Peggy hurt herself very much this time, and, having got up, slid
gingerly on both skates across to the bench where Hugh was studying a
treatise on the difficult art.
“Press the left shoulder back,” he said aloud, “while pressing the
master-hip forward. Hullo, Peggy! I say, which is the master-hip? Is it
the hip of the unemployed or the other? You seem to be in pain.”
“I have hurt myself more than anybody was ever hurt,” said Peggy. “I
fell on all my knees.”
“I know it does shake one up, doesn’t it?” said Hugh with odious
calmness. “I wish you would just look at my unemployed a moment.”
“What are you going to do?” asked Peggy.
“As if you couldn’t see!” said Hugh scornfully. “I am going to make the
turn just opposite you, and I want you to watch my left leg.”
Hugh skated some distance away, and, with glorious disregard of limb if
not of life, put himself on to the inside-back, and, while travelling at
express speed, made a desperate attempt to turn. He sat on the ice for a
little while after that.
“Your left leg went over your head,” said Peggy, who owed him one,
“otherwise, and if you hadn’t fallen down, it would have been a beauty.
Get up, Hugh, and come and sit here for a little. Oh, I should like to
sing!”
“Don’t let me stop you,” said Hugh politely.
“I won’t. But I shall sing inside so that you won’t hear me. Was there
ever such a morning? Oh, thank God for Davos!”
“Amen to that,” said Hugh.
Peggy, in spite of the fact that only a few minutes ago nobody had ever
been hurt so much, gave a huge sigh of content, breathing in a gallon of
the frozen sunny air, and giving it out again in a great puff as of
smoke. All round them rose the white snow-clad hills, rising from
shoulder to peak of glistening, dazzling surfaces. Just opposite and
above them stretched the long single street of Davos, with its rows of
big hotels, tailing off to the right into scattered houses and chalets,
and among them she could just see the house where she was staying now
with Edith and Hugh and Daisy, standing high above Davos-Platz, with
broad wooden balconies, and front turned southward toward the blaze of
the sun. Above the village hung little thin blue streamers of smoke from
the fires, but these were scarcely visible, for it seemed as if nothing
smoky or foggy could live long in this miraculous air. Above the village
stretched black blots and clumps of pine-wood, from off which the snow
had melted and fallen, as the leaves were warmed with the in-striking of
the sun; above that again rose the peaks and spurs of the heaven-seeking
hills. And over all stretched an incredible sky, bluer than the mind
could otherwise conceive which had not seen it, more crystalline than
glass, and as untainted as the snow it looked upon. And, shining there,
was the keynote of the whole, the huge golden sun, divinity made
visible, enough to turn the sourest Puritan into a Parsee. Sun, hot,
unveiled sun, and the cleanness and purity of frost. That was Davos.
Davos meant a great deal to Peggy just now; it meant all to Hugh.
He and Edith had come straight here after Munich, before the snow fell,
and privately Hugh thought he had never seen so dreadful and dingy a
place. The summer had been very hot, and where now the ineffable
whiteness of the snow was spread, making the eye to dance and the heart
to be glad, there stretched long weary spaces of faded green. And the
worst of it was that it reminded them both in some distorted homesick
manner of the down above Chalkpits. But the down above Chalkpits was to
them, even as Hugh had said, the first act of the love-duet, where Edith
had told him who was Andrew Robb, whereas the gray-yellow stretches of
mountainside here were, so to speak, the walls and windows of a
sickroom. Then had come rain, dreary, unremitting rain, when the heavens
were shrouded, and a tiring, enervating wind called Föhn, blew out of
the southwest. And the very interesting fact that the word Föhn was
undoubtedly a corruption of the Latin _Favonius_ did not seem to make it
any better. Also they could not find a suitable house.
There was worse than that. The invalid life that Edith had to lead was
an iron hand upon them both. She who had been so active, so
indefatigable, had to lie down most of the day, out in a slightly leaky
balcony, and watch the cloud-shroud over the hills, and the thick-ruled
streaks of rain. She had to take her temperature and enter it on a
chart; she had to adopt all the nameless little devices of the illness
from which she suffered. To her it was all hateful to her pride, to him
it was a degradation that she should have to suffer in these mean little
ways. She, always splendid but always rebellious against the surrender
to ailments, could scarcely bear that Hugh should see her thus. But
slowly, by patience and by habit, the first-fruits of patience, she had
grown used to it. Yet she felt at the end of the first three weeks that
if she had known how horrible it was going to be, she would almost have
refused to come here at all, have died standing and defiant, rather than
fight her foe by these mean submissions. Also for the first fortnight
the disease certainly attacked her more fiercely than before. Often she
had felt tired at Munich, but not till now did she really know what mere
tiredness could mean. She went to bed tired, but awoke to an infinitely
greater degree of fatigue. Physical pain she had known before, but never
had pain so undermined her as this. Then once she had another return of
hæmorrhage, and Hugh had sat by her while a servant ran for the doctor,
sponging, wiping.... She longed to tell him to go, to tell him that she
would so infinitely sooner be alone. But he could not have borne that.
Also she could not speak.
Yet in spite of the fiercer onslaught of the disease, in spite of the
hæmorrhage, in spite of the dreadful fatigue, she felt that deep down
somewhere, so deep that it showed as yet no surface-sign, she was better
at the end of those first three weeks. She could not tell how; indeed,
she had never felt so ill, yet there was, so to speak, a little raft of
recovery beginning to form. Through hours of helplessness she felt it
forming, and in spite of bad reports, gently told her, she knew it to be
so. Foundations have to be dug, so that a house may arise, and the
masons and builders have to go down that they may build up. It was thus
that she felt it.
Then came a change. Rain ceased, and snow began. For four days it snowed
without cessation, and still she lay out on her balcony, Hugh sitting by
her, and rising now and again to shake the fallen flakes off the rug
that covered her. And gradually through those four days they both began
to be conscious of the change. It was very distant at first, and very
faint, and it was through the nostril even more than through the eye
which now saw, though veiled in the falling curtain of snow, the changed
aspect, that it revealed itself. Something cold and clean was coming,
the stale odour of dried grass had gone, and there was filtering into
the air the odour of nothing at all, the absence of odour, the negative
smell of the absence of smelling things. During these four days, too,
Edith lost her temper at picquet, a game that occupied much of their
evenings. Hugh hailed that secretly, privately, as he would have hailed
an angel from Heaven. She had been utterly apathetic before; they had
played but to pass the hours.
Then, still while the clean, sweet snow was falling, he found a house
that might suit them. For days before they had constantly talked over
the sort of house they wanted, and for days it appeared to be a matter
of absolute indifference to Edith. To-night, however, it did not.
“Oh! but how stupid of you, Hughie!” she had said. “Why, of course, you
ought to have gone to see the kitchen. All houses are uninhabitable
unless the servants are comfortable. We had far better be in a hotel
than in a house where the kitchen is a coal-cellar!”
“I’m sorry!” said Hugh. “I’ll go and look at it again to-morrow.”
“Yes, but you probably don’t know a good kitchen from a bad one,” said
Edith sharply.
It was that sort of thing that so often during these weeks made his
heart bleed. He knew--how well he knew--that it was not she who spoke,
but only this hideous disease. He never confused the one with the other,
for he knew Edith too well for that. All these weeks she had been
fighting her battle, desperately, splendidly, and all these weeks she
had been constantly impatient with him, irritated by him. And quietly,
proudly, he wore that like a decoration. It was just because she loved
him that she was like that with him. With her nurse, whom she detested,
she was studiously, evenly polite, thanking her for all sorts of
infinitesimal services, hoping she was not tired, fearing to disturb
her. But Hugh divined the cause of her impatience with him, and knew
that she divined it too.
Then swiftly came the rest of the heavenly change. Edith, utterly weary,
had gone to bed one night while the snow still fell, and Hugh, not long
after, though it was still early, had followed. The drowsiness of snow
was on him and he slept heavily, expecting even in sleep to awaken to
that numb, torpid pain of soul that had been his all these weeks. But he
did not wake thus.
It was a new heaven and a new earth. Sun and frost had entered. Blue
weather.
Trouble had passed, and joy came with that morning. It came in all
manners, big and small. The kitchen of the possible house proved to be
palatial. Peggy, by the morning post, announced that she and Jim and
Daisy would all come out for Christmas. And Edith, so she said, when he
went to her, felt different.
“Oh, Hughie! the sun has come,” she said as he entered; “and how good
the air smells. I don’t feel nearly so tired, either.”
“And that is the top of the morning,” said he.
She looked at him, then avoided his eye.
“I have been horrible to you all these weeks,” she said quietly. “I knew
it perfectly well. Have I hurt you, Hughie?”
That was one of the bad moments.
“How could you hurt me?” he asked. “You have never hurt me.”
She still did not look at him, but lay with her cheek on the pillow. She
felt that he had more to say, though the words ceased.
“Yes?” she said. “Go on.”
“Oh, whenever I thought you hurt me, I knew at once it was not you,” he
said.
Then she looked at him.
“No, my darling, it was not,” she said. “Do try to remember that.”
“There is no trying and no remembering,” he said.
It was on that morning that golden days began again. Week by week Edith
had steadily improved. A few little set-backs had come, but still the
tide flowed. All her determination to get well had come back to her; her
will was no longer apathetic, watching the course of events, but active,
directing them.
And to-day, for the first time, by permission, she was to come down to
the rink where Hugh and Peggy sat, and see them attempt to pass the
skating-test which would admit them on to the English rink. It is
impossible to say to whom--themselves, Edith, or the English community
in general--their passing seemed most important, but probably to them.
Daisy was coming up for judgment, too, but it was quite certain that she
would pass. The case of her mother and uncle, however was far more open
to doubt. Peggy, sycophantically, had induced Edith to ask the two
amiable gentlemen, who were going to judge their capacity, to dinner
last night, and had been almost loathsomely fulsome to them. The doors
of Rye House, she had really given them to understand, starved for their
presence. And must the unemployed leg be absolutely still? If she moved
it ever so little she could make the turn, too beautifully.... Oh! yes
she was sure that Hugh would be only too honoured to sing at the
concert at the Belvedere in aid of--oh, quite so, the Colonial
Chaplaincy Fund.
“Hugh, Mr. Simpkins, who is going to judge us to-morrow, wants you to
sing at the Belvedere, and, of course, you will. Tuesday night: yes, we
are not doing anything. And you will judge us at half-past twelve? that
will suit beautifully, and I can practise first. Half-past twelve, Hugh.
Bring a flask of brandy.”
So now on this momentous morning, and in spite of the ordeal that would
have to be gone through at twelve-thirty, Peggy drew in and gave out the
long breaths of content. There was no doubt that Edith was much better;
a week ago even she was still in the lying-down regime; to-day she was
going to walk to the rink, observe their antics, lunch with them there,
and be driven home. She, Peggy, had interviewed the doctor herself this
morning. It was all as good as it could be. It was better even than the
doctor had hoped. Her weight had gone up, her general health had
improved, vigour and health were marching on the high-road toward her.
And the one thing that they had to be careful about, did not at this
moment trouble Peggy. Edith’s heart was not strong. No, there was
nothing organically wrong, but it was possible that some lower place
than Davos might be as good for her lungs, and not so trying, so
stimulating to the heart. But he did not for a moment suggest her
leaving Davos. A place that had already done her so much good was not to
be lightly abandoned.
Peggy breathed her long sighs, and fell to talking of skating again,
when Hugh had recovered from his rather complicated fall.
“Oh, it does matter so much,” she said, “and Edith feels it matters so
much. She wants us dreadfully to pass our test. Oh, Hugh! how very big
quite little things are. It will really make her happier if we can do
these things. And it will make us happier too. Do--do be serious. I am
going to do outside edge back, quite slowly and smoothly. It is the only
way.”
Hugh was content to sit still a little longer, and watch Peggy skating
in the only way. Her whole face and figure altered so radically when she
was skating, as to be almost unrecognisable. She naturally stood erect
and upright, but on skates, in pursuance of “form,” she became stiffer
than the Life Guards; she was cast in iron and heroic mould. Her face,
too, pleasant and humorous in the affairs of everyday life, became a
thing portentous, grim, determined, inexorable. She had been told to
look up, to hold her head back when she was skating, and in pursuance of
this she fixed a savage and unrelenting eye on the unoffending Belvedere
Hotel, as if she was going to command its instant demolition. Then when
a crisis approached, when the turn had to be made, her aspect changed
again, the relentless expression was relaxed, pity and terror usurped
her face. And, the crisis being successfully surmounted, a look of
fathomless, idiotic joy beamed from her. Then that faded like some
regretful sunset, and grim determination, the inexorableness of
Rhadamanthus, again reigned.
He watched Peggy a little, while she receded into the crowd that was
growing thick on the rink, cutting, or rather not being able to
recognise, her friends, while employed in these majestic backward
manœuvres, and casting glances of deep withering reproach on any who
came near her sacred person, and with the recession of Peggy other
matters receded, too, till he was left alone with the only matter that
really had value in his eyes. And this morning for the first time, he
felt safe in letting himself go, in abandoning himself to the ecstasy
that the removal of anxiety brought him. Again and again, after these
first three dreadful weeks were passed, the doctor had given him
excellent reports; she was going on as well as possible, but not till
to-day had Hugh felt himself be comforted. He had always been prepared,
at the back of his mind, for bad news, for the information that she was
not making progress, and none knew but he what a dreadful uphill task
had been his, in performing the promise he had made to Edith on the
night at Munich when she told him, and in being gay, being foolish, and
natural. Sometimes it had seemed to him that she must guess how
hideously hollow his apparent high spirits were, but a letter she wrote
to Peggy, shortly before the latter came out, which Peggy had told him
of, was his reward. In it Edith had expressed the removal of her own
great anxiety that Hugh would find nothing to do, and feel that the
place was intolerable. But, so she wrote, it was not so. Hugh had gone
quite mad about winter-sports, and spent ecstatic days in trying to
break his limbs over some apparatus for sliding, whether over skis or
toboggans or skates it seemed to make no difference. The point clearly
was to cripple yourself in some way. He was keeping up his singing, too,
with really commendable diligence, and a decent Steinway had at length
arrived. He was wonderfully cheerful, too; he did her no end of good.
Peggy had stopped there and not told him what the letter went on
about--Edith’s bitter pathetic reproaches against herself for the
unfathomable depression that she so often suffered under, and which made
her often so cross and irritable to Hugh. “But I think my darling knows
it isn’t me,” she had finished. But that was not for Hugh to hear.
But to-day for the first time in all these weeks, he felt he could be
cheerful, uproarious even, out of his own self, because his spirit
wished to laugh and sing. “Immense, almost incredible improvement,” had
been the report, and to endorse that, she was allowed to walk down to
the rink, a matter of nearly a mile. Many months, as he well knew, given
that all went well, must lie between her and complete recovery, and it
was to-day for the first time that Hugh had let himself even look
forward to that, to contemplate it at all. Even now he could not look at
it long, and he had to look at it, so to speak, with half-closed eyes,
for it dazzled him. But it was within the field of his vision, remote
perhaps, but shining.
But how different it made everything else look! Everything was
enlightened; even Ambrose, who approached him at this moment on skates
about four sizes too large and black goggles perched on his inquiring
nose, was welcome.
“I came down to see you and Aunt Peggy and Daisy skate for the English
club,” said this incomparable youth; “and I do so hope you will all get
in. It will make me so happy, Uncle Hugh. And I am happy already because
papa told me that Aunt Edith was ever so much better. Aren’t you
pleased, too?”
“Yes, old boy,” said Hugh; “and why don’t you practise and get in the
English club, too? Daisy is sure to pass, and she’s younger than you,
isn’t she?”
Ambrose put his head a little sideways, as he did when he was saying his
catechism, or when thoughts of exceptional nobility occurred to him.
“Well, I have thought about it,” he said; “but, you see, I am sure it
has been a great expense to papa to bring me out here, and he never
would have come out himself if I hadn’t been ill, and I should have to
pay a subscription, shouldn’t I, if I passed? Papa isn’t going in for
it either, and, of course, he could pass as easy as anything if he
tried, couldn’t he?”
“Oh! that’s all right, then,” said Hugh, neglecting this last topic.
“I’ll pay your subscription for you, if you get through.”
Ambrose clapped his hands together--he had caught it from Mrs. Owen--and
forgetting that he was on skates tried to jump in the air to show his
joy. He fell down instead, but even at the moment of contact continued
to talk in his penetrating treble.
“Oh, thank you, Uncle Hugh!” he cried. “How kind everybody is to me! I
shall go and practise at once. Oh, my spectacles have fallen off! Would
you please give them me, as I promised papa never to look at anything
out-of-doors without them, so I must shut my eyes till I have them on
again.”
* * * * *
Canon Alington and Ambrose had been here a fortnight, for the Canon had
long wanted to spend a winter in Switzerland, and the fact that Ambrose,
who had been a good deal pulled down by an attack of scarlatina, was
advised to go to some bracing place, made a duty of what he had only
thought of as a pleasure. He himself, too, so Agnes assured him, had
been much tried by incessant work and a very rainy autumn in England,
and reminding him how his fortnight’s yachting in the summer had set him
up, she urged him to go and be set up again. In fact, the idea of its
being a pleasure at all had long faded from his memory. Agnes
recommended it for him, just as the doctor recommended it for Ambrose.
It was a necessary expense, heavy, no doubt, but unavoidable. But they
had come out second-class and lived on the fifth floor. Also--it really
seemed providential--the resident chaplain at Davos had been taken ill
a fortnight ago, and Canon Alington, saying that he had gone back to his
own curate-days, had taken his place at the current stipend. He had
preached last Sunday, taking for his text “Oh, ye ice and snow, bless ye
the Lord!” Hugh, to his own malicious satisfaction, had guessed what the
text would be, and, indeed, betted on the subject with Peggy (she had
bet on “Oh, ye mountains and hills”) before it was given out. He won
five francs, and put them in the offertory.
So Ambrose retired into a corner to practise for his test, and soon
Peggy returned on her majestic outside-back. She, too, saw the
difference in Hugh this morning, and his almost solemn joy over
Ambrose’s conversation rang true.
“For the cream of it is,” said Hugh, “that for years and years the
admirable Dick has swaggered to me about his skating, because, you see,
there have been no frosts in England. Oh! perhaps that is unfair,
because the first day he came out here he paraded the rink doing what I
think he called Dutch roll. Anyhow, both feet were on the ice
simultaneously. But nobody was very much struck; here they prefer
skating on one foot at a time, you see. So foolish!”
Peggy gave a long sigh.
“Oh, Ice and Snow!” she exclaimed. “I beg your pardon. Go on.”
“Well, since then Ice and Snow has been practising for all he’s worth,
in sequestered corners. I doubt if he thinks about parish affairs at
all, and the dream of his life is to get into the English club. He will
come up as soon as he has the slightest chance of passing, if not
before. But I feel convinced that he has conveyed to Ambrose that it is
an unnecessary expense, and Ambrose has told me that he thought of it
himself. Aren’t they divine?”
Peggy got up at once.
“I shall go and talk to Ambrose instantly,” she said, “and find out
whether his father did convey that impression.”
“I know you can be diplomatic,” remarked Hugh.
She returned in a few minutes.
“Yes, it is so,” she said. “Ice and Snow alluded to expense, and said
that the English rink was not so good as the public one. Oh, Hugh, if
only he goes up for the test after that!”
But at that moment Hugh forgot all this; he forgot Peggy, he forgot the
fatal hour of half-past twelve, for somebody waved to him from the snow
bank that bounded the rink. He clambered awkwardly up the wooden steps,
and stamped his way along the frozen snow.
“Ah, but this is good,” he cried, “this is the very best. And you’ve
walked all the way? And you are not tired? Are you sure you are not
tired?”
“Not a bit; I’ve enjoyed it. Oh, Hugh, it’s nearly half-past twelve, and
I am so agitated. You must get through. Where’s Peggy?”
Peggy had followed Hugh to the edge of the ice.
“Oh, Edith, how splendid,” she cried, “and you are just in time to see
us all ploughed. Get her a chair, Hugh, on the edge of the rink. Oh,
here’s Daisy. Daisy, you little fiend, if you pass and I don’t, I shall
stop your allowance for a month.”
An agitating half-hour followed. Daisy, to do her justice, was, if
possible, more anxious that her mother should pass than was Peggy
herself, and, having acquitted herself triumphantly before the judges,
and sailed through her test, endured agonies of anxiety as Peggy
wobbled when she should have been firm. But the grim determination of
her face never varied, and she still looked skyward. But eventually the
effort of weeks, and a perseverance which Robert Bruce’s spider might
have envied, was crowned, and she and Hugh emerged victorious.
Ah, but how good it was, Edith felt, to see the others really taking
this wild interest in little things again; how good also to take it
herself. Vitally and eagerly constituted as they all were, it was like
them, the moment that good news came about that which was nearest their
hearts they should all behave in this perfectly childish manner, and
treat this skating episode (which for this very reason has been given at
length) as if Eternal Salvation was on tap at the English rink, to
which, through much tribulation, Peggy and Hugh had been admitted. There
was no make-believe about it to-day, and if before both Peggy and Hugh
while they rested some aching limb found no rest for the ache of their
hearts, to-day there was ache neither in heart nor limb; all was
forgotten in the sun of Edith’s improvement. “Immense, incredible
improvement!” Hugh whispered it to her over and over again as they
waited for their lunch to arrive from the house. And in the same breath,
as was natural to his youth, he told her about the deep machinations of
Dick, the assumption of Ambrose, and then and there founded an Ambrose
club. Far away, too, at the corner of the public, common, lower rink,
the Canon’s manly form could be discerned diligently circling, till Hugh
could bear it no longer and left Edith, ostensibly to ask him to join
them at lunch, in reality to patronise him. Ambrose was looking at his
father in the deepest admiration, and the latter, just as Hugh came up,
having made a sudden involuntary change of edge (a thing he had been
trying to do voluntarily for days), exclaimed--
“Ah, that’s it, Ambrose. That’s what you were asking me to show you.
Why, here’s Hugh! Well, Hugh, joining us again down here? Not quite fit
for the Olympian yet?”
Hugh could not resist a little swagger. He was exalted.
“Oh, we got through quite, quite easily,” he said; “all of us in fact.
Peggy, Daisy, and I. I expect Ambrose will get through next.”
This was deep: it was almost fiendish. Hugh knew his brother-in-law was
practising till sleep forsook him at night. Dick thought that he was
equally aware that Hugh could have no notion of it, since Ambrose (so
properly) had mentioned to him the conversation about expense which that
child had already held with Hugh.
Canon Alington showed an eager interest in this.
“Ambrose tells me you have been good enough to promise to pay his
subscription if he passes,” he said. “Come, Ambrose, show Hugh what you
can do.”
Ambrose could not do anything at all, and his father knew it. So Dick,
with an eye on Hugh, showed him what had to be done. He displayed a
completely accurate knowledge of what the test was, which was strange,
since he did not contemplate going in for it. But his practical idea,
how to skate it, in fact, was rather sketchy. Hugh hugged himself in
silence. So often had Dick told him exactly how all sorts of complicated
manœuvres had to be done; so often had he wished that the frost might
hold in order that he could have a day’s skating with Hugh, and just put
him in the way of it! But Hugh liked his brother-in-law the better for
it. He had “humbugged” (a beautiful word) about his skating. That was
human. Ambrose had humbugged too about the originality of his idea that
the question of expense only stood between Dick and the higher rink.
Hugh did not feel any marked sympathy with humbug, but he was much in
sympathy with anything that proved that Ambrose was human too.
“The back cross-roll now,” continued Dick, still addressing his son.
“You must cross your feet well!”
He began to illustrate it.
“Ah, my toe caught then,” he said. “But you see the idea. Foot well
behind, well across. H’m! I must have a bit taken off the toes. There,
that’s better, isn’t it, Hugh! That would do for the Olympians, wouldn’t
it? I think that is the hardest part of the test!”
Hugh had not yet asked his brother-in-law to lunch with them. He simply
could not interrupt yet. He did not know Dick could be so gorgeous. And
he led him on.
“Yes, that’s ripping,” he said. “Why didn’t you come and be judged with
us this morning? Oh, I forgot; you don’t want to join the English rink.
Yes, awfully good, that was.”
Dick walked straight into the trap.
“Then there is the three, isn’t there, on each foot?” he asked. “My left
foot bothers me rather. Will you just look?”
He executed this in a slightly diffuse manner. “Would that pass, do you
think?” he asked.
The trap closed behind him.
“I think it wants a little more practice,” said Hugh. “When are you
going to come up?”
“I thought about Tuesday next,” said Dick, completely off his guard.
“Oh, I should think it would be all right by then. By the way, do come
and lunch with Edith and me. Ambrose too, of course. It’s a sort of
festal occasion, you see, as Peggy and I have both passed.”
“And Daisy,” said Ambrose. He hated people to not think of other people.
“Oh, everyone knew that Daisy would pass,” said Hugh. “The
thank-offering is for Aunt Peggy and me. Let’s go. I think Peggy has
asked the whole population to lunch, and I know I have. There probably
won’t be enough to eat.”
Dick suddenly started forward on the left foot.
“Just look a moment, Hugh,” he said.
He made a beautiful turn, and a severe, unbending edge after it.
“I shall go up for the test on Monday,” he said with noble courage. “Ah,
by the way, ‘I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance.’ How would that do for
the motto of a skating club? I shall certainly form a skating club when
I get back to Mannington. You and I will be there to coach the
beginners, I hope.”
“I think ‘The frequent fall’ would be a better motto,” said Hugh.
The “festal occasion” was extraordinarily festive. The whole population,
as Hugh had said, appeared to have been invited, and the whole
population came. And the spring, the origin of the enjoyment of
everyone, was the huge enjoyment of Peggy and Hugh. And the spring of
their enjoyment sat at the head of the table. She was better, better,
much better, incredibly better. It was no wonder that mirth abounded.
For mirth is more infectious than any disease, and Hugh and Peggy
scattered it. And they had passed their test and the sun shone, and it
was hotter now than it had ever been, and a great frost was coming
to-night which made the day so beautiful. And Edith was better,
incredibly better. It always came back to that. It was from that that
the mirth sprang.
And Edith? There she sat, pleasant, fine, less boisterous than her
husband or her sister, but happy beyond all words. She saw now the
difference that had come to Hugh. For days and days he had been
uniformly cheerful, uniformly boyish, with pleasure in the snow, with
pleasure in the contrivances for limb-breaking, but never had he been
like this. When he was silent (which was rare) he sparkled, when he
spoke he shone. She knew well what had caused that; not the skating, not
anything else, but she. How well he had acted, too, through these weeks.
Again and again, as when she wrote to Peggy, she had believed he was
enjoying himself, not making the best of his exile here, but actively
taking real pleasure in it all. But to-day there was a huge difference.
He was glad because he was glad, not because he wished to appear glad.
Peggy, too, making a sea-sick passenger out of an orange! To-day it
amused her; yesterday, had she done it, it would have been to amuse
other people. What a difference there!
Above, the beneficent sun, and all round, for they lunched in but a
little island of a shelter, the clean, powdery snow, frozen and hard
just on the surface, but a millimetre below, not wet or slushy, as is
the manner of the more temperate stuff, but like sawdust, dry from the
cold. There was the heat of summer, too, in the sun’s rays, the blaze of
the tropics, the blueness of South Italy, yet all round was the
untainted purity of frost. The blood and the brain had here their ideal
environment; it was hot and frosty--Shakespeare’s paradox was literally
fulfilled. Everyone was swift and pleased and animated; fog of the brain
or the temper was a thing as far and as forgotten as its atmospheric
counterpart. Anything that clogged or confused the senses was
non-existent, incredible. One could mix with the elements, and breathe,
and be!
Edith looked round the table as she finished her coffee. Everyone was
pleased, happy. The tragic mask which in life even as in Greek
bas-reliefs is strung side by side with the mask of comedy, seemed to
have slipped from its place; the kind, warm world showed only its
smiling, shining side. She had come out of a very dark and lonely
valley--in spite of Hugh it had been lonely--and though she knew well
there lay many miles of valley in front of her still, yet the ground was
mounting. And at the place in her journey at which she had arrived
to-day there was, so to speak, a cleft in the wall of rock that had shut
her in for all these weeks, and a huge beam of dusty sunlight came in,
warming and gladdening her.
She went back alone to her house when lunch was over, in the sledge that
had come for her, forbidding either Hugh or Peggy to accompany her, and
even refusing, with thanks, Ambrose’s offer to come up with her, for she
wanted to be alone; just as when Sir Thomas had first told her her
sentence, she had to be alone to think that over, to scrutinise the face
of the future till it became familiar, part of her. And so quietly, so
honestly, had she done that, that the news that had reached her
to-day--much better, incredibly better--had got to be made familiar too.
She lay down on the sofa in the balcony, where up till now more than
half of her life at Davos had been passed. She was a little tired, a
little excited, by this first long outing, and for some while she lay
very quiet, closing the eyes of her mind, as it were, resting it. All
round her were the innumerable contrivances of invalid life--an electric
bell on the arm of her chair, so that she could summon her nurse without
moving, an adjustable shutter on each side of the balcony, so that the
wind or the sun could be screened from her; a small cross-over table
which could be balanced on the arm of her couch so that she could write,
an elbowed bookstand which could be pushed away or brought in front of
her. And slowly, as she let her mind dwell on the great news of to-day,
all these things, so familiar from long and continuous use, somehow
seemed to fade and become meaningless portions of the past, even as when
we see the first snowdrop, so bravely, so weakly, aspiring, piercing the
cold brown earth, and promising spring, the dead leaves of last autumn
suddenly become without significance to us. The death of winter that
they foreboded is over, winter is forgotten. It was just so with her
now; these invalid contrivances suddenly turned to the leaves which had
been shed before winter. Real summer was coming now. Nearly two years
ago her Indian summer had come to crown the early wreck and autumn of
her life. What should this be, this revivification after the winter of
weeks that had succeeded it?
Edith suddenly felt her pulse leap and quiver in her wrists and in her
throat, with the wonder and the excitement of this, and, with the
faculty that invalids develop, she took her mind off it, and went back
to the past instead of peering further into the tremulous, luminous
future. On the first day that she knew of her disease she had intended
and determined to live, to put the thought of death away, to set her
mind on recovery. And now when she had gone so far--incredibly
better--on that road, she could look back and see how far and how often
she had fallen short of her purpose. And she shook her head over her
misdeeds. She had always intended well, but how often her best had been
but a sorry performance. She had so often lain like a mere log under her
fatigue and despondency, yet, indeed, she had only lain like a log when
she felt absolutely incapable of doing otherwise. But it was no use
arguing about it, or excusing herself like that; she had failed often
and often. But there was one who had never failed--Hugh. She had often
been odious and detestable to him, and fretful, but, indeed, she had
never ceased trying to be otherwise except when, so it seemed, the power
of volition had failed her. And he had always understood. In his mind it
had never been she who was fretful; it was only the “insects.”
That suddenly hammering pulse had grown quieter, but still she did not
look toward the future again. It was her business--indeed, she had none
other immediate--to get well. All through these weeks they had
encouraged her always to occupy herself in some quiet way rather than
lie here without any employment, except when she was definitely resting,
and in addition to the innumerable books she had read, the endless games
of picquet she had played with Hugh (they played nominally for sovereign
points, it being understood no money was to pass, and she had lost nine
thousand seven hundred pounds on balance), she had worked at the play
which (with extreme content) she had despaired of ever bringing to
birth. Hugh had said it was not by Andrew Robb at all, and she had
agreed with him. So when her invalid life began she had destroyed what
was done of it and had set to work again. Two acts had been re-written,
and now, instead of indulging in further speculation, she took them up
and read them. She had not touched the play at all since Peggy, now some
three weeks ago, had come out to Switzerland, and she hoped to be able
to read them with that detachment from the feeling of authorship which
only the lapses of time can give. But the mere reading reminded her too
acutely of the circumstances under which she wrote. It reminded her too
much of the sway of “the insects.” She could not manage it alone, but
Hugh or Peggy, if they cared, should read it aloud after dinner. They
were insecticides.
The insecticides fell in with her suggestion, and that evening Hugh read
to her and Peggy. Sometimes he found it rather hard to control his
voice; sometimes Peggy blew her nose. And after the last page was turned
they all sat silent a little----
“But it’s Andrew Robb again,” said Hugh at length. “Genuine Andrew Robb,
only he has improved. Oh, Edith, now you are so much better, do be
diligent and do the other act. You have plenty of time, you know.”
But Peggy turned to Edith.
“No, I hope you’ll never finish it,” said she. “Hugh doesn’t understand.
Andrew Robb was born out of misery. Oh, let’s play that silly game where
you mustn’t take any knaves!”