That sticks in my mind as a picture remains in a room, it has kept there
bright and fresh as a thing seen yesterday, for twenty years....
I flirted hesitatingly once or twice with comely serving girls, and was
a little ashamed lest Willersley should detect the keen interest I took
in them, and then as we came over the pass from Santa Maria Maggiore to
Cannobio, my secret preoccupation took me by surprise and flooded me and
broke down my pretences.
The women in that valley are very beautiful--women vary from valley
to valley in the Alps and are plain and squat here and divinities five
miles away--and as we came down we passed a group of five or six of them
resting by the wayside. Their burthens were beside them, and one like
Ceres held a reaping hook in her brown hand. She watched us approaching
and smiled faintly, her eyes at mine.
There was some greeting, and two of them laughed together.
We passed.
“Glorious girls they were,” said Willersley, and suddenly an immense
sense of boredom enveloped me. I saw myself striding on down that
winding road, talking of politics and parties and bills of parliament
and all sorts of dessicated things. That road seemed to me to wind on
for ever down to dust and infinite dreariness. I knew it for a way of
death. Reality was behind us.
Willersley set himself to draw a sociological moral. “I'm not so
sure,” he said in a voice of intense discriminations, “after all, that
agricultural work isn't good for women.”
“Damn agricultural work!” I said, and broke out into a vigorous cursing
of all I held dear. “Fettered things we are!” I cried. “I wonder why I
stand it!”
“Stand what?”
“Why don't I go back and make love to those girls and let the world and
you and everything go hang? Deep breasts and rounded limbs--and we poor
emasculated devils go tramping by with the blood of youth in us!...”
“I'm not quite sure, Remington,” said Willersley, looking at me with
a deliberately quaint expression over his glasses, “that picturesque
scenery is altogether good for your morals.”
That fever was still in my blood when we came to Locarno.
13
Along the hot and dusty lower road between the Orrido of Traffiume and
Cannobio Willersley had developed his first blister. And partly because
of that and partly because there was a bag at the station that gave us
the refreshment of clean linen and partly because of the lazy lower air
into which we had come, we decided upon three or four days' sojourn in
the Empress Hotel.
We dined that night at a table-d'hote, and I found myself next to an
Englishwoman who began a conversation that was resumed presently in the
hotel lounge. She was a woman of perhaps thirty-three or thirty-four,
slenderly built, with a warm reddish skin and very abundant fair
golden hair, the wife of a petulant-looking heavy-faced man of perhaps
fifty-three, who smoked a cigar and dozed over his coffee and
presently went to bed. “He always goes to bed like that,” she confided
startlingly. “He sleeps after all his meals. I never knew such a man to
sleep.”
Then she returned to our talk, whatever it was.
We had begun at the dinner table with itineraries and the usual
topographical talk, and she had envied our pedestrian travel. “My
husband doesn't walk,” she said. “His heart is weak and he cannot manage
the hills.”
There was something friendly and adventurous in her manner; she conveyed
she liked me, and when presently Willersley drifted off to write
letters our talk sank at once to easy confidential undertones. I felt
enterprising, and indeed it is easy to be daring with people one has
never seen before and may never see again. I said I loved beautiful
scenery and all beautiful things, and the pointing note in my voice made
her laugh. She told me I had bold eyes, and so far as I can remember I
said she made them bold. “Blue they are,” she remarked, smiling archly.
“I like blue eyes.” Then I think we compared ages, and she said she was
the Woman of Thirty, “George Moore's Woman of Thirty.”