From which she awoke in light that seemed for a moment to be beyond the
confines of earth. It was as if all her life she had travelled towards
this radiance, and was now within it, clear of the past, at an ultimate
destination.
How long had it been there, quizzically patient, waiting for her to be
aware of it?
It was sound, that had wakened her and ceased now that she was looking
and listening; become the inaudible edge of a sound infinitely far away.
Brilliant light, urgently describing the outdoor scene. But she was
unwilling to stir and break the radiant stillness.
Close at hand a bell buzzed sharply. Another, and then a third far away
down the corridor. People ringing their day into existence, free to ring
their day into existence when they pleased. She was one of them; and for
to-day she would wait awhile, give the bell-ringers time to be up and
gone down to breakfast while she kept intact within this miracle of
light the days ahead that with the sounding of her own bell would be
already in process of spending.
But perhaps there was a time-limit for breakfasts?
Screwing round to locate the bell with the minimum of movement she
paused in sheer surprise of well-being. Of the shattering journey there
was not a trace. Nor of the morning weariness following social
excitements.
Sitting up to search more effectually she saw the source of her
wakening, bright gold upon the mountain tops: a smiling challenge, as
if, having put on their morning gold, the mountains watched its effect
upon the onlookers.
* * * * *
She was glad to be alone on the scene of last night’s dinner-party; to
be in the company of the other breakfasters represented only by depleted
butter-dishes and gaps in the piles of rolls, and free from the risk of
hearing the opening day fretted by voices set going like incantations to
exorcise the present as if it had no value, as if the speakers were not
living in it but only in yesterday or to-morrow.
And when there came a warning swift clumping of hob-nailed boots across
the hall, across the room, she demanded Vereker, oddly certain that even
at this late hour still somehow it would contrive to be he.
And there he was, lightly clumping round the table-end to his place,
into which he slipped smiling his greeting, boyishly. Not at all in the
self-conscious Englishman’s manner of getting himself seated when others
are already in their places: bent, just before sitting down, forward
from the waist and in that pose—hitching his trousers the
while—distributing his greetings, and so letting himself down into his
chair either with immediate speech or a simulated air of preoccupation.
Vereker flopped and beamed at the same moment, unfeignedly pleased to
arrive. Knickerbockers; but that was not the whole difference. He was
always unfeignedly pleased to arrive?
He began at once collecting food and spoke with gentle suddenness into a
butter-dish:
“I hope you had a good night?”
His talk made a little symphony with his movements which also were
conversational, and he looked across each time he spoke, but only on the
last word; a swift blue beam. In the morning light he seemed
younger—perhaps a champion ski-er at the end of his day is as tired as a
hard-worked navvy?—and a certain air of happy gravity and the very fair
curly hair shining round its edges from recent splashings, gave him, in
his very white, very woolly sweater, something of the look of a newly
bathed babe in its matinée jacket—in spite of the stern presence, above
the rolled top of his sweater, of an inch of stiff linen collar highly
glazed.
He was of a type and of a class, and also, in a way not quite clear, a
tempered, thoroughly live human being; something more in him than fine
sportsman and nice fellow, giving him weight. Presently she found its
marks: a pleat between the brows and, far away within his eyes even when
they smiled, a sadness; that sounded too in his cheerful voice, a
puzzled, perpetual compassion.
For the world? For himself?
But these back premises were touched with sunlight. Some sense of things
he had within him that made him utterly _kind_.
“Isn’t it extraordinary,” she said, hoping to hide the fact that she had
missed his last remark, “the way these people leave the lights switched
on all the time, everywhere.”
“Cheap electricity,” he said as if in parenthesis, and as if
apologetically reminding her of what she already knew—“Water power. They
pay a rate and use as much as they like.”
In all his answers there was this manner of apologising for giving
information. And his talk, even the perfect little story of the local
barber and the newspapers, which he told at top pace as if grudging the
moment it wasted, was like a shorthand annotation to essential unspoken
things, shared interests and opinions taken for granted. Talking with
him she no longer felt as she had done last night either that she was at
a private view of an exclusive exhibition, or gathering fresh light on
social problems. There was in him something unbounded, that enhanced the
light reflected into the room from the sunlit snow. His affectionate
allusion to his Cambridge brought to her mind complete in all its
parts—together with gratitude for the peace he gave in which things
could expand unhindered—her own so sparse possession: her week-ends
there with the cousins, their blinkered, comfort-loving academic
friends, the strange sense of at once creeping back into security and
realising how far she had come away from it; their kindnesses, their
secret hope of settling her for life in their enclosed world, and their
vain efforts to mould her to its ways; and then the end, the growing
engrossments in London breaking the link that held her to them and to
the past they embodied—and Cambridge left lit by their sweet
hospitality, by the light streaming on Sunday afternoons through King’s
Chapel windows; the Backs in sunlight, and a memory of the halting
little chime.
When she told him of the things that Cambridge had left with her, she
paused just in time to escape adding to them the gait of the
undergraduates: the slovenly stride whose each footfall sent the chin
forward with a hen-like jerk.
He agreed at once with her choice, but hesitated over the little chime.
“It might have been a new church. I never saw it. But if you had once
heard it you _couldn’t_ forget it.”
It was absurd to be holding to her solitary chime in face of his four
years’ residence. But it seemed now desperately important to state
exactly the quality she had felt and never put into words. She sat
listening—aware of him waiting in a sympathetic stillness—to each note
as it sounded out into the sky above the town, making it no longer
Cambridge but a dream-city, subduing the graceless modern bricks and
mortar to harmony with the ancient beauty of the colleges—until the
whole was a loveliness beneath the evening sky—and presently found
herself speaking with reckless enthusiasm.
“_Don’t_ you remember the four little gentle tuneless phrases, of six
and seven notes alternately, one for each quarter, and at the hour
sounding one after the other with a little pause between each, seeming
to ask you to look at what it saw, at the various life of the town made
suddenly wonderful and strange; and the last phrase, beginning with a
small high note that tapped the sky, and wandering down to the level and
stopping without emphasis, leaving everything at peace and very
beautiful.”
“I think I _can’t_ have heard it,” he said wistfully and sat
contemplative in a little pause during which it occurred to her,
becoming aware of the two of them talking on and on into the morning
that it rested with her to wind up the sitting; that he might perhaps,
if not quite immediately, yet in intention be waiting for her to rise
and spare him the apparent discourtesy of pleading an engagement. Even
failing the engagement they could not sit here forever, and the
convention of his world demanded that she should be the first to go.
She had just time to note coming from far away within herself a defiance
that would sooner inflict upon him the discomfort of breaking the rule
than upon herself the annoyance of moving at its bidding, when he looked
across and said with the bowing attitude he had held last night as he
spoke and waited for her to become aware of him: “May I put you up for
the ski-club?”
It was, of course, his business to cultivate new people, and, if they
seemed suitable, to collect them....
She smiled acknowledgment and insincerely pleaded the shortness of her
stay. All she could do, short of blurting out her poverty which he
seemed not to have seen.
But a fortnight was, he declared, the ideal time: time to learn and to
get on well enough to want to come out again next year; and hurried on
to promise a fellow sufferer, a friend coming up, for only a few days,
from the South, who would be set immediately to work and on whose
account he was committed to-day to trek down to the station.
“We were,” he said, for the first time looking across almost before he
spoke, and with the manner now of making a direct important
communication, “at Cambridge together.”
A valued friend, being introduced, recommended, put before himself.
Warmth crept into his voice, and lively emphasis—compressed into a small
note of distress. That note was his social utmost, for gravity and for
joy; recalling Selina Holland—when she was deeply moved: a wailing tone,
deprecating, but in his tone was more wistfulness, a suggestion too of
anxiety. It had begun when he spoke of Pater’s Renaissance Studies, but
had then merely sounded into the golden light, intensifying it. Now it
seemed to flout the light, flout everything but his desire to express
the absent friend.
“That was some years ago. Since then he has been a very busy man, saying
to this one go and he goeth ...” He smiled across as if asking her to
share the strangeness of his friend’s metamorphosis.
“You’ve not seen him since?”
“Not since he bought his land.”
“He’s a landowner,” she said, and fell into sadness.
“He is indeed, on quite a big scale, and a very hardworking one.”
“A farmer,” murmured Miriam, “that’s not so bad.”
“It’s very arduous. He is always at his post. Never takes a holiday. For
three winters I’ve tried to get him up here for a week.”
“Absolute property in land,” she said to the sunlit snow, “is a crime.”
Before her, side by side with a vision of Rent as a clutching monster
astride upon civilisation, was a picture of herself, suddenly hitting
out at these pleasant people, all, no doubt, landowners. It was only
because the friend had been presented to her in the distance and with as
it were all his land on his back that this one article of the Lycurgan
faith of which she had no doubt, had at all reared itself in her mind.
And as it came, dictating her words while she stood by counting the
probable cost and wondering too over the great gulf between one’s most
cherished opinions about life and one’s sense of life as it presents
itself piecemeal embodied in people, she heard with relief his unchanged
voice:
“Oh, please tell me why?”
And turned to see him flushed, smiling, pardoning her lapse, apologising
for pardoning it, and altogether interested.
“It’s a whole immense subject and I’m not a specialist. But the theory
of Rent has been worked out by those who are, by people sincerely trying
to discover where it is that temporarily useful parts of the machinery
of civilisation have got out of gear and become harmful. _No_ one ought
to have to pay for the right to sit down on the earth. _No_ one ought to
be so helplessly expropriated that another can _buy_ him and use him up
as he would never dream of using up more costly material—horses for
instance.”
“You are a socialist?”
Into her answer came the sound of a child’s voice in plaintive
recitative approaching from the hall.
“Daphne in trouble,” he said, “you’ll tell me more, I _hope_,”—and
turned his pleading smile to meet people coming in at the door. They
clumped to the small table nearer the further window and she caught a
sideways glimpse before they sat down: a slender woman with red-gold
hair carrying a bunchy little girl whose long legs dangled against her
skirt—Mrs. Sneyde, the grass-widow, and, making for the far side of the
table a big buoyant girlish young woman—uninteresting—the sister-in-law,
Maud Hollebone.
The child’s “so bitter, _bitter_ cold,” sounded clear through the
morning greetings in which she took no part. Her voice was strange, low
and clear, and full of a meditative sincerity. Amidst the interchange of
talk between Vereker and the two women it prevailed again: a plaintive
monologue addressed to the universe.
The grating of a chair and there she was confronting the talking
Vereker, who was on his feet and just about to go. She stood gazing up,
with her hands behind her back. A rounded face and head, cleanly
revealed by the way the fine silky brown hair was strained back across
the skull; bunchy serge dress and stiff white pinafore. Pausing, Vereker
looked down at her.
“You going out, Vereker?”
“Not yet.”
“Your friend coming? Not telegraphed or anything?”
“He’s coming all right, Daphne. He’ll be here to-night. You’ll see him
in the morning.”
“You’ll be writing your letters till you start?”
“I may.”
“Then I’ll come and sit in your room till my beecely walk.”
She rapped out her statements—immediately upon his replies, making him
sound gentle and slow—from the childish, rounded face that was serenely
thinking, full of quick, calm thought. Regardless talk was going forward
at the other table to which, her business settled, she briskly returned.
* * * * *
The little wooden hall was like a summer-house that was also a
sports-pavilion. Against the wall that backed the dining-room stood
bamboo chairs uncertain, as if, belonging elsewhere and having been told
not to block the gangway by moving into the open, they did not know what
they were for. The table to which they belonged stood boldly in the
centre and held an ash-tray. Between it and the front door from above
which the antlered head of a chamois gazed down upon the small scene,
the way was clear, but the rest of the floor space was invaded on all
sides by toboggans propped against the wall or standing clear with boots
lying upon them, slender boots gleaming with polish and fitted with
skates that appeared to be nothing but a single brilliant blade. Against
one wall was a pair of things like oars. Ski? But thought of as attached
to a human foot they were impossibly long.
From a hidden region away beyond the angle of the staircase came
servants’ voices in staccato, and abrupt sounds: the sounds of their
morning campaign, giving an air of callous oblivion to the waiting
implements of sport, and quenching, with the way they had of seeming to
urge the residents forth upon their proper business outdoors, the
hesitant invitation of the chairs.
Beyond the dining-room and this little hall, whose stillness murmured
incessantly of activities, there was no refuge but the dejected little
salon.
Filled with morning light it seemed larger, a little important and quite
self-sufficient, giving out its secret strangeness of a Swiss room, old;
pre-existing English visitors, proof, with its way of being, set long
ago and unaltered, against their travelled hilarity. The little parlour
piano, precious in chosen wood highly polished, with faded yellow keys
and faded silk behind its trellis, was full of old music, seemed to
brood over the carollings of an ancient simplicity unknown to the modern
piano whose brilliant black and white makes it sound in a room all the
time, a ringing accompaniment to the life of to-day.
But into this averted solitude there came to her again the sense of time
pouring from an inexhaustible source: gentle, marvellous, unutterably
_kind_. It came in through the window whose screened light, filling the
small room and halting meditatively there, seemed to wait for song.
Drawing back the flimsy curtain from the window, she found it a door
giving on a covered balcony through whose panes she saw wan sunless
snowfields and beyond them slopes, patched with black pinewoods and
rising in the distance to a high ridge, a smooth bulging thickness of
snow against deep blue sky. The dense pinewoods thinned and as they
climbed into small straggling groups with here and there a single file
of trees, small and sharp-pointed, marching towards the top of the
ridge.
Beautiful this sharp etching far-off of keen black pines upon the
sunless snow and strange the clear deep blue of the sky. But mournful;
remote and self-sufficient. Switzerland averted and a little
discouraging.
The balcony extended right and left and a glimpse away to the left of
mats hanging out into the open and a maid pouncing forth upon them with
a beater sent her to the right, where the distance was obscured by a
building standing at right angles to the house, a battered barn-like
place, unbalconied, but pierced symmetrically by little windows; châlet,
warm rich brown, darkened above by its sheltering, steeply jutting roof
... beautiful. Its kindliness extended all about it, lending a warmth
even to the far-off desolate slopes.
A door at her side revealed the dining-room lengthwise and deserted, and
then she was round the angle of the house and free of its secret: its
face towards the valley that was now a vast splendour of sunlight.
Every day, through these windows that framed the view in strips this
light would be visible in all its changings. Standing at the one that
glazed the great mountain whose gold had wakened her she discovered that
the balcony was a verandah, had in front of it a railed-in space set
with chairs and tables. In a moment she was out in the open light, upon
a shelf, within the landscape that seemed now to be the whole delight of
Switzerland outspread before her eyes.
Far away below, cleft along its centre by the irregular black line of
its frozen river was the wide white floor of the valley, measuring the
mountains that rose upon its hither side.
Those high, high summits, beetling variously up into the top of the sky,
with bright patches of tawny rock breaking through their smooth
whiteness against its darkest blue, knew nothing of the world below
where their mountains went downward in a great whiteness of broadening
irregular slopes that presently bore pines in single file upwards
advancing from the dense clumps upon the lower ridges, and met in an
extended mass along the edge of the valley floor.
Here and there, clear of the pinewoods, and looking perilously high and
desolate, a single châlet made a triangular warm brown blot upon the
dazzling snow.
In this crystal stillness the smallest sound went easily up to the high
peaks; to the high pure blue.
Turning to bless the well-placed little hotel she met a frontage of
blank windows, each with its sharply jutting balcony, jaws, dropped
beneath the blind stare of the windows set forever upon a single scene.
Hotel; queer uncherished thing. No one to share its life and make it
live.
On a near table was a folded newspaper, thin, heavily printed,
continental. Switzerland radiant all about her and the Swiss world
within her hands—a reprieve from further seeing and a tour, into the
daily life of this country whose living went on within a setting that
made even the advertisements look lyrical.
The simple text was enthralling. For years she had not so delighted in
any reading. In the mere fact of the written word, in the building of
the sentences, the movement of phrases linking part with part. It was
all quite undistinguished, a little crude and hard; demanding, seeming
to assume a sunny hardness in mankind. And there was something missing
whose absence was a relief, like the absence of heaviness in the air.
Everything she had read stood clear in her mind that yet, insufficiently
occupied with the narrative and its strange emanations, caught up single
words and phrases and went off independently touring, climbing to fresh
arrangements and interpretations of familiar thought.
And this miracle of renewal was the work of a single night.
The need for expression grew burdensome in the presence of the empty
sun-blistered tables. Perhaps these lively clarities would survive a
return journey through the hotel?
Voices sounded up from below, from the invisible roadway. English
laughter, of people actively diverting themselves in the winter
landscape. Far away within each one was the uncommunicating English
spirit, heedless, but not always unaware, filling its day with habitual,
lively-seeming activities. The laughter sounded insincere; as if defying
a gloom it refused to face.
They passed out of hearing and the vast stillness, restored, made her
look forth: at a scene grown familiar, driving her off to fresh seeking
while it went its way towards the day when she would see it for the last
time, giving her even now as she surveyed its irrevocably known beauty,
a foretaste of the nostalgia that must rend her when once more she was
down upon the plains.
But that time was infinitely far away beyond the days during which she
was to live perpetually with this scene that clamoured now to be
communicated in its first freshness.
* * * * *
The writing at top-speed of half-a-dozen letters left arrival and
beginning in the past, the great doorway of the enchantments she had
tried to describe safely closed behind her, and herself going forward
within them. With letters to post she must now go forth, secretly, as it
were behind her own back, into Oberland; into the scene that had seemed
full experience and was but its overture.
The letters were disappointing. Only in one of them had she escaped
expressing yesterday’s excited achievements and set down instead the
living joy of to-day. And this for the one to whom such joy was
incredible. But all were warm with affection newly felt. The long
distance not only made people very dear—in a surprising way it
re-arranged them. Foremost amongst the men was Densley of the warm heart
and wooden head wildly hailed. His letter, the last and shortest, wrote
itself in one sentence, descriptive, laughing, affectionate. How it
would surprise him....
Life, she told herself as she crossed the hall trying to drown the
kitchen sounds by recalling what had flashed across her mind as she
wrote to Densley, is eternal because joy is. “Future life” is a
contradiction in terms. The deadly trap of the adjective. _Pourquoi
dater?_ Even science insists on indestructibility—yet marks for
destruction the very thing that enables it to recognise
indestructibility. But it had come nearer and clearer than that.
Fawn-coloured woolly puppies, romping in the thick snow at the side of
the steps as though it were grass, huge, as big as lion cubs, with large
snub faces, and dense short bushy coats trying to curl, evenly all over
their tubby tumbling bodies ... St. Bernards, at home in their snow.
They flung themselves at her hands, mumbling her gloves, rolling over
with the smallest shove, weak and big and beautiful and with absurd
miniature barkings.
* * * * *
The hotel was at the higher end of the village and from its steps she
could see down the narrow street to where the little church and its
white cloaked sugar-loaf spire obscured the view and away to the right
set clear of the village and each on the crest of a gentle slope, the
hotels, four, five, big buildings, not unbeautiful with their peaked
roofs and balconies and the brilliance of green shutters on their white
faces. And even the largest, Mrs. Harcourt’s ‘hidjus big place’
recognisable by its difference, a huge square plaster box, patterned
with rows and rows of uniform windows above which on its flat roof a
high pole flaunted a flag limp in the motionless air, looked small and
harmless, a dolls’ house dumped casually, lost in the waste of snow.
If these hotels were full, there were in the village more visitors than
natives. But where were they? The vast landscape was empty. From its
thickly mantled fields came the smell of snow.
Lost when she went down the street in a maze of fugitive scents within
one pervading, and that seemed to compose the very air: the sweet deep
smell of burning pinewood. Moving within it as the crowded little shop
windows went by on either hand were the smells of dried apples and straw
and a curious blending of faint odours that revealed themselves—when
presently summoning an excuse for the excitement of shopping, at the
cost of but a few of the multitude of small coins representing an
English sovereign, she gained the inside of the third general store
between the hotel and the church—as the familiar smell of mixed
groceries; with a difference: clean smells, baked dry. No prevailing
odour of moist bacon and mouldering cheese; of spilt paraffin and musty
sacking, and things left undisturbed in corners. No dinginess. And
though shelves and counter were crowded, every single thing gleamed and
displayed itself with an air.
But there were no Swiss biscuits. Only a double row of the familiar
square tins from Reading, triumphantly displayed by the gaunt
sallow-faced woman whose ringing voice was as disconcertingly at
variance with her appearance as was her charmed manner with the eager
cunning that sat in her eyes. She asked for soap and the woman set wide
the door of an upright glass case in which were invitingly set forth
little packets bearing names that in England were household words.
She glanced back at the biscuits. Petit-Beurre were after all foreign
and brought with them always the sight of Dinant and its rock coming
into view, ending the squabble about the pronunciation of _grenouille_,
as the Meuse steamer rounded the last bend. But catching sight above the
biscuits of a box of English nightlights she chose a piece of soap at
random and fought while she responded to the voluble chantings
accompanying the packing of her parcel, with the nightmare vision of
bedrooms _never_ bathed in darkness, of people _never_ getting away into
the night, people insisting, even in rooms where brilliance can be
switched on at will, on the perpetual presence of the teasing little
glimmer; people who travel in groups and bring with them so much of
their home surroundings that they destroy daily, piecemeal, the sense of
being abroad.
Regaining the street in possession of a replica of the tablet she had
unpacked last night, she found that the busy midst of the village lay
just ahead where the way widened to encircle the little church. Many
shops, some of them new-built, with roomy windows, and the lifeless
impersonal appearance of successful provincial stores. There were more
people here, more women in those heavy black dresses and head-shawls,
more bloused and bearded men, crossing the snowy road with swift
slouching stride. A post-office, offering universal hospitality.
As if from the bright intense sunlight all about her, a ray of thought
had fallen upon the mystery of her passion for soap, making it so clear
in her mind that the little ray and the lit images waiting for words
could be put aside in favour of the strange dingy building breaking the
line of shops, looking like a warehouse, its small battered door, high
up, approached by a flight of steps leading from either side whose
meeting made a little platform before the door. Rough sleds were drawn
up round about the entrance, making it central in the little open space
about the church, the perpetual head-tossings of the horses filling the
bright air with showers of tinkles. It could hardly be a café; yet two
men had just clattered down the steps flushed and garrulous. Strange
dark-looking hostelry within which shone the midday sun of these rough
men living in far-away châlets among the snow.
It was not only the appeal of varying shape and colour or even of the
many perfumes each with its power of evoking images: the heavy
voluptuous scents suggesting brunette adventuresses, Turkish cigarettes
and luxurious idleness; the elusive, delicate, that could bring
spring-time into a winter bedroom darkened by snow-clouds. The secret of
its power was in the way it pervaded one’s best realisations of everyday
life. No wonder Beethoven worked at his themes washing and re-washing
his hands. And even in merely washing with an empty mind there is a
_charm_; though it is an empty charm, the illusion of beginning, as soon
as you have finished, all over again as a different person. But all
great days had soap, impressing its qualities upon you, during your most
intense moments of anticipation, as a prelude. And the realisation of a
good day past, coming with the early morning hour, is accompanied by
soap. Soap is with you when you are in that state of feeling life at
first hand that makes even the best things that can happen important not
so much in themselves as in the way they make you conscious of life, and
of yourself living. Every day, even those that are called ordinary days,
with its miracle of return from sleep, is heralded by soap, summoning
its retinue of companion days.
To buy a new cake of soap is to buy a fresh stretch of days. Its little
weight, treasure, minutely heavy in the hand, is life, past present and
future compactly welded.
Post-office offering universal hospitality more vitally than the little
church. A beggar could perhaps find help in a church more easily than in
a post-office. Yet the mere atmosphere of a post-office offered
something a church could never give. Even to enter it and come away
without transactions was to have been in the midst of life. And to
handle stamps, and especially foreign stamps, was to be aware of just
those very distances the post had abolished.
The priced goods in the windows were discouragingly high. One window
behind whose thick plate glass were set forth just a few things very
tastefully arranged, showed no prices at all and had the ominous note of
a west-end shop. Next door was a windowful that might have been
transplanted from Holborn so much steel was there, such an array of
rectangular labels and announcements. Skates and skates and skates. Then
a chemist’s and an inspiration, though the window showed nothing but a
perforated screen and the usual coloured bottles bulging on a shelf
above.
The counter was stacked with wares from Wigmore Street. Even the
tooth-brushes were those of the new shape devised in Cavendish Square.
The chemist was a bald preoccupied man speaking English abruptly. She
came away with a jar of Smith’s cream, her shopping done and the face of
the clock sticking out above the watchmaker’s telling her it was nearly
noon. The little clock on the church said a quarter past eleven and
glancing back at the watchmaker’s, now in the rear, she saw the reverse
dial of the outstanding clock marking half past eleven. And Switzerland
was the land of watchmakers.... Her own watch said one o’clock, English
time. Then it was noon. But this far world was not three minutes
distance from the Alpenstock. There was still half-an-hour.
The post-office was a sumptuous hall. Little tables stood about
invitingly set with pens and ink. No railed counter; a wooden partition
extending to the ceiling; a row of arched pigeon-holes, all closed. Like
a railway booking-office on Sunday, between trains—blankly indifferent
to the announcement of the presence of a customer made by the clumping
of her boots upon the wooden floor. And when presently—having gone the
round of the posters, brilliant against the white-washed walls, all so
much brighter and so much less bright than reality, all resounding with
a single deep charm, bringing assurance of possessing, in one journey
and one locality, the being of the whole—she tapped at a little shutter,
it flew up impatiently, revealing an affronted young man in a blue
cotton overall, glaring reproachfully through spectacles. The stamps
handed over, the little door shot back into place with a bang, as if
cursing an intruder.
The open spaces called for a first view before the sense of its being no
longer morning should have robbed them of intensity. But where the
street joined the roadway there was a little shop, full sunlight falling
on its window, whose contents were a clustered delight and each separate
thing more charming than its neighbour.
Two women approaching along the road preceded by English voices
distracted her, for a moment, with the strangeness of their headdress—a
sort of cowl. In a moment they passed with dangling clinking skates, and
her intention of getting a good view from behind was diverted back to
the shop window, by “tourist-trap” interpolated in a tone meant to be
inaudible, in the dissertation of the one holding forth in a voice not
unlike Mrs. Harcourt’s, about a hotel “packed like a bee-hive and
swarming with influenza.”
It was true. The shop was full of Swiss brummagem. She fastened on it
the more eagerly. Little expensive cheap things whose charm was beyond
price. Small clumsy earthenware, appealingly dumpy, flower patterned
upon a warm creamy background; painted wooden spoons. Little brooches
and trinkets innumerable. Cow-bells. Some small thing for everybody and
a problem solved at the cost of a few marks.
Turning away she caught sight of an old woman amazingly wrapped up,
peering at her from inside a little booth set down in the snow on the
other side of the way. A shelf laden with small things in carved wood
protruded in front. She crossed to look at them. Silently with slow
fumbling movements the old woman displayed her wares. Bears. Bears on
ski, on toboggans, bears in every kind of unbearlike attitude. Intricate
model châlets, useless and suggesting, imagined in England, nothing but
the accumulation of dust. But there was an owl, with owlish dignity,
very simply and beautifully carved. Her eyes returned to it and the old
woman put forth an aged freckled hand and grasped its head, which went
easily back upon a hinge and left revealed a clean white china inkwell.
“Kipsake,” said the old woman huskily.
“_Danke schön. Ich komme wieder_,” smiled Miriam escaping, followed by
hoarse cacklings of praise.
Out upon the roadway fenced between dazzling snowfields, the end of the
valley came into sight, new, but faintly reproachful, having waited too
long, and complaining now about the lateness of the hour. Certainly it
was worthy of a whole self, undistracted. But there was to-morrow, many
to-morrows. She had done with the street and the shops save as a
corridor, growing each day more dear, to daily fulfilment of the promise
of this prospect whose beauty she was clearly recognising. And more than
its beauty. Its great, great power of assertion, veiled for the moment
by distractions, but there. Wonderfully beautiful was the speech and
movement of the far-off smooth pure ridge of snow, rising high against
the deepest blue of the sky, linking twin peaks.
Some of the near slopes were dotted with people, tiny figurines
mitigating the snowfields and the towering mountains: the sounds of
English voices ringing out infinitesimal in the wide space, yet filling
it. Shutting out the scene, yet intensifying it; bringing gratitude for
their presence.
That remained even after the quaint peaked hoods of brilliant white or
mauve, the effective skirts and jerseys of a group of women passing in
the roadway had rebuked with their colours, clean and sharp against the
snow, her tweed that in London had seemed a good choice, and her London
felt hat.
But though the clever clothes of these people brought a sense of exile
they were powerless to rouse envy or any desire. Envy was impossible in
this air that seemed, so sharp was every outline, to be no longer
earth’s atmosphere but open space, electric.
Perhaps even this morning there was time to get clear, to be if only for
a few moments, along some side track alone with the landscape, walking
lightly clad in midsummer sun through this intensity of winter.
The road was dropping and growing harder. No longer crunching under her
feet, the snow beaten flat showed here and there dark streaks of ice,
and her puttee-bandaged legs, flexible only at the knees, felt like
sticks above her feet lost and helpless in the thick boots that seemed
to walk of themselves.
The dropping road took a sharp turn towards the valley, showing ahead a
short empty stretch and another sharp turn, revealing it as the winding
trail up which she had come last night. On the right it was joined by a
long track running steeply down into a wilderness of snow in the midst
of whose far distances appeared high up a little bridge half hidden
amongst pines. The track was dotted with pigmy forms.
“_Ash_-tongue!” A fierce hoarse voice just behind, and joining it
another, clear and ringing: “_Ach_-tooooong.”
Plunging into the roadside drift she turned in time to see a toboggan
bearing upon it a boy prone, face foremost eagerly out-thrust, shoot
down the slanting road, take the bend at an angle that just cleared the
fence and dart at a terrific pace down the slope towards the wilderness;
followed by the girl with the ringing voice, lightly seated, her
toboggan throwing her up as it bumped skimming from ridge to ridge down
the uneven road. She took the bend smoothly with space to spare and flew
on down the slope with lifted chin and streaming hair. Both mad.
Children of the reckless English who had discovered the Swiss winter.
This terrific scooting was not the tobogganing of which she had heard in
London. Two more figures were coming, giving her excuse to wait lest
they were coming her way and watch their passing from the drift that was
like warm wool, knee-deep. They were women, coming slowly, paddling
themselves along with little sticks. They took the bend with ironic
caution and went on down the slope, still furiously stabbing the snow
with their little sticks, their high, peaked cowls making them look like
seated gnomes.
Aware of intense cold invading her feet, she plunged out into the road
and was beating her snow-caked puttees when an intermittent grinding
sound approaching brought her upright: an aged couple side by side,
white-haired and immensely muffled, sitting very grave and stern behind
the legs protruding stiffly on either side the heads of their toboggans
and set from moment to moment heels downwards upon the road to check a
possible increase of their slow triumphant pace. Triumph. Behind the
sternness that defied the onlooker to find their pose lacking in dignity
was triumph. Young joy; for these who might well be patrolling in
bath-chairs the streets of a cathedral town.
And they left the joyous message: that this sport, since pace could so
easily be controlled, might be tested at once, alone, without
instruction, this very afternoon. A subtle change came over the
landscape, making it less and more; retiring a little as who should say:
then I am to be henceforth a background, already a mere accessory, it
yet challenged her vow, an intimidating witness.
Along the empty stretch towards the valley the blazing sun blotted out
the distance so that it was pleasant to turn the next corner and be
going again towards the expanse that ended at the white high-hung
collar. The fresh stretch of gently sloping road was longer than the one
above it and walking freely here she found that her gait had changed,
that she was planking along in a lounging stride which brought ease to
her bandaged legs and made more manageable her inflexible feet. With a
little practice, walking could be a joy. Walking in this scene, through
this air, was an occupation in itself. And she was being assailed by the
pangs of a piercing hunger. Obtrusive; insistent as the hunger of
childhood.
It would take a little longer to go back. It would be wise to turn now.
At the corner ending this stretch. Suddenly it seemed immensely
important to discover what there was round the corner. From the angle of
the turning she could see the little bridge far away to the right, in
profile, with pines stretching along the bank of what it spanned, that
showed a little further on as a thin straight line steeply descending to
join the serpentine that cut the white floor of the valley. Away to the
right of the bridge straggling leafless trees stood in a curve. Behind
them something moved; coming and going across the gaps between their
trunks. Skaters.
Then for the girl and boy that reckless rush was just a transit; a means
of getting to the rink, as one might take a bus to a tennis-court.
A voice greeted her from behind, surprising in its level familiarity
until the finished phrase revealed the American, to whom, turning to
find him standing before her, his toboggan drawn to heel by its rope,
she gave the smile, not for him, the lover’s smile reviewing, as they
passed her in inverse rotation while she made the long unwelcome journey
into his world of an American in Europe, her morning’s gatherings.
But he had received it, was telling her that already she looked
splendid, adding that when folks first came up they looked, seen beside
those already there, just gass’ly. And for a moment the miscarriage was
painful: to have appeared to drop even below his own level of
undiscriminating hail-fellow-well-met. And for a fraction of a second as
he stood before her in his correct garb she transformed him into an
Englishman condemning her foolish grin—but there was his queer little
American smile, that came to her from a whole continent and seemed to
demand a larger face and form, a little smile dryly sweet, as
misdirected as her own and during which they seemed to pour out in
unison their independent appreciations and to recognise and greet in
each other, in relation to the English world out here, fellow voyagers
in a strange element.
It healed her self-given stripes that were, she reflected as they went
on together up the hill, needless, since to him, as an American, her
greeting would seem neither naïve nor bourgeois. For all Americans are
either undisturbedly naïve and bourgeois or in a state of merely having
learned, via Europe, to be neither. And this man, now launched in speech
revealed himself by the way he had of handling his statements, as so far
very much what he had always been.
Strange that it was always queer people, floating mysterious and
intangible in an alien element who gathered up, not wanting them,
testimonies that came from her of themselves.
All the way back to the Alpenstock he pursued his monologue,
information, and in an unbroken flow that by reason of its temperature,
its innocence of either personal interest or benevolent intention, left
her free to wander. There was in his narrow, unresonant voice only one
shape of tone: a discouraged, argumentative rise and fall, very slight,
almost on two adjacent notes, colourless; as of one speaking almost
unawares at the bidding of an endless uniform perception. She heard it
now as statement, now merely as sound and for a moment as the voice of a
friend while after informing her that he had done the valley run and
climb each morning and taken to-day a last turn to add yet one more
layer to his week’s sunburn, he remarked that the long zig-zag was
commonly deserted in the forenoon, folks mostly taking the other track,
either to the rink, or further to the made run, or way beyond that to
the ski-ing slopes.
* * * * *
When she was clear of the shop and crossing the road with the toboggan
slithering meekly behind, the invisible distant slopes seemed lonely and
her plan for getting immediately away to them postponed itself in favour
of enjoying for a while the thrilled equilibrium with everything about
her that was the gift of the slight pull on the cord she was trying to
hold with an air of preoccupied negligence. Turning leisurely back from
the short length of street ahead that too soon would show the open
country, she came once more into the heart of the village and paid an
unnecessary visit to the post-office, heard the toboggan pull up against
the kerb and knew as she turned to abandon the cord that she had tasted
the utmost of this new joy, and that when once more the cord was in her
hands she must go forth and venture.
Out on the road beyond the village the pleasant even slithering
alternated with little silent weightless runs, that at first made her
glance back to see if the toboggan were still there. These little runs,
increasing as the road began to slope came like reminders of its
character, assertions of its small willingness for its task, enhancing
its charm, calling her to turn and survey as she went its entrancing
behaviour of a little toboggan.
But presently, and as if grown weary of gentle hints and feeling the
necessity of stating more forcibly the meaning of its presence out here
in the glittering stillness, it took a sudden run at her heels. Moving
sideways ahead she reduced it to its proper place in the procession
until the distance between them set it once more in motion. Overtaking
her it made a half turn, slid a little way broadside and pulled up,
facing her, in a small hollow, indignant. In the mercifully empty yet
not altogether unobservant landscape it assumed the proportions of a
living thing and seemed to say as she approached: “You _can’t_ bring me
out here and make a fool of me.” And indeed, even with no one in sight,
she could not allow herself to walk down the slope with the toboggan
ahead and pulling like a dog.
She might go back, make a détour on the level round about the village,
turn the afternoon into a walk and postpone until to-morrow the
adventure for which now she had neither courage nor desire. In choosing
the time when there would be fewest people abroad she had forgotten that
it was also the lowest point of the day. Even this first day had a
lowest point. And belated prudence, reminding her that she had come away
to rest, cast a chill over the empty landscape, changing it from reality
to a picture of a reality seen long ago. At the sight of it she turned
and went a few paces up the gradient and perched and gathered up the
length of cord, and life came back into the wastes of snow, the
mountains were real again, quiet in the motionless afternoon light, and
the absurd little toboggan a foe about to be vanquished.
It slid off at once, took a small hummock askew, righted itself, to a
movement made too instinctively to be instructive, and slid onwards
gathering pace.
But ecstasy passed too swiftly into awareness of the bend in the road
now rushing up to meet her ignorance. Ramming her heels into the snow
she recovered too late with a jolting pang in both ankles and a headlong
dive into this morning’s drift, a memory of what she should have done
and stood up tingling with joy in the midst of the joyous landscape
stilled again that had flown with her and swooped up as she plunged, and
was now receiving her exciting news.
The backward slope invited her to return and go solemnly, braking all
the way and testing the half-found secret of steering. But the bend
tempted her forward. A single dig on the left when she reached it and
she would be round in face of the long run down to the level.
But the dig was too heavy and too soon and landed her with her feet in
the drift and the toboggan swung broadside and all but careering with
her backwards along the steepness that lay, when once more she faced it,
a headlong peril before the levels leading on and up to the little
bridge could come to bring rescue and peace.
Pushing carefully off, sliding with bated breath and uncomfortably
rasping heels, down and down, making no experiments and thankful only to
feel the track slowly ascending behind her she remained clenched until
only a few yards were left down which with feet up she slithered
deliriously and came to rest.
It was done. She had tobogganed herself away from Oberland into the
wilderness, the unknown valley waiting now to be explored, with the
conquered steed trailing once more meek and unprotesting in the
background. The afternoon was hers for happiness until hunger, already
beginning its apparently almost continuous onslaught, should make
welcome the triumphant climb back to Oberland and tea upon the
promontory.
The high bridge that in the distance looked so small and seemed to span
smallness was still small, a single sturdy arch; but beneath it dropped
a gorge whose pines led down to a torrent, frozen; strange shapes of
leaping water arrested, strangely coloured: grey in shadow, black in
deep shadow, and here and there, caught by the light, a half-transparent
green.
There was a great fellowship of pines clustered on either bank and
spreading beyond the bridge to a wood that sent out a rising arm
blocking the view of the valley and the pass. They made a solitude down
here above the silenced waters. The backward view was closed by the
perilous slope whose top was now the sky-line, leaving Oberland far away
out of sight in another world.
The track through the wood, wide and level for a while with pointed
pines marching symmetrically by, narrowed to a winding path that took
her in amongst them, into their strange close fellowship that left each
one a perfect thing apart. Not lonely, nor, for all the high-bulging
smoothness of snow in which it stood, cold. It was their secret,
pine-breath, that brought a sense of warm life, and their
close-clustered needles. Out on the mountain-sides they looked black and
bleak, striving towards the sun until they were stayed by the upper
cold. Seen close they were a happy company bearing light upon the green
burnish of their needles and the dull live tints of their rough stems.
And very secret; here thought was sheltered as in a quiet room.
Out in the immense landscape, in the down-pouring brilliance of pure
light, thought was visible. Transparent to the mountains who took its
measure and judged, yet without wounding, and even while they made it
seem of no account, a small intricate buzzing in the presence of mighty,
simple statement sounding just out of reach within the air, and invited
thoughtless submission to their influence as to a final infinite good
that would remain when they were no more seen, there was pathos in their
magnificence; as if they were glad even of one small observing speck,
and displayed gently the death they could deal, and smiled in their
terrifying power as if over an open secret.
And to walk and walk on and on amongst them, along their sunlit
corridors with thought shut off and being changed, coming back refreshed
and changed and indifferent, was what most deeply she now wanted of
them.
The track climbed a ridge and there below were the American’s wide
snowfields.
Before she was assured by the doffed cap outheld while he made his
salutation—the sweeping foreign _coup de chapeau_ that was so decisive a
politesse compared to the Englishman’s meagre small lift; and yet also
insolent—she was rejoicing in the certainty that the bearded figure in
spite of the English Norfolk suit and tweed cap, was the big Russian. He
alone, at this moment, of all the people in the hotel would be welcome.
Remote, near and friendly as the deepest of her thoughts, and so far
away from social conventions and the assumptions behind conventions, as
to leave all the loveliness about her unchanged—and yet trailing an
absurd little toboggan, smaller, and, in contrast with his height, more
ridiculous an appendage than her own. He plunged down the ridge in the
English style, by weight and rather clumsily, and in a moment was by her
side at the head of the run that went, pure white and evenly flattened,
switch-backing away across the field out of sight.
In a slow mournful voice that gave his excellent French a melancholy
music he asked her if she had already tested the run and became when he
had heard the short tale of her adventure impatiently active. Her
toboggan, he said, and raised its fore-part and bent scanning, was too
large, too heavy and with runners not quite true. It would be better for
the moment to exchange. Try, Try, he chanted with the true Russian
nonchalance and, abandoning his own went off down the gentle slope on
the discredited mount that she might now blame for her mysterious swerve
at the bend.
After the gentle drop, carrying him over the first small rise as if it
were not there, he flew ahead gathering swiftness with each drop, away
and away until at last he appeared a small upright figure far away on
the waste of snow.
The run compared with what she had already attempted seemed nothing at
all. The drops so slight that once or twice she was stranded on a ridge
and obliged to push off afresh. And the light little toboggan,
responding to the slightest heel-tap upon the hard pressed snow, taught
her at once the secret of steering. And when at last full of the joy of
fresh conquest she was pulled up by the loose snow at the end of the
run, she was eager only to tramp back and begin again. But tramping at
her side he tore her triumph to shreds. Silently she tried to imagine
the toboggan having its own way uncontrolled for the whole of that
sweeping trek, for the two quite steep drops towards the end.
The second time he started her in advance and remained behind shouting,
his voice rising to a crescendo at the first steepness: “_Il n’y a pas
de danger!_” With an immense effort she restrained her feet and entered
paradise.
“_Ça ira, ça ira_,” he admitted smiling when once more they were side by
side. They tramped back in silence, under the eyes as they approached
the ridge of a group newly appeared upon its crest and from which when
they drew near a voice came down in greeting. She looked up to see the
Croydon family, all very trim in sporting garb and carrying skates,
gathered in a bunch, at once collectively domestic and singly restive.
They smiled eagerly down at her and she read in the father’s twinkling
gaze that she was providing material for Croydon humour, so distinctly
and approvingly, was it saying in the Croydon way: “You’ve not lost much
time,” and so swiftly, having told her in response to her own greeting
that the rink was within five minutes easy walking, did he turn and
disappear with his family in tow down the far side of the ridge.
The third run left her weary and satisfied. Again they were tramping
back side by side, and although her experience of Russians had taught
her that gratitude was out of place and enthusiasm over simple joys a
matter for half-envious contempt, her thankfulness and felicity,
involuntarily eloquent, treated him, marching tall and sombre at her
side upon feet that in spite of the enormous boots showed themselves
slender and shapely terminations of a well-hung frame, as if he had been
of her own English stock; let him see the value, to herself, of his
kindly gift. All she lived for now, she told him, was to rush,
safe-guarded by a properly-mastered technique, at the utmost possible
speed through this indescribable air, down slopes from which the
landscape flew back and up. He smiled down, of course, the half
incredulous smile. Of course bored, giving only part of a dreamy
attention to all this raving.
“_C’est bon pour la santé_,” he murmured as she paused.
What did he know of santé, unless perhaps he had been in prison? He
might be a refugee; an anarchist living in Switzerland.
When he, too, turned out to be now returning in search of tea and they
were climbing the slope towards Oberland, their toboggans colliding and
bumping along as best they might at the ends of cords twisted together
round the wrist of his gloveless hand, she remarked by way of relieving
a silence he did not seem to think it necessary to break, that the Swiss
winter must be less surprisingly beautiful to Russians than to the
people of the misty north. He agreed that doubtless this was so and
gloomily asked her if she had been in Russia. He agreed with everything
she said about his country as seen from a distance, but without interest
and presently, as if to change the subject, declared that he knew
nothing of Russia and Russians.
His voice sounded again too soon to give her time to select a
nationality that should soften the disappointment of losing him as a
Russian, and in a moment he was talking of Italy, and the Italy she knew
by so many proxies dead and living was stricken out of her mind, to give
place to the unknown Italy who had produced this man, simple and
sincere, gloomy and harsh-minded, playing Chopin with all his heart. But
when presently she learned that he was a business man on holiday from
Milan, her Italy returned to her. He was from a world that everywhere
was the same, a world that existed even within Italy.
And at dinner again he sat apart wrapped in his gloom until again
Vereker was rescuing him with speech and he was responding in the
withheld, disclaiming Russian way.
A Latin consciousness was, in this group, something far more remote than
a Russian would have been, and she wondered what it was that behind
Vereker’s unchanging manner was making his half of the bridge upon which
they met. Music perhaps, if Vereker, with eyes candid and not profound
and not deep-set, were musical. She caught a few words. It was the
weather. Do Italians discuss the weather? Was Guerini, behind his
gratitude in being rescued from isolation, wondering at the Englishman’s
naïveté? Vereker was not showing off his French. He was being courteous,
being himself. No one, except when he could seize a chance the American,
made any sort of parade. Nor was it that they made a parade of not
making a parade. Talk with them was easy because it was quite naturally
serene. No emphasis. No controversy. The emergence of even a small
difference of opinion produced at once, on both sides, a smiling
retreat. Deep in his soul the American must certainly be smiling at this
baffling urbanity. English correctness and hypocrisy. Here was the
original stuff from which the world-wide caricatures were made.
And talk with these people always ended in a light and lively farewell,
a manner of dropping things that handed a note of credit for future
meetings. A retreat, as from royalty, backwards. A retreat from the
royal game of continuous courtesy.
And together with the surprise of discovering—when having departed
upstairs she was drawn down to the little salon by the sound of the
Chopin ballade—not the Italian but Vereker at the piano in the empty
room, was the boon of his composure. Of his being and continuing to be
after she had slipped into the room and reached a chair from which she
could just see him in profile, so quietly engrossed. A little strung, as
though still the phrases that yesterday he had so carefully recaptured
might again elude him; but listening. Led on, and listening and in the
hands of Chopin altogether.
Seated thus exposed he was slender, delicate, musicianly; only the line
of his jaw gave him an appearance of strength; and perhaps the close
cropping of his hair so that of what would have been a flamboyant mass
only crisp ridges were left, close against a small skull, like Cæsar’s.
His spruceness and neatness made stranger than ever the strange variance
between the stiff, magpie black and white of dress clothes, and the
depth and colour of music.
He played the whole ballade; sketchily where the technical difficulties
came thick and fast, but keeping the shape, never losing the swinging
rhythm.
Its concluding phrases were dimmed by the need of finding something to
say that should convey her right to say anything at all; but when the
last chord stood upon the air, the performance seemed to have been a
collaboration before which they now sat equally committed. And when his
face came round, its smile was an acknowledgment of this.
For an instant she felt that nothing could fit but a gratefully
affectionate salute and then a “How’s old So-and-So in these days?”
after the manner of men of his type drifting happily about upon the
surfaces of life. And when she said: “You got the whole of it this
time,” it was as if the unexpressed remainder had indeed passed across
to him, as if she were the newly-arrived friend whose presence somewhere
upstairs had made him so radiant during dinner and afterwards sent him
to pour out his happiness in the deserted little salon.
“After a fashion,” he said with the little flicker of the eyelids that
was his way, from sixth-form or from undergraduate days, of sustaining
for further speech the pose of his turned head and smiling face:
“There’s no one like him, is there?”
“You were playing last evening just after I came. For a moment I
couldn’t believe that ballade was actually here. I heard it long ago,
and never since, and I’ve never been able to recall the theme.”
“I’m _so_ glad,” he said with his little note of distress. “I’ve been
trying for _days_ to get it all back.”
For him, too, it came out of a past, and brought that past into this
little Swiss room, spread it across whatever was current in his life,
showed him himself unchanged. And in that past they had lived in the
same world, seen and felt in the same terms the things that are there
forever before life has moved. So far they were kindred. But since then
she had been flung out into another world; belonged to the one in which
he had gone forward only through an appreciative understanding of its
code, of what it was that created its self-operating exclusiveness. He
did not yet know that she stood outside the charmed circle, had been
only an occasional visitor, and that now, visiting again after years of
absence, she was hovering between the desire to mask and remain within
it and her proper business as a Lycurgan: to make him aware of the
worlds outside his own, let him see that his innocent happiness was kept
going by his innocent mental oblivion.
And whilst they called up cherished names and collided in agreement she
wondered what these people who lived in exile from reality could find in
their music beyond escape into the self for whom in their state of
continuous urbane association there was so little space; and presently
became aware of lively peace filling the intervals between their to and
fro of words, distracting attention from them, abolishing everything but
itself and its sure meaning: so that into this Swiss stillness of frost
without and electricity within nothing had been present of the
Switzerland that had brought them both here, and now suddenly came back,
enhanced, a single unbounded impression that came and was gone, that was
the face of its life now begun in her as memory.
She read her blissful truancy in his eyes, his recognition of their
having fallen apart, but not of its cause, which he thought was perhaps
the monotony of their continuous agreement, and was now swiftly seeking
a fresh bridge that in an instant, since clearly he intended to prolong
the sitting, he would, deferentially flickering his eyelids, take
courage to fling.
But into the little pause came the sound of footsteps approaching
through the hall, and an intensity of listening that was their common
confession of well-being and was filling them with a wealth of eager
communication that must now be postponed until to-morrow. But to-morrow
the college friend would be in possession; there was only this evening,
a solitary incident. Perhaps the door would open upon someone who would
straightway withdraw, leaving the way open for the waiting conversation.
And the college friend had come only for a few days ...
But this falling from grace was rebuked by the reminder of Vereker’s
all-round niceness. He would, of course, retain the intruder. If it were
a man there would be three-cornered talk enlivened by what was being
sacrificed to it. But with the opening of the door, as she raised her
eyes towards it and caught in passing a glimpse of him upon his music
stool, out of action and alone, she saw that dear and nice as he was,
had always been, he could not fully engage her, was real to her on a
level just short of reaching down to the forces of her nature; was
pathetically, or culpably, a stranded man; subsisting.
Guerini: huge, filling the doorway, hesitating for a moment and
retreating, quietly closing the door, but not before Vereker wheeling
round on his music-stool, had seen his departing form.
It was his unexpectedness, the having forgotten him so that he came like
an apparition, that had sent him away. Even so, a woman of the world
would have promptly become a smiling blank and suitably vocal; or
withdrawn and expressionless in the manner of a hotel guest only partly
in possession of a room now to be partly taken over by another. But she
had left her thoughts standing in her face, leaving Vereker, who had
turned just too late, to be hostess.
Wheeling back to face her, he was again the gentle companion from the
past. In his elegant sunny voice he was recalling their morning’s talk,
begging at once with his despairing little frown, for more light on the
subject of property in land. It was clear that these things had never
come his way. It was after all not his fault that his education had held
his eyes closed, that they had since been kept closed by wealth and ease
taken for granted. And in his way he had kept fine. His adoration for
his gods of art and literature was alive and genuine—and he was a
sportsman. It was difficult face to face with his gentle elegance to
remember that he was distinguishing himself in an exacting sport.
Repentant of her condemnation she set forth the steps of the reasoning
and the groups of facts, saw him eagerly intent—not upon herself but
upon this new picture of life, wrestling step by step with what he saw
far off—and presently had the joy of seeing him see how economic
problems stood rooted in the holding of land at rent. But he was only
one; there were thousands of men, nice men, needing only hints, as
blinkered as he.