SWITZERLAND was like the opera, and for her first months there Miss
Glover felt as if she watched it from a box--very much at the back and
looking past many heads at the vast display. Everything that Florrie had
said was true: the scenery was more magnificent than she could have
imagined, oppressively more, and the people, again oppressively, more
interesting. They were, these people, engaged all of them in trying to
keep alive, and, when they failed in that, in dying, dying under one’s
eyes from day to day; and in the publicity of such occupations there was
something as abnormal as was the size of the mountains. Some of these
people she came to know a little--those, usually, who had given up: the
dear little Russian girl who, alas, died in December; the sulky,
affectionate French boy; and the large yet wasted German singer who made
Miss Glover think of a splendid fruit keeping still its shell of form
and colour while eaten away inside by wasps. Fraülein Schmidt liked to
have her play Schubert and Schumann songs to her, and still tried to
sing attainable passages here and there in a queer, booming, hollow
voice that made Miss Glover, again, think of the wasps imprisoned and
buzzing. But most of the people remained parts of the spectacle to her.
They engaged, when they were well enough, in winter sports; they talked
together of books she had never heard of, and of things she had never
thought of; and often, moreover, she could not understand what they
said, as her languages did not extend beyond rather simple French and
German, and Dante with a dictionary.
The only other English person there was a young man who made her think
of the Prince Charlie roses; he was sombre and delicate and beautiful
and did not talk to anybody, sitting apart and reading all day long.
Miss Glover wondered a good deal about him, and watched him sometimes
from her place on the snow-sifted balcony when they lay there encased in
fur bags and buttressed with hot-water bottles. His name was Lord Ninian
Carstairs; and that was like the roses, too.
Once, when they were alone on the balcony, their recumbent chairs near
one another, he lifted his eyes suddenly and found hers fixed upon him,
and perhaps their wistful and ingenuous absorption touched him, for,
flushing faintly,--he was a shy young man,--he asked if she were feeling
better.
She said she couldn’t quite tell. It was difficult to tell what one
felt, didn’t he find? Everything was so different; so exciting in a way;
and when one was excited one felt, perhaps, better than one was.
Lord Ninian laughed shortly at that, and said that he didn’t feel
excited; he wished he could.
“I’m depressed, too, sometimes,” said Miss Glover; and then he sighed.
“One gets so abominably homesick in this hole,” he said.
She had never thought of such splendour as being, possibly, to anybody,
a hole; but she knew what it was to feel homesick. They smiled at each
other when they met after that, she and Lord Ninian, and he lent her
magazines and books. When she heard that he had died,--she had not seen
him for a week and had feared for him,--she felt very, very sad and her
thoughts turned in great longing to Acacia Road and to her garden.
She wanted very much to live to see her garden again; but she could not
help being frightened lest she should not; for, as the winter wore on,
it became evident to her, and all the more because every one else was so
carefully unaware of it, that one of the things that Florrie had
predicted was not to come true. She was not to return cured. She was not
going to get better. At first the slow burning of fever had seemed only
part of the excitement, but she could not go on thinking it that when it
began to leave her breathless, trembling, faint. By the time that the
miracle of the Alpine flower-meadows was revealed to her and she had
watched the snow recede and the jonquils and anemones advance, she knew
that if she wished to die at home she must soon go. They would not
consent to that at once. They said that the spring months were full of
magic, and she was persuaded to stay on. They were magically beautiful
and she was glad to see them, but she longed more and more to see her
little garden. She dreamed sometimes of her pansies at night, and it
seemed to her once that as she stooped in the moonlight and touched them
she was cured; the fever fell from her; a cool white peace flowed into
her veins; and when she looked up from them, the night was gone and the
sun was rising over her Surrey hills.
At the beginning of June they consented that she should go. They did not
tell her the truth, of course. They said that she might pass the summer
in England, since she wished so much to return there, and that she must
come back for next winter; but she knew that if her state had not been
recognized as hopeless they would not have let her go. It was hopeless,
and she summoned all her strength and resolution, that she might live
until she reached Acacia Road.