knew in her youth before the coming of
men. The ancient gods come close. One feels the awful potentialities of
this wonderful white and silent landscape. Into the terms of modern
life, however, it is with difficulty, if at all, translatable. Before
the task was half completed, someone would come along with weights and
scales in his hand and mention casually the exact mass and size and
composition of it all--and rob the wondrous scene of half its awe and
_all_ its wonder.
The gathering of the enormous drifts that begins in November and
continues until March is another winter fact that touches the
imagination. The sight of these vast curled waves of snow is undeniably
impressive--accumulating with every fresh fall for delivery in the
spring. The stored power along those huge steep slopes is prodigious,
for when it breaks loose with the first _Föhn_ wind of April, the trees
snap before it like little wooden matches, and the advance wind that
heralds its coming can blow down a solid châlet like a playing-card. One
finds these mighty drifts everywhere along the ridges, smooth as a
billiard-table along the surface, their projecting cornices running out
into extensions that alter the entire shape of the ridge which supports
them. They are delicately carved by the wind, curved and lined into
beautiful sweeping contours that suggest suddenly arrested movement.
Chamois tracks may be seen sometimes up to the very edge--the thin,
pointed edge that hangs over the abyss. One thinks of an Atlantic
suddenly changed into a solid frozen white, and as one whips by on ski
it often seems as though these gigantic waves ran flying after, just
about to break and overwhelm the valley. Outlined on a cloudless day
against the skies of deep wintry blue--seen thus from below--they
present a spectacle of weirdest beauty. And the silence, this thick,
white-coated silence that surrounds them, adds to their singular forms
an element of desolate terror that is close to sublimity.
The whole point of the Winter Alps, indeed, is that they then reveal
themselves with immensities of splendour and terror that the familiarity
of summer days conceals. The more gaunt and sombre peaks, perhaps,
change little from one season to another--like the sinister tooth of the
old Matterhorn, for instance, that is too steep for snow to gather and
change its aspect. But the general run of summits stand aloof in winter
with an air of inaccessibility that adds vastly to their essential
majesty. The five peaks of the Dent du Midi, to take a well-known group,
that smile a welcome to men and women by the score in August, retreat
with the advent of the short dark days into a remoter heaven, whence
they frown down, genuinely terrific, with an aspect that excites worship
rather than attack. In their winter seclusion, dressed in black and
white, they belong to the clouds and tempests, rather than to the fields
and woods out of which they grow. Watch them, for instance, on a January
morning in the dawn, when the wild winds toss the frozen powdery snow
hundreds of feet into the air from all their summits, and upon this
exaggerated outline of the many-toothed ridge the sunrise strikes in red
and gold--and you may see a sight that is not included in the very
finest of the summer’s repertoire.
But it is at night, beneath the moon, that the Winter Alps become really
supreme. The shadows are pitch black, the snow dazzling as with a
radiance of its own, the “battlements that on their front bear stars”
loom awfully out of the sky. In close-shuttered châlets the peasants
sleep. In the brilliant over-heated salons of hotels hundreds of little
human beings dance and make music and play bridge. But out there, in
this silent world of ice and stars, the enormous mountains dream
solemnly upon their ancient thrones, unassailable, alone in the heavens,
forgotten. The Alps, in these hours of the long winter night, come
magnificently into their own.
XXIX
THE SECOND GENERATION
Sometimes, in a moment of sharp experience, comes that vivid flash of
insight that makes a platitude suddenly seem a revelation: its full
content is abruptly realised. “Ten years _is_ a long time, yes,” he
thought, as he walked up the drive to the great Kensington house where
she still lived.
Ten years--long enough, at any rate, for her to have married and for her
husband to have died. More than that he had not heard, in the outlandish
places where life had cast him in the interval. He wondered whether
there had been any children. All manner of thoughts and questions,
confused a little, passed across his mind. He was well-to-do now, though
probably his entire capital did not amount to her income for a single
year. He glanced at the huge, forbidding mansion. Yet that pride was
false which had made of poverty an insuperable obstacle. He saw it now.
He had learned values in his long exile.
But he was still ridiculously timid. This confusion of thought, of
mental images rather, was due to a kind of fear, since worship ever is
akin to awe. He was as nervous as a boy going up for a _viva voce_; and
with the excitement was also that unconquerable sinking--that horrid
shrinking sensation that excessive shyness brings. Why in the world had
he come? Why had he telegraphed the very day after his arrival in
England? Why had he not sent a tentative, tactful letter, feeling his
way a little?
Very slowly he walked up the drive, feeling that if a reasonable chance
of escape presented itself he would almost take it. But all the windows
stared so hard at him that retreat was really impossible now; and though
no faces were visible behind the curtains, all had seen him. Possibly
she herself--his heart beat absurdly at the extravagant suggestion. Yet
it was odd; he felt so certain of being seen, and that someone watched
him. He reached the wide stone steps that were clean as marble, and
shrank from the mark his boots must make upon their spotlessness. In
desperation, then, before he could change his mind, he touched the bell.
But he did not hear it ring--mercifully; that irrevocable sound must
have paralysed him altogether. If no one came to answer, he might still
leave a card in the letter-box and slip away. Oh, how utterly he
despised himself for such a thought! A man of thirty with such a chicken
heart was not fit to protect a child, much less a woman. And he
recalled with a little stab of pain that the man she married had been
noted for his courage, his determined action, his inflexible firmness in
various public situations, head and shoulders above lesser men. What
presumption on his own part ever to dream ...! He remembered, too, with
no apparent reason in particular, that this man had a grown-up son
already, by a former marriage.
And still no one came to open that huge, contemptuous door with its so
menacing, so hostile air. His back was to it, as he carelessly twirled
his umbrella, but he “felt” its sneering expression behind him while it
looked him up and down. It seemed to push him away. The entire mansion
focused its message through that stern portal: Little timid men are not
welcomed here.
How well he remembered the house! How often in years gone by had he not
stood and waited just like this, trembling with delight and
anticipation, yet terrified lest the bell should be answered and the
great door actually swung wide! Then, as now, he would have run, had he
dared. He was still afraid; his worship was so deep. But in all these
years of exile in wild places, farming, mining, working for the position
he had at last attained, her face and the memory of her gracious
presence had been his comfort and support, his only consolation, though
never his actual joy. There was so little foundation for it all, yet
her smile, and the words she had spoken to him from time to time in
friendly conversation, had clung, inspired, kept him going. For he knew
them all by heart. And, more than once, in foolish optimistic moods, he
had imagined, greatly daring, that she possibly had meant more....
He touched the bell a second time--with the point of his umbrella. He
meant to go in, carelessly as it were, saying as lightly as might be,
“Oh, I’m back in England again--if you haven’t _quite_ forgotten my
existence--I could not forgo the pleasure of saying how do you do, and
hearing that you are well ...,” and the rest; then presently bow himself
easily out--into the old loneliness again. But he would at least have
seen her; he would have heard her voice, and looked into her gentle,
amber eyes; he would have touched her hand. She might even ask him to
come in another day and see her! He had rehearsed it all a hundred
times, as certain feeble temperaments do rehearse such scenes. And he
came rather well out of that rehearsal, though always with an aching
heart, the old great yearnings unfulfilled. All the way across the
Atlantic he had thought about it, though with lessening confidence as
the time drew near. The very night of his arrival in London, he wrote;
then, tearing up the letter (after sleeping over it), he had telegraphed
next morning, asking if she would be in. He signed his surname--such a
very common name, alas! but surely she would know--and her reply,
“Please call 4.30,” struck him as oddly worded--rather.... Yet here he
was.
There was a rattle of the big door knob, that aggressive, hostile knob
that thrust out at him insolently like a fist of bronze. He started,
angry with himself for doing so. But the door did not open. He became
suddenly conscious of the wilds he had lived in for so long; his clothes
were hardly fashionable; his voice probably had a twang in it, and he
used tricks of speech that must betray the rough life so recently left.
What would she think of him--now? He looked much older, too. And how
brusque it was to have telegraphed like that! He felt awkward, gauche,
tongue-tied, hot and cold by turns. The sentences, so carefully
rehearsed, fled beyond recovery.
Good heavens--the door was open! It had been open for some minutes. It
moved on big hinges noiselessly. He acted automatically--just like an
automaton; he heard himself asking if her ladyship was at home, though
his voice was nearly inaudible. The next moment he was standing in the
great, dim hall, so poignantly familiar, and the remembered perfume
almost made him sway. He did not hear the door close, but he knew. He
was caught. The butler betrayed an instant’s surprise--or was it
overwrought imagination again?--when he gave his name. It seemed to
him, though only later did he grasp the significance of that curious
intuition--that the man had expected another caller instead. The man
took his card respectfully, and disappeared. These flunkeys, of course,
were so marvellously trained. He was too long accustomed to straight
question and straight answer; but here, in the Old Country, privacy was
jealously guarded with such careful ritual.
And, almost immediately, the butler returned with his expressionless
face again, and showed him into the large drawing-room on the ground
floor that he knew so well. Tea was on the table--tea for one. He felt
puzzled. “If you will have tea first, sir, her ladyship will see you
afterwards,” was what he heard. And though his breath came thickly, he
asked the question that forced itself up and out. Before he knew what he
was saying, he asked it: “Is she ill?” Oh no, her ladyship was “quite
well, thank you, sir. If you will have tea first, sir, her ladyship will
see you afterwards.” The horrid formula was repeated, word for word. He
sank into an arm-chair and mechanically poured out his own tea. What he
felt he did not exactly know. It seemed so unusual, so utterly
unexpected, so unnecessary, too. Was it a special attention, or was it
merely casual? That it could mean anything else did not occur to him.
How was she busy, occupied--not here to give him tea? He could not
understand it. It seemed such a farce, having tea alone like this; it
was like waiting for an audience; it was like a doctor’s or a dentist’s
room. He felt bewildered, ill at ease, cheap.... But after ten years in
primitive lands ... perhaps London usages had changed in some
extraordinary manner. He recalled his first amazement at the
motor-omnibuses, taxicabs, and electric tubes. All were new. London was
otherwise than when he left it. Piccadilly and the Marble Arch
themselves had altered. And, with his reflection, a shade more
confidence stole in. She knew that he was there; and presently she would
come in and speak with him, explaining everything by the mere fact of
her delicious presence. He was ready for the ordeal; he would see
her--and drop out again. It was worth all manner of pain, even of
mortification. He was in her house, drinking her tea, sitting in a chair
she even perhaps used herself. Only--he would never dare to say a word,
or make a sign that might betray his changeless secret. He still felt
the boyish worshipper, worshipping in dumbness from a distance, one of a
group of many others like himself. Their dreams had faded, his had
continued, that was the difference. Memories tore and raced and poured
upon him. How sweet and gentle she had always been to him! He used to
wonder sometimes.... Once, he remembered, he had rehearsed a
declaration--but, while rehearsing, the big man had come in and captured
her, though he had only read the definite news long after by chance in
the Arizona paper....
He gulped his tea down. His heart alternately leaped and stood still. A
sort of numbness held him most of that dreadful interval, and no clear
thought came at all. Every ten seconds his head turned towards the door
that rattled, seemed to move, yet never opened. But any moment now it
_must_ open, and he would be in her very presence, breathing the same
air with her. He would see her, charge himself with her beauty once more
to the brim, and then go out again into the wilderness--the wilderness
of life--without her--and not for a mere ten years, but for always. She
was so utterly beyond his reach. He felt like a backwoodsman. He was a
backwoodsman.
For one thing only was he duly prepared--though he thought about it
little enough: she would, of course, have changed. The photograph he
owned, cut from an illustrated paper, was not true now. It might even be
a little shock perhaps. He must remember that. Ten years cannot pass
over a woman without----
Before he knew it, then, the door was open, and she was advancing
quietly towards him across the thick carpet that deadened sound. With
both hands outstretched she came, and with the sweetest welcoming smile
upon her parted lips he had seen in any human face. Her eyes were soft
with joy. His whole heart leaped within him; for the instant he saw her
it all flashed clear as sunlight--that she knew and understood. His
being melted in the utter bliss of it; shyness vanished. She had always
known, had always understood. Speech came easily to him in a flood, had
he needed it. But he did not need it. It was all so adorably easy,
simple, natural, and true. He just took her hands--those welcoming,
outstretched hands in both his own, and led her to the nearest sofa. He
was not even surprised at himself. Inevitable, out of depths of truth,
this meeting came about. And he uttered a little, foolish commonplace,
because he feared the huge revulsion that his sudden glory brought, and
loved to taste it slowly:
“So you live here still?”
“Here, and here,” she answered softly, touching his heart, and then her
own. “I am attached to this house, too, because _you_ used to come and
see me here, and because it was here I waited so long for you, and still
wait. I shall never leave it--unless you change. You see, we live
together here.”
He said nothing. He leaned forward to take and hold her. The abrupt
knowledge of it all somehow did not seem abrupt--as though he had known
it always; and the complete disclosure did not seem disclosure
either--rather as though she told him something he had inexplicably left
unrealised, yet not forgotten. He felt absolutely master of himself,
yet, in a curious sense, outside of himself at the same time. His arms
were already open--when she gently held her hands up to prevent. He
heard a faint sound outside the door.
“But you are free,” he cried, his great passion breaking out and
flooding him, yet most oddly well controlled, “and I----”
She interrupted him in the softest, quietest whisper he had ever heard:
“You are not free, as I am free--not yet.”
The sound outside came suddenly closer. It was a step. There was a faint
click on the handle of the door. In a flash, then, came the dreadful
shock that overwhelmed him--the abrupt realisation of the truth that was
somehow horrible: that Time, all these years, had left no mark upon her,
and that she _had not changed_. Her face was young as when he saw her
last.
With it there came cold and darkness into the great room that turned it
instantly otherwise. He shivered with cold, but an alien, unaccountable
cold. Some great shadow dropped upon the entire earth. And though but a
second could have passed before the handle actually turned, and the
other person entered, it seemed to him like several minutes. He heard
her saying this amazing thing that was question, answer, and forgiveness
all in one. This, at least, he divined before the ghastly interruption
came:
“But, George--if you had only spoken----!”
With ice in his blood, he heard the butler saying that her ladyship
would be “pleased” to see him now if he had finished his tea and would
he be “so good as to bring the papers and documents upstairs with him.”
He had just sufficient control of certain muscles to stand upright and
murmur that he would come. He rose from a sofa that held no one but
himself. But, all at once, he staggered. He really did not know exactly
then what happened, or how he managed to stammer out the medley of
excuses and semi-explanations that battered their way through his brain
and issued somehow in definite words from his lips. Somehow or other he
accomplished it. The sudden attack, the faintness, the collapse!... He
vaguely remembered afterwards--with amazement, too--the suavity of the
butler, as he suggested telephoning for a doctor, and that he just
managed to forbid it, refusing the offered glass of brandy as well, and
that he contrived to stumble into the taxi-cab and give his hotel
address, with a final explanation that he would call another day and
“bring the papers.” It was quite dear that his telegram had been
attributed to someone else--someone “with papers”--perhaps a solicitor
or architect. His name was such an ordinary one. There were so many
Smiths. It was also clear that she he had come to see, and _had_ seen,
no longer lived here--in the flesh....
And, just as he left the hall, he had the vision--mere fleeting glimpse
it was--of a tall, slim, girlish figure on the stairs asking if anything
was wrong, and realised vaguely through his atrocious pain that she was,
of course, the wife of the son who had inherited....
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