In the drawing-room to-night an old and solitary, but blandly cheerful,
female wanderer recounted numerous accidents at St. Moritz: legs broken
in two places, shoulders broken, spines injured; also deaths. Further,
the danger of catching infectious diseases at St. Moritz. “One _very_
large hotel, where _everybody_ had influenza,” etc. These recitals
seemed to give her calm and serious pleasure.
“Do you think this place is good for nerves?” she broke out suddenly at
me. I told her that in my opinion a hot bath and a day in bed would make
any place good for nerves. “I mean the nerves of the _body_,” she
said inscrutably. Then she deviated into a long set description of the
historic attack of Russian influenza which she had had several years
ago, and which had kept her in bed for three months, since when she had’
never been the same woman. And she seemed to savour with placid joy the
fact that she had never since been the same woman.
Then she flew back to St. Moritz and the prices thereof. She said you
could get pretty reasonable terms, even there, “provided you didn’t mind
going high up.” Upon my saying that I actually preferred being high up,
she exclaimed: “I don’t. I’m so afraid of fire. I’m always afraid of
fire.” She said that she had had two nephews at Cambridge. The second
one took rooms at the top of the highest house in Cambridge, and the
landlord was a drunkard. “My sister didn’t seem to care, but I
didn’t know _what_ to do! What _could_ I do? Well, I bought him a.
non-inflammable rope.” She smiled blandly.
This allusion to death and inebriety prompted a sprightly young
Yorkshirewoman, with the country gift for yarn-spinning, to tell a
tale of something that had happened to her cousin, who gave lessons in
domestic economy at a London Board School. A little girl, absent for two
days, was questioned as to the reason.
“I couldn’t come.”
“But why not?”
“I was kept.. . Please ‘m, my mother’s dead.”
“Well, wouldn’t you be better here at school? When did she die?”
“Yesterday. I must go back, please. I only came to tell you.”
“But why?”
“Well, ma’am. She’s lying on the table and I have to watch her.”
“Watch her?”
“Yes. Because when father comes home drunk, he knocks her off, and I
have to put her on again.”
This narration startled even the bridge-players, and there were protests
of horror. But the philosophic wanderer, who had never been the same
woman since Russian influenza, smiled placidly.
“I knew something really much more awful than that,” she said. “A young
woman, well-known to me, had charge of a crèche of thirty infants, and
one day she took it into her head to amuse herself by changing all their
clothes, so that at night they could not be identified; and many of them
never _were_ identified! She was _such_ a merry girl! I knew all her
brothers and sisters too! She wanted to go into a sisterhood, and she
did, for a month. But the only thing she did there--well, one day she
went down into the laundry and taught all the laundry-maids to polka.
She was such a merry girl!”
She smiled with extraordinary simplicity.
“In the end,” the bland wanderer continued, after a little pause, “she
went to America. America is such an odd place! Once I got into a car
at Philadelphia that had come from New York. The conductor showed me my
berth. The bed was warm. I partly undressed and got into it, and drew
the curtain. I was half asleep, when I felt a hand feeling me over
through the curtain. I called out, and a man’s voice said: ‘It’s all
right. I’m only looking for my stick. I think I must have left it in the
berth’! Another time a lot of student girls were in the same car
with me. They all got into their beds--or berths or whatever you call
it--about eight o’clock, wearing fancy jackets, and they sat up and
ate candy. I was walking up and down, and every time I passed they
_implored_ me to have candy, and then they implored each other to try
to persuade me. They were mostly named Sadie. At one in the morning they
ordered iced drinks ‘round. I was obliged to drink with them. They tired
me out, and then made me drink. I don’t know what happened just after
that, but I know that, at five in the morning, they were all sitting up
and eating candy. I’ve travelled a good deal in America and it’s _such_
an odd place! It was just the place for that young woman to go to.”