OBERLAND
VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES
POINTED ROOFS
BACKWATER
HONEYCOMB
THE TUNNEL
INTERIM
DEADLOCK
REVOLVING LIGHTS
THE TRAP
OBERLAND
(The next volume is in preparation)
OBERLAND
BY
DOROTHY M. RICHARDSON
AUTHOR OF “POINTED ROOFS,” ETC.
DUCKWORTH
3 HENRIETTA STREET, LONDON
First published 1927
(All rights reserved)
Printed in Great Britain by Ebenezer Baylis & Son, Ltd., The Trinity
Press, Worcester.
TO
J. H. B.
OBERLAND
CHAPTER I
The sight of a third porter, this time a gentle-looking man carrying a
pile of pillows and coming slowly, filled her with hope. But he passed
on his way as heedless as the others. It seemed incredible that not one
of these men should answer. She wasted a precious moment seeing again
the three brutishly preoccupied forms as figures moving in an evil
dream. If only she were without the miserable handbags she might run
alongside one of these villains, with a tip in an outstretched hand and
buy the simple yes or no that was all she needed. But she could not
bring herself to abandon her belongings to the mercy of this
ill-mannered wilderness where not a soul would care if she wandered
helpless until the undiscovered train had moved off into the night. She
knew this would not be and that what she was resenting was not the human
selfishness about her of which she had her own full share, but this
turning of her weariness into exhaustion ruining the rest of the journey
that already had held suffering enough.
There must be several minutes left of the ten the big clock had marked
as she neared the platforms. Recalling its friendly face she saw also
that of the little waiter at the buffet who had tried to persuade her to
take wine and murmured too late that there was no extra charge for it,
very gently. Rallying the remainder of her strength she dropped her
things on the platform with a decisiveness she tried just in vain to
scorn, and stood still and looked about amongst the hurrying passengers
and saw passing by and going ahead to the movement of an English stride
the familiar, blessed outlines of a Burberry. Ignoring the near train
the man was crossing a pool of lamplight and making for the dark
unlikely platform over the way. She caught up her bags and followed and
in a moment was at peace within the semi-darkness of the further
platform amongst people she had seen this morning at Victoria, and the
clangorous station was reduced to an enchanting background for confident
behaviour.
All these people were serene; had come in groups, unscathed, knowing
their way, knowing how to quell the bloused fiends into helpfulness. But
then, also, the journey to them was uniform grey, a tiresome business to
be got through; not black and sudden gold. Yet even they were relieved
to find themselves safely through the tangle. They strode unnecessarily
about, shouted needlessly to each other; expressing travellers’ joy in
the English way.
There seemed to be plenty of time and for awhile she strolled delighting
in them, until the sight of an excited weary child, in a weatherproof
that trailed at its heels, marching sturdily about adream with pride and
joy perfectly caricaturing the rest of the assembly, made her turn away
content to see no more, to hoist up her baggage and clamber after it
into cover, into the company of her own joy.
Into a compartment whose blinds were snugly drawn upon soft diffused
light falling on the elegance of dove-grey repp and white lace that had
been the surprise and refreshment of this morning’s crowded train, but
that now, evening-lit and enclosed, gave the empty carriage the air of a
little salon.
Installed here, with fatigue suddenly banished and the large P.L.M.
weaving within the mesh of the lace its thrilling assurance of being
launched on long continental distances, it was easy to forgive the
coercion that had imposed the longer sea-route for its cheapness and the
first-class ticket for the chance of securing solitude on the night
journey.
And indeed this steaming off into the night, that just now had seemed to
be the inaccessible goal and end of the journey, was only the beginning
of its longest stretch; but demanding only endurance. With hurry and
uncertainty at an end there could be nothing to compare with what lay
behind; nothing that could compare with the state of being a helpless
projectile that had spoiled Dieppe and made Paris a nightmare.
Yet Dieppe and Paris and the landscape in between, now that they were
set, by this sudden haven, far away in the past, were already coming
before her eyes transformed, lit by the joy that, hovering all the time
in the background, had seen and felt. France, for whose sake at once she
had longed to cease being a hurrying traveller robbed right and left of
things passing too swiftly, had been seen. Within her now, an
irrevocable extension of being, was France.
France that had spoken from its coast the moment she came up from the
prison of the battened-down saloon; the moment before the shouting
fiends charged up the gangway; spoken from the quay, from the lounging
blue-bloused figures, the buildings, the way the frontage of the town
met the sky and blended with the air, softly, yet clear in its softness,
and with serenity that was vivacious, unlike the stolid English peace.
And later those slender trees along the high bank of a river, the way
they had of sailing-by, mannered, _coquettish_; awakening affection for
the being of France.
And Paris barely glimpsed and shrouded with the glare of night ... the
emanation even of Paris was peace. An emanation as powerful as that of
London, more lively and yet more serene. Serene where gracious buildings
presided over the large flaring thoroughfares, serene even in the
dreadful by-streets.
And that woman at the station. Black-robed figure, coming diagonally
across the clear space yellow in gaslight against the background of
barriered platforms, seeming with her swift assured gait, bust first,
head reared and a little tilted back on the neck, so insolently
feminine, and then, as she swept by, suddenly beautiful; from head to
foot all gracefully moving rhythm. _Style_, of course, redeeming
ugliness and cruelty. She was the secret of France. France concentrated.
Michael, staying in Paris, said that the French are indescribably evil
and their children like monkeys. He had fled eagerly to England. But
Michael’s perceptions are moral. France, within his framework, falls
back into shadow.
The train carrying her through beloved France and away from it to a
bourne that had now ceased to be an imagined place, and become an idea,
useless, to be lost on arrival as her idea of France had been lost, was
so quiet amidst its loud rattling that the whole of it might be asleep.
No sound came from the corridor. No one passed. There was nothing but
the continuous rattling and the clatter of gear. The world deserting her
just when she would have welcomed, for wordless communication of the joy
of achievement, the sight and sound of human kind.
Twelve hours away, and now only a promise of daylight and of food, lay
Berne. Beyond Berne, somewhere in the far future of to-morrow afternoon,
the terminus, the business of finding and bargaining for a sleigh—the
last effort.
A muffled figure filled the doorway, entered the carriage, deposited
bags. A middle-aged Frenchman, dark, with sallow cheeks bulging above a
little pointed beard. Thinking her asleep he moved quietly, arranging
his belongings with deft, maturely sociable hands. From one of them a
ring gleamed in the gaslight. He showed no sign of relief in escaping
into silence, no sign of being alone. Conversation radiated from him.
Where, on the train, could he have been so recently talking that at this
moment he was almost making remarks into his bag?
She closed her eyes, listening to his sounds that sent to a distance the
sounds of the train. He had driven away also the outer spaces. The grey
and white interior spoke no longer of the strange wide distances of
France. He was France at home in a railway carriage, preparing to sleep
until, at the end of a definite short space of hours, the Swiss dawn
appeared at the windows. Before he came the night had stretched ahead,
timeless.
A moment’s stillness, and then a sound like the pumping of nitrous-oxide
into a bag. She opened her eyes upon him seated opposite with cheeks
distended and eyes strained wide above indeed a bag, held to his lips
and limply flopping. Bracing herself to the presence either of a lunatic
or a pitiful invalid believing himself unobserved, she watched while
slowly the bag swelled up and took, obedient to an effort that seemed
about to make his eyeballs start from his head, the shape of a cushion,
circular about a flattened centre. Setting it down in the corner
corresponding to that where lay her own head, he took off his boots,
pulled on slippers and pattered out into the corridor where he became
audible struggling with a near ventilator that presently gave and
clattered home. Tiptoeing back into the carriage where already it seemed
that the air grew close, he stood under the light, peering upwards with
raised arm. A gentle click, and two little veils slid down over the
globe and met, leaving the light quenched to a soft glimmer: beautiful,
shrouding hard outlines, keeping watch through the night, speaking of
night and travel, yet promising day and the end of travel.
But he had not done. He was battling now with the sliding door. It was
closing, closed, and the carriage converted into a box almost in
darkness and suddenly improper. With a groaning sigh he flung himself
down and drew his rug to the margin of the pale disc that was his face
and that turned sharply as she rose and passed it to reach the door, and
still showed, when the corridor light flowed in through the opened door,
a perfect astonishment. His inactivity, while she struggled out with her
baggage into the inhospitable corridor checked the words with which she
would have explained her inability to remain sealed for the night in a
small box. As she pushed the door to she thought she heard a small
sound, a sniggering expletive, mirth at the spectacle of British
prudery.
She was alone in the corridor of the sleeping train, in a cold air that
reeked of rusting metal and resounded with the clangour of machinery.
Exploring in both directions she found no sign of an attendant, nothing
but closely shrouded carriages telling of travellers outstretched and
slumbering. Into either of these she felt it impossible to break. There
was nothing for it but to abandon the hope of a night’s rest and drop to
a class whose passengers would be numerous and seated. The train had
gathered a speed that flung her from side to side as she went. In two
journeys she got her belongings across the metal bridge that swayed
above the couplings, and arrived with bruised arms and shoulders in
another length of corridor, a duplicate in noise and cold emptiness of
the one she had left. Everywhere shrouded carriages. But something had
changed, there was something even in the pitiless clangour that seemed
to announce a change of class.
The door she pushed open revealed huddled shapes whose dim faces,
propped this way and that, were all relaxed in slumber. There was no
visible vacant place, but as she hesitated within the emerging reek a
form stirred and sat forward as if to enquire; and when she struggled in
with her bags and her apology the carriage came to life in heavily
draped movement.
She was seated, shivering in a fog of smells, but at rest, escaped from
nightmare voyaging amongst swaying shadows. The familiar world was about
her again and she sat blessing the human kindliness of these sleeping
forms, blessing the man who had first moved, even though his rousing had
proved to be anxiety about the open door which, the moment she was
inside, he had closed with the gusty blowings of one who takes refuge
from a blizzard.
But the sense of home-coming began presently to fade under the pressure
of suffering that promised only to increase. She had long ceased to
wonder what made it possible for these people to add wraps and rugs to
the thick layers of the stifling atmosphere and remain serene. The
effort was no longer possible that had carried her through appearances
into a sense of the reality beneath. She saw them now as repellent
mysteries, pitiless aliens dowered with an unfathomable faculty for
dispensing with air. With each breath the smells that had greeted her,
no longer separately apparent, advanced in waves whose predominant
flavour was the odour of burnt rubber rising from the grating that ran
along the middle of the floor and seemed to sear the soles of her feet.
Getting beneath them her rolled rug she abandoned all but the sense of
survival and sank into herself, into a coma in which everything but the
green-veiled oscillating light was motionless forever. Forever the night
would go on and her head turn now this way now that against the harsh
upholstery.
* * * * *
The train was slowing, stopping. Its rumbling clatter subsided to a
prolonged squeak that ended on a stillness within which sounded one
against the other the rapid ticking of a watch and a steady rhythmic
snore. No one stirred, and for a moment there was nothing but these
sounds to witness that life went on. Then faintly and as if from very
far away she heard the metallic clangours of a large high station and
amidst them a thin clarion voice singing out an indistinguishable name.
Some large sleeping provincial town signalling its importance; a
milestone, marking off hours passed through that need not be braved
again. Yet when the train moved on it seemed impossible even to imagine
the ending of the night. She had no idea of how long she had sat hemmed
and suffering, with nothing in her mind but snatches of song that would
not be dismissed, with aching brow and burning eyeballs and a
ceaselessly on-coming stupor that would not turn to sleep. And at the
next stop with its echoing clangour and faintness of clarion voices she
no longer desired somehow to get across the encumbered carriage and
taste from a corridor window the sweet fresh air of the railway station
so freely breathed by those who were crying in the night.
* * * * *
A numbness had crept into the movement of the train, as though, wearying
it had ceased to clatter and were dropping into a doze. It was moving so
quietly that the ticking of the watch again became audible. The wheels
under the carriage seemed to be muffled and to labour, pushing heavily
forward ... _Snow_. The journey across France ending on the heights
along its eastern edge. Her drugged senses awoke bewailing Paris,
gleaming now out of reach far away in the north, challenging with the
memory of its glimpsed beauty whatever loveliness might be approaching
through the night.
* * * * *
Again outside the stopping train a far-off voice but this time a jocund
sound, ringing echoless in open air. In a moment through a lifted window
it became a rousing summons. Blinds went up, and on the huddled forms
emerging serene and bright-eyed from their hibernation a blueish light
came in. The opened door admitted crisp sounds close at hand and air,
advancing up the carriage.
Upon the platform the air was motionless and yet, walked through, an
intensity of movement—movement upon her face of millions of
infinitesimal needles attacking. Mountain air “like wine,” but this
effervescence was solid, holding one up, feeding every nerve.
A little way down the platform she came upon the luggage, a few trunks
set side by side on a counter, and saw at once that her portmanteau was
not there. Anxiety dogging her steps. But this air, that reached, it
seemed, to her very spirit, would not let her feel anxious.
The movements of the people leaving the train were leisurely, promising
a long wait. Most of the passengers were the English set free, strolling
happily about in fur-coats and creased Burberrys. English voices took
possession of the air. Filled it with the sense of the incorrigible
English confidence. And upon a table beyond the counter stood rows and
rows of steaming cups. Coffee. Café, mon dieu! Offered casually, the
normal beverage of these happy continentals.
The only visible official stood at ease beyond the table answering
questions, making no move towards the ranged luggage. He looked very
mild, had a little blue-black beard. She thought of long-forgotten
Emmerich, the heavy responsible pimpled face of the German official who
plunged great hands in amongst her belongings. Perhaps the customs’
officers were yet to appear.
Fortified by coffee she strolled up and made her enquiry in French, but
carefully in the slipshod English manner. For a moment her demand seemed
to embarrass him. Then, very politely:
“_Vous arrivez, madame?_”
“_De Londres._”
“_Et vous allez?_”
“_À Oberland._”
“_Vous n’avez qu’a monter dans le train_,” and hospitably he indicated
the train that stood now emptied, and breathing through its open doors.
Walking on down the platform she caught through a door ajar in the
background a glimpse of a truckle bed with coverings thrown back. Here
as they laboured forward through the darkness the douanier had been
sleeping, his station ready-staged for their coming, a farcical
half-dozen trunks laid out to represent the belongings of the trainful
of passengers. Appearances thus kept up, he was enjoying his rôle of
pleasant host. Tant mieux, tant very much mieux. One could enjoy the fun
of being let out into the night.
The solid air began to be intensely cold. But in its cold there was no
bitterness and it attained only her face, whose shape it seemed to
change. And all about the station were steep walls of starless darkness
and overhead in a blue-black sky, stars oddly small and numerous; very
sharp and near.
When the train moved on night settled down once more. Once more there
was dim gaslight and jolting shadows. But the air was clearer and only
two passengers remained, two women, each in her corner and each in a
heavy black cloak. Strangers to each other, with the length of the
carriage between them, yet alike, indistinguishable; above each cloak a
plump middle-aged face not long emerged from sleep: sheened with the
sleep that had left the oily, glinting brown eyes. Presently they began
to speak, with the freemasonry of women unobserved, socially off duty.
Their voices frugal, dull and flat; the voices of those who have
forgotten even the desire to find sympathy, to find anything turned
their way with an offering.
They reached details. One of them was on her way home to a place with a
tripping gentle name, a fairy keep agleam on a lakeside amidst
mountains. To her it was dailiness, life as now she knew it, a hemmed-in
loneliness. Visitors came from afar. Found it full of poetry. Saw her
perhaps as a part of it, a figure of romance.
When their patient voices ceased they were ghosts. Not even ghosts, for
they seemed uncreated, seemed never to have lived and yet to preside
over life, fixed in their places, an inexorable commentary. Each sat
staring before her into space, patient and isolated, undisguised
isolation. To imagine them alert and busied with their families about
them made them no less sad. Immovable at the centre of their lives was
loneliness, its plaints silenced, its source forgotten or unknown.
Of what use traveller’s joy? Frivolous, unfounded, dependent altogether
on oblivions.
One of them was rummaging in a heavy sack made of black twill and corded
at the neck. Toys, she said, were there—“_pour mes p’tits enfants_.”
“_Ça porte beaucoup de soins, les enfants_,” said the other, and
compressed dry lips. The first agreed and they sat back, each in her
corner, fallen into silence. Children to them seemed to be not persons
but a material, an unvarying substance wearily known to them both and to
be handled in that deft adjusting way of the French. Satisfied with this
mutual judgment on life, made in camera, they relapsed into
contemplation, leaving the air weighted with their shared, secretly
scornful, secretly impatient resignation.
Yet they were fortunate. Laden with wealth they did not count. It spoke
in their complacency. Aspiration asleep. They looked for joy in the
wrong place. In this they were humanity, blindly pursuing its way. Their
pallid plump faces, so salient, could smile impersonally. Their heads
were well-poised above shapely subdued bodies.
* * * * *
Now that it was empty and the blinds drawn up, the carriage seemed all
window, letting in the Swiss morning that was mist opening here and
there upon snow still greyed by dawn. Through the one she had just
pushed up came life, smoothing away the traces of the night. She lay
back in her corner and heard with closed eyes the steady voice of the
train. The rattle and clatter of its night-long rush through France
seemed to be checked by a sense of achievement, as if now it took its
ease, delighting in the coming of day, in the presence of this
Switzerland for whose features it was watching through the mist.
Incredible that in this same carriage where now she was at peace in
morning light she had sat through a flaming darkness, penned and
enduring. Lifting weary eyes she boldly surveyed it, saw the soilure and
shabbiness the gaslight had screened, saw a friend, grimed with
beneficent toil, and turned once more blissfully towards the window and
its view of thin mist and dawn-greyed snowfields.
* * * * *
The leap of recognition, unknowing between the mountains and herself
which was which, made the first sight of them—smoothed snow and crinkled
rock in unheard-of unimagined tawny light—seem, even at the moment of
seeing, already long ago.
They knew, they smiled joyfully at the glad shock they were, sideways
gigantically advancing while she passed as over a bridge across which
presently there would be no return, seeing and unseeing, seeing again
with the first keen vision.
They closed in upon the train, summitless, their bases gliding by, a
ceaseless tawny cliff throwing its light into the carriage, almost
within touch; receding, making space at its side for sudden blue water,
a river accompanying, giving them gentleness who were its mighty edge;
broadening, broadening, becoming a wide lake, a stretch of smooth
peerless blue with mountains reduced and distant upon its hither side.
With the sideways climbing of the train the lake dropped away, down and
down until presently she stood up to see it below in the distance, a
blue pool amidst its encirclement of mountain and of sky: a picture
sliding away, soundlessly, hopelessly demanding its perfect word.
* * * * *
“_Je suis anglaise_,” she murmured as the window came down into place.
“_Je le crois, madame. Mais
comment-voulez-vous-mon-dieu-vous-autres-anglais-qu’on-chauffe-les-coupés?_”
She was left to pictures framed and glazed.
* * * * *
Berne was a snowstorm blotting out everything but small white
green-shuttered houses standing at angles about the open space between
the station and the little restaurant across the way, their strangeness
veiled by falling flakes, flakes falling fast on freshly fallen snow
that was pitted with large deep-sunken foot-prints. The electric air of
dawn had softened, and as she plunged, following the strides of a row of
foot-prints, across to her refuge, it wrapped her about, a pleasant
enlivening density, warmed by the snow. Monstrous snowstorm, adventure,
and an excuse for shirking the walk to the Bridge and its view of the
Bernese heights. She was not ready for heights. This little secret tour,
restricted to getting from train to breakfast and back again to the
train, gave her, with its charm of familiar activity in a strange place,
a sharp first sense of Switzerland that in obediently following the
dictated programme she would have missed. But coming forth,
strengthened, once more into the snow she regretted the low
walking-shoes that prevented the following up of her glad meeting with
the forgotten details of the continental breakfast, its tender-crusted
rolls, the small oblongs of unglistening sugar that sweetened the
life-giving coffee, by an exploration of the nearer streets.
* * * * *
Presently their talk fell away and the journeying cast again its full
spell. Almost soundlessly the train was labouring along beside a ridge
that seemed to be the silent top of the world gliding by, its narrow
strip of grey snow-thick sky pierced by the tops of the crooked stakes
that were a fence submerged. From time to time the faint clear sound of
a bell, ting-ting, and a neat toy station slid by half buried in snow.
* * * * *
“I don’t dislike those kind of breakfasts myself,” she said and turned
her face to the window. Her well-cut lips had closed unpressing,
flowerlike. Both the girls had the slender delicate fragility of
flowers. And strength. Refined and gentle, above a strength of which
they were unaware. They were immensely strong or they would not appear
undisturbed by their long journeying, would not look so exactly as if
they were returning home in an omnibus from an afternoon’s shopping in
their own Croydon.
* * * * *
They had come so far together that it would seem churlish, with the
little terminus welcoming the whole party, to turn away from them. And
she liked them, was attached to them as fellow adventurers, fellow
survivors of the journey. The falling into the trap of travellers’
freemasonry was inevitable: a fatal desire to know the whence and the
whither, and, before you are aware of it you have pooled your enterprise
and the new reality is at a distance. But so far it had not come to
that. There were no adieux. They had melted away, they and their things,
lost in the open while she, forgetful of everything but the blessed
cessation, had got herself out of the train.
The station was in a wilderness. High surrounding mountains making it
seem that their half-day’s going up and still up had brought them out
upon a modest lowland. There was no sign from where she stood of any
upward track. Sheds, dumped upon a waste of snow beyond which mountains
filled the sky and barred the way.
Fierce-looking men in blue gaberdines and slouch hats, lounging about.
One of these must be attacked and bargained with for a sleigh. But there
were no sleighs to be seen, nothing at all resembling a vehicle, unless
indeed one braved the heights in one of those rough shallow frameworks
on runners, some piled with hay and some with peeled yellow timbers,
neatly lashed. Perhaps a sleigh should be ordered in advance? Perhaps
here she met disaster....
The man knew her requirements before she spoke and was all hot-eyed
eagerness, yet off-hand. Brutish, yet making her phrases, that a London
cabby would have received with deference, sound discourteous. In his
queer German he agreed to the smaller sum and turned away to
expectorate.
The large barn-like restaurant was empty save for a group of people at
the far end, forgotten again and again as she sat too happy to swoop the
immense distance between herself and anything but the warm brownness of
the interior and its strange quality, its intensity of welcoming
shelter—sharp contrast with the bleak surrounding snow. Switzerland was
here, already surrounding and protecting with an easy practised hand.
And there was a generous savouriness.... She could not recall any
lunching on an English journey affording this careless completeness of
comfort.
Incompletely sharing these appreciations her tired and fevered body
cowered within the folds of the beneficent fur-coat seeking a somnolence
that refused to possess it. Fever kept her mind alert, but circling at a
great pace round and round amidst reiterated assertions. Turn and turn
about they presented themselves, were flung aside in favour of what
waited beyond, and again thrust themselves forward, as if determined, so
emphatic they were, not only to share but to steer her adventure. And
away behind them, standing still and now forever accessible, were the
worlds she had passed through since the sleet drove in her face at
Newhaven. And ahead unknown Oberland, summoning her up amongst its
peaks.
And hovering vehement above them all hung the cloud of her pity for
those who had never bathed in strangeness—and its dark lining, the
selfish congratulation that reminded her how at the beginning of her
life, in the face of obstructions, she had so bathed and now under
kindly compulsion was again bathing. And again alone. Loneliness, that
had long gone from her life, had come back for this sudden voyaging to
be her best companion, to shelter strangeness that can be known only in
solitude.
In a swift glimpse, caught through the mesh woven by the obstinate
circlings of her consciousness, she saw her time in Germany, how perfect
in pain and joy, how left complete and bright had been that piece of her
life. And in Belgium—in spite of the large party. Yet even the party,
though they had taken the edge from many things had now become a rich
part of the whole. But the things that came back most sharply had been
seen in solitude: in those times of going out alone on small
commissions, the way the long vista of boulevard seemed to sing for joy,
the sharp turn, the clean pavé and neat bright little shops; the
charcuterie just round the corner, the old pharmacien who had understood
and quickly and gravely chloroformed the kitten quite dead; the long
walk through the grilling lively Brussels streets to get the circular
tickets—little shadow over it of pain at the thought of the frightened
man who believed it sinful to go to mass and saw the dull little English
Church as light in a pagan darkness; the afternoon alone in the polished
old salon while the others were packing for the Ardennes tour just
before the great thunderstorm, bright darkness making everything gleam,
the candles melting in the heavy heat, drooping from their sconces,
white, and gracious in their oddity, against the dark panelling: rich
ancient gloom and gleam and the certainty of the good of mass, of the
way so welcome and so right as an interval in living it stayed the
talkative brain and made the soul sure of itself. That moment in
Bruges—after the wrangling at the station, after not wanting to go
deliberately to see the Belfry, after feeling forever blank in just this
place that was fulfilling all the so different other places, showing
itself to be their centre and secret, while aunt Bella bought the prawns
and we all stood fuming in the sweltering heat—of being suddenly struck
alive, drawn running away from them all down the little brown street—the
Belfry and its shadow, all its might and sweetness and surroundedness,
safe, before they all came up with their voices and their books.
And oh! that first glimpse that had begun it all, of Brussels in the
twilight from the landing window; old peaked houses, grouped irregularly
and rising out of greenery, gothic, bringing happy nostalgia. Gothic
effects bring nostalgia, have a deep recognisable quality of life. A
gothic house is a person, a square house is a thing....
In silence and alone; yet most people prefer to see everything in
groups, collectively. They never lose themselves in strangeness and wake
changed.
That man is cheerfully bearing burdens. Usually in a party there is one
who _is_ alone. Harassed, yet quietly seeing.
He was smiling, the smile of an old friend. With a sharp effort she
pushed her way through, wondering how long she had sat staring at them,
to recognition of the Croydon party. Who else indeed could it be? She
gathered herself together and instantly saw in the hidden future not the
sunlit mountains of her desire but for the first time the people already
ensconced at the Alpenstock, demanding awareness and at least the
semblance of interest. Sports-people, not only to the manner born—that,
though they would not know it, was a tie, a home-tie pulling at her
heart—but to the manner dressed, making one feel not merely inadequate
but improperly hard-up. But since she was to live on a balcony? And
there was the borrowed fur-coat ... and the blue gown.
The words sung out by the Croydon father were lost amongst their echoes
in the rafters. She heard only the English voice, come, as she had come,
so far and so laboriously. Her gladly answering words were drowned by
the sudden jingling of sleighbells at the door near by.
* * * * *
Behind the sturdy horse, whose head-tossings caused the silvery clash of
bells was the sleigh of _The Polish Jew_, brought out of the darkness at
the back of the stage and brightly coloured: upon a background of
pillar-box red, flourishing gilt scrolls surrounded little landscape
scenes painted upon its sides in brilliant deep tones that seemed to
spread a warmth and call attention to the warmth within the little
carriage sitting compact and low on its runners and billowing with a
large fur rug.
As unexpected as the luxurious vehicle was the changed aspect of the
driver. Still wearing smock and slouch hat he had now an air of gravity,
the air of a young student of theology. And on his face as he put her
into the sleigh was a look of patient responsibility. He packed and
arranged with the manner of one handling valuables, silently; the Swiss
manner perhaps of treating the English, acquired and handed down through
long experience of the lavish generosity of these travellers from whom
it was useless to expect an intelligible word. But there was contempt
too; deep-rooted, patient contempt.
This was luxury. There was warmth under her feet, fur lining upon the
back of the seat reinforced by the thickness of the fur-coat and all
about her the immense fur rug. There was nothing to fear from the air
that presently would be in movement, driving by and growing colder as
the sleigh went up into the unknown heights. Away ahead the Croydon
party made a compact black mass between the two horses of their larger
sleigh and the luggage standing out behind in unwieldy cubes just above
the snow. Their driver was preparing to start. On all the upward way
they would be visible ahead, stealing its mystery, heralding the hotel
at the end.
They were off, gliding swiftly over the snow, gay voices mingling with
the sound of bells, silvery crashings going to the rhythm of a soundless
trit-trot. Every moment her own horse threw up a spray of tinkles
promising the fairy crashing that would ring upon the air against the
one now rapidly receding. The mountains frowning under the grey sky and
the snowfields beyond the flattened expanse round the station came to
life, listening to the confidently receding bells.
The Croydon party disappeared round a bend and again there was silence
and a mighty inattention. But her man, come round from lashing on her
luggage, was getting into his seat just as he was, coatless and
gathering up the reins with bare hands.
“Euh!”
The small sound, like a word spoken _sotto voce_ to a neighbour, barely
broke the stillness, but the sleigh leapt to the pull of the horse, and
glided smoothly off. Its movement was pure enchantment. No driving on
earth could compare to this skimming along on hard snow to the note of
the bells that was higher than that of those gone on ahead and seemed to
challenge them with an overtaking eagerness. Gay and silvery sweet, it
seemed to make a sunlight within the sunless air and to call up to the
crinkled tops of the mountains that were now so magnificently in
movement.
“Euh-euh!”
On they swept through the solidly impinging air. Again the million
needles attacking. In a moment they were round the bend and in sight of
the large sleigh, a moving patch upon the rising road.
“Euh-euh-euh,” urged the driver laconically, and the little sleigh flew
rocking up the slight incline. They were overtaking. The heavier note of
the bells ahead joined its slower rhythm to their swift light jinglings.
The dark mass of the Croydon party showed four white faces turned to
watch.
“You are well off with your fur-coat,” cried the father as her sleigh
skimmed by. They had looked a little crouched and enduring. Not knowing
the cold she had endured in the past, cold that lay ahead to be endured
again, in winters set in a row.
Ringing in her head as she sped upwards along the road narrowing and
flanked by massive slopes whose summits had drawn too near to be seen,
were the shouted remarks exchanged by the drivers. They had fallen
resonantly upon the air and opened within it a vision of the sunlit
heights known to these men with the rich deep voices. But there was the
hotel....
After all no one was to witness her apprenticeship. And to get up within
sight of the summits was worth much suffering. Suffering that would be
forgotten. And if these were Oberland men, then there was to be
_ski-running_ to-morrow. Si-renna, what else could that mean? Patois,
rich and soft. Doomed to die. Other words gathered unawares on the way
came and placed themselves beside those ringing in her ears.
Terminations, turns of sound, upon a new quality of voice. Strong and
deep and ringing with a wisdom that brought her a sense of helpless
ignorance. The helpless ignorance of town culture.
* * * * *
The thin penetrating mist promised increasing cold. The driver flung on
a cloak, secured at the neck but falling open across his chest and
leaving exposed his thinly clad arms and bare hands.
She pulled high the collar of her fur-coat, rimy now at its edges, and
her chin ceased to ache and only her eyes and cheekbones felt the thin
icy attacking mist that had appeared so suddenly. The cold of a few
moments ago numbing her face had brought a hint of how one might freeze
quietly to death, numbed and as if warmed by an intensity of cold; and
that out amongst the mountains it would not be terrible. But this raw
mist bringing pain in every bone it touched would send one aching to
one’s death, crushed to death by a biting increasing pain.
She felt elaborately warm, not caring even now how long might go on this
swift progress along a track that still wound through corridors of
mountains and still found mountains rising ahead. But night would come
and the great shapes all about her would be wrapped away until they were
a darkness in the sky.
If this greying light were the fall of day then certainly the cold would
increase. She tried to reckon how far she had travelled eastwards, by
how much earlier the sun would set. But south, too, she had come....
* * * * *
The mist was breaking, being broken from above. It dawned upon her that
they had been passing impossibly through clouds and were now reaching
their fringe. Colour was coming from above, was already here in dark
brilliance, thundery. Turning to look down the track she saw distance,
cloud masses, light-soaked and gleaming.
And now from just ahead high in the mist, a sunlit peak looked down.
Long after she had sat erect from her warm ensconcement, the sunlit
mountain corridors still seemed to be saying watch, see, if you can
believe it, what we can do. And all the time it seemed that they must
open out and leave her upon the hither side of enchantment, and still
they turned and brought fresh vistas. Sungilt masses beetling variously
up into pinnacles that truly cut the sky high up beyond their
high-clambering pinewoods, where their snow was broken by patches of
tawny crag. She still longed to glide forever onwards through this
gladness of light.
But the bright gold was withdrawing. Presently it stood only upon the
higher ridges. The colour was going and the angular shadows, leaving a
bleakness of white, leaving the mountains higher in their whiteness. The
highest sloped more swiftly than the others from its lower mass and
ended in a long cone of purest white with a flattened top sharply aslant
against the deepening blue; as if walking up it. It held her eyes, its
solid thickness of snow, the way from its blunted tower it came
broadening down unbroken by crag, radiant white until far down its
pinewoods made a gentleness about its base. Up there on the quiet of its
topmost angle it seemed there must be someone, minutely rejoicing in its
line along the sky.
A turn brought peaks whose gold had turned to rose. She had not eyes
enough for seeing. Seeing was not enough. There was sound, if only one
could hear it, in this still, signalling light.
The last of it was ruby gathered departing upon the topmost crags,
seeming, the moment before it left them, to be deeply wrought into the
crinkled rock.
At a sharp bend the face of the sideways-lounging driver came into
sight, expressionless.
“_Schön, die letzte Glüh_,” he said quietly.
When she had pronounced her “_Wunderschön_,” she sat back released from
intentness seeing the scene as one who saw it daily; and noticed then
that the colour ebbed from the mountains had melted into the sky. It was
this marvel of colour, turning the sky to molten rainbow, that the
driver had meant as well as the rubied ridges that had kept the sky
forgotten.
Just above a collar of snow, that dipped steeply between the peaks it
linked, the sky was a soft greenish purple paling upwards from
mauve-green to green whose edges melted imperceptibly into the deepening
blue. In a moment they were turned towards the opposite sky, bold in
smoky russet rising to amber and to saffron-rose expanding upwards; a
high radiant background for its mountain, spread like a banner, not
pressed dense and close with deeps strangely moving, like the little sky
above the collar.
The mountain lights were happiness possessed, sure of recurrence. But
these skies, never to return, begged for remembrance.
The dry cold deepened, bringing sleep. Drunk, she felt now, with sleep;
dizzy with gazing, and still there was no sign of the end. They were
climbing a narrow track between a smooth high drift, a greying wall of
snow, and a precipice sharply falling.
An opening; the floor of a wide valley. Mountains hemming it, exposed
from base to summit, moving by as the sleigh sped along the level to
where a fenced road led upwards. Up this steep road they went in a slow
zig-zag that brought the mountains across the way now right now left,
and a glimpse ahead against the sky of a village, angles and peaks of
low buildings sharply etched, quenched by snow, crushed between snow and
snow, and in their midst the high snow-shrouded cone of a little church;
Swiss village, lost in wastes of snow.
At a tremendous pace they jingled along a narrow street of shops and
châlets. The street presently opened to a circle about the little church
and narrowed again and ended, showing beyond, as the sleigh pulled up at
the steps of a portico, rising ground and the beginning of pinewoods.