That holiday seemed to Marjorie as if they had found a lost and
forgotten piece of honeymoon. She had that same sense of fresh
beginnings that had made their first walk in Italian Switzerland so
unforgettable. She was filled with the happiness of recovering Trafford
when he had seemed to be slipping from her. All day they talked of their
outlook, and how they might economise away the need of his extra work,
and so release him for his search again. For the first time he talked of
his work to her, and gave her some intimation of its scope and quality.
He became enthusiastic with the sudden invention of experimental
devices, so that it seemed to her almost worth while if instead of going
on they bolted back, he to his laboratory and she to her nursery, and
so at once inaugurated the new regime. But they went on, to finish the
holiday out. And the delight of being together again with unfettered
hours of association! They rediscovered each other, the same--and a
little changed. If their emotions were less bright and intense, their
interest was far wider and deeper.
The season was too early for high passes, and the weather was
changeable. They started from Fribourg and walked to Thun and then back
to Bulle, and so to Bultigen, Saanen, Montbovon and the Lake of Geneva.
They had rain several days, the sweet, soft, windless mountain rain that
seemed so tolerable to those who are accustomed to the hard and driven
downpours of England, and in places they found mud and receding snow;
the inns were at their homeliest, and none the worse for that, and there
were days of spring sunshine when a multitude of minute and delightful
flowers came out as it seemed to meet them--it was impossible to suppose
so great a concourse universal--and spread in a scented carpet before
their straying feet. The fruit trees in the valleys were powdered with
blossom, and the new grass seemed rather green-tinted sunlight than
merely green. And they walked with a sort of stout leisureliness,
knapsacks well-hung and cloaks about them, with their faces fresh and
bright under the bracing weather, and their lungs deep charged with
mountain air, talking of the new austerer life that was now beginning.
With great snow-capped mountains in the background, streaming precipices
overhead, and a sward of flowers to go upon, that strenuous prospect was
altogether delightful. They went as it pleased them, making detours into
valleys, coming back upon their steps. The interludes of hot, bright
April sunshine made them indolent, and they would loiter and halt where
some rock or wall invited, and sit basking like happy, animals, talking
very little, for long hours together. Trafford seemed to have forgotten
all the strain and disappointment of the past two years, to be amazed
but in no wise incredulous at this enormous change in her and in their
outlook; it filled her with a passion of pride and high resolve to think
that so she could recover and uplift him.
He was now very deeply in love with her again. He talked indeed of his
research, but so that it might interest her, and when he thought alone,
he thought, not of it, but of her, making again the old discoveries, his
intense delight in the quality of her voice, his joy in a certain
indescribable gallantry in her bearing. He pitied all men whose wives
could not carry themselves, and whose voices failed and broke under the
things they had to say. And then again there was the way she moved her
arms, the way her hands took hold of things, the alert lucidity of her
eyes, and then that faint, soft shadow of a smile upon her lips when she
walked thinking or observant, all unaware that he was watching her.
It rained in the morning of their eleventh day and then gave way to
warmth and sunshine, so that they arrived at Les Avants in the afternoon
a little muddy and rather hot. At one of the tables under the trees
outside the Grand Hotel was a small group of people dressed in the
remarkable and imposing costume which still in those days distinguished
the motorist. They turned from their tea to a more or less frank
inspection of the Traffords, and suddenly broke out into cries of
recognition and welcome. Solomonson--for the most part brown
leather--emerged with extended hands, and behind him, nestling in the
midst of immense and costly furs, appeared the kindly salience and
brightness of his Lady's face. "Good luck!" cried Solomonson. "Good
luck! Come and have tea with us! But this is a happy encounter!"
"We're dirty--but so healthy!" cried Marjorie, saluting Lady Solomonson.
"You look, oh!--splendidly well," that Lady responded.
"We've been walking."
"With just that knapsack!"
"It's been glorious."
"But the courage!" said Lady Solomonson, and did not add, "the tragic
hardship!" though her tone conveyed it. She had all the unquestioning
belief of her race in the sanity of comfort. She had ingrained in her
the most definite ideas of man's position and woman's, and that any one,
man or woman, should walk in mud except under dire necessity, was
outside the range of her philosophy. She thought Marjorie's thick boots
and short skirts quite the most appalling feminine costume she had ever
seen. She saw only a ruined complexion and damaged womanhood in
Marjorie's rain-washed, sun-bit cheek. Her benevolent heart rebelled at
the spectacle. It was dreadful, she thought, that nice young people like
the Traffords should have come to this.
The rest of the party were now informally introduced. They were all very
splendid and disconcertingly free from mud. One was Christabel Morrison,
the actress, a graceful figure in a green baize coat and brown fur, who
looked ever so much more charming than her innumerable postcards and
illustrated-paper portraits would have led one to expect; her neighbour
was Solomonson's cousin Lee, the organizer of the Theatre Syndicate, a
brown-eyed, attenuated, quick-minded little man with an accent that
struck Trafford as being on the whole rather Dutch, and the third lady
was Lady Solomonson's sister, Mrs. Lee. It appeared they were all
staying at Lee's villa above Vevey, part of an amusing assembly of
people who were either vividly rich or even more vividly clever, an
accumulation which the Traffords in the course of the next twenty
minutes were three times invited, with an increasing appreciation and
earnestness, to join.
From the first our two young people were not indisposed to do so. For
eleven days they had maintained their duologue at the very highest
level; seven days remained to them before they must go back to begin the
hard new life in England, and there was something very attractive--they
did not for a moment seek to discover the elements of that
attractiveness--in this proposal of five or six days of luxurious
indolence above the lake, a sort of farewell to the worldly side of
worldly things, before they set forth upon the high and narrow path they
had resolved to tread.
"But we've got no clothes," cried Marjorie, "no clothes at all! We've
these hobnail boots and a pair each of heelless slippers."
"My dear!" cried Lady Solomonson in real distress, and as much aside as
circumstances permitted, "my dear! My sister can manage all that!" Her
voice fell to earnest undertones. "We can really manage all that. The
house is packed with things. We'll come to dinner in fancy dress. And
Scott, my maid, is so clever."
"But really!" said Marjorie.
"My dear!" said Lady Solomonson. "Everything." And she changed places
with Lee in order to be perfectly confidential and explicit. "Rachel!"
she cried, and summoned her sister for confirmatory assurances....
"But my husband!" Marjorie became audible.
"We've long Persian robes," said Mrs. Lee, with a glance of undisguised
appraisement. "He'll be splendid. He'll look like a Soldan...."
The rest of the company forced a hectic conversation in order not to
seem to listen, and presently Lady Solomonson and her sister were
triumphant. They packed Marjorie into the motor car, and Trafford and
Solomonson returned to Vevey by train and thence up to the villa by a
hired automobile.