We talked of London, face to face with a great bristling, primeval
glacier. The hour and the scene were one of those impressions which make
up a little, in Switzerland, for the modern indignity of travel--the
promiscuities and vulgarities, the station and the hotel, the gregarious
patience, the struggle for a scrappy attention, the reduction to a
numbered state. The high valley was pink with the mountain rose, the
cool air as fresh as if the world were young. There was a faint flush of
afternoon on undiminished snows, and the fraternizing tinkle of the
unseen cattle came to us with a cropped and sun-warmed odour. The
balconied inn stood on the very neck of the sweetest pass in the
Oberland, and for a week we had had company and weather. This was felt
to be great luck, for one would have made up for the other had either
been bad.
The weather certainly would have made up for the company; but it was not
subjected to this tax, for we had by a happy chance the _fleur des
pois_: Lord and Lady Mellifont, Clare Vawdrey, the greatest (in the
opinion of many) of our literary glories, and Blanche Adney, the
greatest (in the opinion of all) of our theatrical. I mention these
first, because they were just the people whom in London, at that time,
people tried to "get." People endeavoured to "book" them six weeks
ahead, yet on this occasion we had come in for them, we had all come in
for each other, without the least wire-pulling. A turn of the game had
pitched us together, the last of August, and we recognized our luck by
remaining so, under protection of the barometer. When the golden days
were over--that would come soon enough--we should wind down opposite
sides of the pass and disappear over the crest of surrounding heights.
We were of the same general communion, we participated in the same
miscellaneous publicity. We met, in London, with irregular frequency; we
were more or less governed by the laws and the language, the traditions
and the shibboleths of the same dense social state. I think all of us,
even the ladies, "did" something, though we pretended we didn't when it
was mentioned. Such things are not mentioned indeed in London, but it
was our innocent pleasure to be different here. There had to be some way
to show the difference, inasmuch as we were under the impression that
this was our annual holiday. We felt at any rate that the conditions
were more human than in London, or that at least we ourselves were. We
were frank about this, we talked about it: it was what we were talking
about as we looked at the flushing glacier, just as some one called
attention to the prolonged absence of Lord Mellifont and Mrs. Adney. We
were seated on the terrace of the inn, where there were benches and
little tables, and those of us who were most bent on proving that we had
returned to nature were, in the queer Germanic fashion, having coffee
before meat.
The remark about the absence of our two companions was not taken up, not
even by Lady Mellifont, not even by little Adney, the fond composer; for
it had been dropped only in the briefest intermission of Clare Vawdrey's
talk. (This celebrity was "Clarence" only on the title-page.) It was
just that revelation of our being after all human that was his theme. He
asked the company whether, candidly, every one hadn't been tempted to
say to every one else: "I had no idea you were really so nice." I had
had, for my part, an idea that he was, and even a good deal nicer, but
that was too complicated to go into then; besides it is exactly my
story. There was a general understanding among us that when Vawdrey
talked we should be silent, and not, oddly enough, because he at all
expected it. He didn't, for of all abundant talkers he was the most
unconscious, the least greedy and professional. It was rather the
religion of the host, of the hostess, that prevailed among us: it was
their own idea, but they always looked for a listening circle when the
great novelist dined with them. On the occasion I allude to there was
probably no one present with whom, in London, he had not dined, and we
felt the force of this habit. He had dined even with me; and on the
evening of that dinner, as on this Alpine afternoon, I had been at no
pains to hold my tongue, absorbed as I inveterately was in a study of
the question which always rose before me, to such a height, in his fair,
square, strong stature.
This question was all the more tormenting that he never suspected
himself (I am sure) of imposing it, any more than he had ever observed
that every day of his life every one listened to him at dinner. He used
to be called "subjective" in the weekly papers, but in society no
distinguished man could have been less so. He never talked about
himself; and this was a topic on which, though it would have been
tremendously worthy of him, he apparently never even reflected. He had
his hours and his habits, his tailor and his hatter, his hygiene and his
particular wine, but all these things together never made up an
attitude. Yet they constituted the only attitude he ever adopted, and it
was easy for him to refer to our being "nicer" abroad than at home. _He_
was exempt from variations, and not a shade either less or more nice in
one place than in another. He differed from other people, but never from
himself (save in the extraordinary sense which I will presently
explain), and struck me as having neither moods nor sensibilities nor
preferences. He might have been always in the same company, so far as he
recognized any influence from age or condition or sex: he addressed
himself to women exactly as he addressed himself to men, and gossiped
with all men alike, talking no better to clever folk than to dull. I
used to feel a despair at his way of liking one subject--so far as I
could tell--precisely as much as another: there were some I hated so
myself. I never found him anything but loud and cheerful and copious,
and I never heard him utter a paradox or express a shade or play with an
idea. That fancy about our being "human" was, in his conversation, quite
an exceptional flight. His opinions were sound and second-rate, and of
his perceptions it was too mystifying to think. I envied him his
magnificent health.
Vawdrey had marched, with his even pace and his perfectly good
conscience, into the flat country of anecdote, where stories are visible
from afar like windmills and signposts; but I observed after a little
that Lady Mellifont's attention wandered. I happened to be sitting next
her. I noticed that her eyes rambled a little anxiously over the lower
slopes of the mountains. At last, after looking at her watch, she said
to me: "Do you know where they went?"
"Do you mean Mrs. Adney and Lord Mellifont?"
"Lord Mellifont and Mrs. Adney." Her ladyship's speech
seemed--unconsciously indeed--to correct me, but it didn't occur to me
that this was because she was jealous. I imputed to her no such vulgar
sentiment: in the first place, because I liked her, and in the second
because it would always occur to one quickly that it was right, in any
connection, to put Lord Mellifont first. He _was_ first--extraordinarily
first. I don't say greatest or wisest or most renowned, but essentially
at the top of the list and the head of the table. That is a position by
itself, and his wife was naturally accustomed to see him in it. My
phrase had sounded as if Mrs. Adney had taken him; but it was not
possible for him to be taken--he only took. No one, in the nature of
things, could know this better than Lady Mellifont. I had originally
been rather afraid of her, thinking her, with her stiff silences and the
extreme blackness of almost everything that made up her person, somewhat
hard, even a little saturnine. Her paleness seemed slightly grey, and
her glossy black hair metallic, like the brooches and bands and combs
with which it was inveterately adorned. She was in perpetual mourning,
and wore numberless ornaments of jet and onyx, a thousand clicking
chains and bugles and beads. I had heard Mrs. Adney call her the queen
of night, and the term was descriptive if you understood that the night
was cloudy. She had a secret, and if you didn't find it out as you knew
her better you at least perceived that she was gentle and unaffected and
limited, and also rather submissively sad. She was like a woman with a
painless malady. I told her that I had merely seen her husband and his
companion stroll down the glen together about an hour before, and
suggested that Mr. Adney would perhaps know something of their
intentions.
Vincent Adney, who, though he was fifty years old, looked like a good
little boy on whom it had been impressed that children should not talk
before company, acquitted himself with remarkable simplicity and taste
of the position of husband of a great exponent of comedy. When all was
said about her making it easy for him, one couldn't help admiring the
charmed affection with which he took everything for granted. It is
difficult for a husband who is not on the stage, or at least in the
theatre, to be graceful about a wife who is; but Adney was more than
graceful--he was exquisite, he was inspired. He set his beloved to
music; and you remember how genuine his music could be--the only English
compositions I ever saw a foreigner take an interest in. His wife was in
them, somewhere, always; they were like a free, rich translation of the
impression she produced. She seemed, as one listened, to pass laughing,
with loosened hair, across the scene. He had been only a little fiddler
at her theatre, always in his place during the acts; but she had made
him something rare and misunderstood. Their superiority had become a
kind of partnership, and their happiness was a part of the happiness of
their friends. Adney's one discomfort was that he couldn't write a play
for his wife, and the only way he meddled with her affairs was by asking
impossible people if _they_ couldn't.
Lady Mellifont, after looking across at him a moment, remarked to me
that she would rather not put any question to him. She added the next
minute: "I had rather people shouldn't see I'm nervous."
"_Are_ you nervous?"
"I always become so if my husband is away from me for any time."
"Do you imagine something has happened to him?"
"Yes, always. Of course I'm used to it."
"Do you mean his tumbling over precipices--that sort of thing?"
"I don't know exactly what it is: it's the general sense that he'll
never come back."
She said so much and kept back so much that the only way to treat the
condition she referred to seemed the jocular. "Surely he'll never
forsake you!" I laughed.