[Illustration: THE GLAMOUR OF THE SNOW]
I
Hibbert, always conscious of two worlds, was in this mountain village
conscious of three. It lay on the slopes of the Valais Alps, and he had
taken a room in the little post office, where he could be at peace to
write his book, yet at the same time enjoy the winter sports and find
companionship in the hotels when he wanted it.
The three worlds that met and mingled here seemed to his imaginative
temperament very obvious, though it is doubtful if another mind less
intuitively equipped would have seen them so well-defined. There was
the world of tourist English, civilised, quasi-educated, to which he
belonged by birth, at any rate; there was the world of peasants to
which he felt himself drawn by sympathy--for he loved and admired
their toiling, simple life; and there was this other--which he could
only call the world of Nature. To this last, however, in virtue of a
vehement poetic imagination, and a tumultuous pagan instinct fed by
his very blood, he felt that most of him belonged. The others borrowed
from it, as it were, for visits. Here, with the soul of Nature, hid his
central life.
Between all three was conflict--potential conflict. On the skating-rink
each Sunday the tourists regarded the natives as intruders; in the
church the peasants plainly questioned: ‘Why do you come? We are here
to worship; you to stare and whisper!’ For neither of these two worlds
accepted the other. And neither did Nature accept the tourists, for
it took advantage of their least mistakes, and indeed, even of the
peasant-world ‘accepted’ only those who were strong and bold enough to
invade her savage domain with sufficient skill to protect themselves
from several forms of--death.
Now Hibbert was keenly aware of this potential conflict and want
of harmony; he felt outside, yet caught by it--torn in the three
directions because he was partly of each world, but wholly in only one.
There grew in him a constant, subtle effort--or, at least, desire--to
unify them and decide positively to which he should belong and live
in. The attempt, of course, was largely subconscious. It was the
natural instinct of a richly imaginative nature seeking the point of
equilibrium, so that the mind could feel at peace and his brain be free
to do good work.
Among the guests no one especially claimed his interest. The men were
nice but undistinguished--athletic schoolmasters, doctors snatching a
holiday, good fellows all; the women, equally various--the clever, the
would-be-fast, the dare-to-be-dull, the women ‘who understood,’ and the
usual pack of jolly dancing girls and ‘flappers.’ And Hibbert, with his
forty odd years of thick experience behind him, got on well with the
lot; he understood them all; they belonged to definite, predigested
types that are the same the world over, and that he had met the world
over long ago.
But to none of them did he belong. His nature was too ‘multiple’ to
subscribe to the set of shibboleths of any one class. And, since all
liked him, and felt that somehow he seemed outside of them--spectator,
looker-on--all sought to claim him.
In a sense, therefore, the three worlds fought for him: natives,
tourists, Nature....
It was thus began the singular conflict for the soul of Hibbert. _In_
his own soul, however, it took place. Neither the peasants nor the
tourists were conscious that they fought for anything. And Nature, they
say, is merely blind and automatic.
The assault upon him of the peasants may be left out of account, for
it is obvious that they stood no chance of success. The tourist world,
however, made a gallant effort to subdue him to themselves. But the
evenings in the hotel, when dancing was not in order, were--English.
The provincial imagination was set upon a throne and worshipped heavily
through incense of the stupidest conventions possible. Hibbert used to
go back early to his room in the post office to work.
‘It is a mistake on my part to have _realised_ that there is any
conflict at all,’ he thought, as he crunched home over the snow at
midnight after one of the dances. ‘It would have been better to have
kept outside it all and done my work. Better,’ he added, looking back
down the silent village street to the church tower, ‘and--safer.’
The adjective slipped from his mind before he was aware of it. He
turned with an involuntary start and looked about him. He knew
perfectly well what it meant--this thought that had thrust its head
up from the instinctive region. He understood, without being able to
express it fully, the meaning that betrayed itself in the choice of
the adjective. For if he had ignored the existence of this conflict he
would at the same time have remained outside the arena. Whereas now he
had entered the lists. Now this battle for his soul must have issue.
And he knew that the spell of Nature was greater for him than all other
spells in the world combined--greater than love, revelry, pleasure,
greater even than study. He had always been afraid to let himself go.
His pagan soul dreaded her terrific powers of witchery even while he
worshipped.
The little village already slept. The world lay smothered in snow. The
châlet roofs shone white beneath the moon, and pitch-black shadows
gathered against the walls of the church. His eye rested a moment on
the square stone tower with its frosted cross that pointed to the
sky: then travelled with a leap of many thousand feet to the enormous
mountains that brushed the brilliant stars. Like a forest rose the huge
peaks above the slumbering village, measuring the night and heavens.
They beckoned him. And something born of the snowy desolation, born
of the midnight and the silent grandeur, born of the great listening
hollows of the night, something that lay ’twixt terror and wonder,
dropped from the vast wintry spaces down into his heart--and called
him. Very softly, unrecorded in any word or thought his brain could
compass, it laid its spell upon him. Fingers of snow brushed the
surface of his heart. The power and quiet majesty of the winter’s night
appalled him....
Fumbling a moment with the big unwieldy key, he let himself in and went
upstairs to bed. Two thoughts went with him--apparently quite ordinary
and sensible ones:
‘What fools these peasants are to sleep through such a night!’ And the
other:
‘Those dances tire me. I’ll never go again. My work only suffers in
the morning.’ The claims of peasants and tourists upon him seemed thus
in a single instant weakened.
The clash of battle troubled half his dreams. Nature had sent her
Beauty of the Night and won the first assault. The others, routed and
dismayed, fled far away.