Hurrying through her dressing to keep the appointment that had not been
made and whose certainty in her own mind was challenged in vain by all
the probabilities, she opened her door upon the silent corridor;
stillness and silence as if everyone else in the hotel had been spirited
away leaving clear, within the strange surroundings in which for a while
she was set down, the familiar pathway of her life. And when she reached
the dining-room the sight of them there, side by side at breakfast in
the brilliant morning light with no one else in the room save herself
approaching, had for a moment the hard unreality of things deliberately
arranged. She saw them very clearly and it was as if neither of them
were there; as if they were elsewhere each on his own path from which
this tacit meeting was a digression.
But before she was half-way to the table they were rising. Their
breakfast over, they were going off into their day. She was too late;
her haste was justified of its wisdom. Reaching her place, she murmuring
a casual greeting, turned away towards the spaces of her own day
opening, beyond this already vanishing small disappointment, as brightly
as the light shining in from the sunlit snow.
They halted a moment while Vereker introduced his friend to whose
height, as she sat down to the table, she glanced up to meet the intent
dark gaze of a man on guard. She was already far away, and in the
instant of her hurried astonished return to face for the first and
perhaps the last time this man who was challenging her, the eyes were
averted and the two men sat down: to freshly broken rolls and steaming
cups.
The little self-arranged party was secure in the morning stillness that
was the divine invisible host equally dear to all three. Happy in this
fulfilment of premonition, she sat silent, delighting in the challenge
left, miscarried and superfluous upon the empty air, wickedly delighting
in the friend’s discomfort in following the dictates of the code
forbidding him again to look across until she should have spoken, and
confining his large gaze within the range of his small immediate
surroundings. Refusing rescue, she busied herself with breakfast,
enjoying his large absurdity, free, while he paid the well-deserved
penalty of his innocently thwarted attack, to observe to her heart’s
content.
He sat taking sanctuary with Vereker—who at his sunny best was making
conversation about the trials in store—slightly turned towards him and
away from the barred vista across which no doubt, before she came in,
his large gaze had comfortably extended; responding now and again with
thoughtful groans.
Beside Vereker’s sunburned fairness he was an oiled bronze; heavy good
features, heavy well-knit frame. Lethargic, or just a very tired man on
a holiday, bemused by his sudden translation. Superficially he was
formidable, “strong and silent.” His few remarks, thrown into the talk
that Vereker kept up while he waited for his two friends to fraternise
and admire each other, came forth upon a voice deliberately cultivated
since his undergraduate days, a ponderous monotone, the voice of a man
infallible, scorning argument, permanently in the right. Its sound was
accompanied by a swaying movement from side to side of his body bent
forward from the hips: suggesting some big bovine creature making up its
mind to charge.
She recalled other meetings with his kind, instant mutual dislike and
avoidance. This time there was no escape. She was linked to him by
Vereker, obliged by Vereker to tolerate his presence, sit out his
portentousness and be aware, since Vereker found him so very fine, of
the qualities hidden within. Courage of course, tenacity, strength to
adventure in strange places. Were such things enough to justify this
pose of omniscience? With that pose it was forever impossible to make
terms; and if this were not a single occasion, if there were further
meetings, there would sooner or later be a crossing of swords. She
considered his armoury.
Mentally it was a flimsy array; a set of generalisations, born of the
experience that had matured him and become now his whole philosophy,
simple and tested, immovable; never suspected of holding good only for
the way of living upon which it was based.
The fact of the existence of life had either never entered his head or
been left behind in the days before he crystallised. He had now become
one of those who say “our first parents” and see a happy protégé of an
entirely masculine Jehovah duped into age-long misery by the first of
the charmers. Homage and contempt for women came equally forth from him,
the manifest faces of his fundamental ignorance. The feminine world
existed for him as something apart from life as he knew it, and to be
kept apart. Within that world “charm” and “wit” drew him like magnets
and he never guessed their source; knew nothing of the hinterlands in
the minds of women who assumed masks, put him at his ease, appeared not
to criticize. And such women were the sum of his social knowledge. One
day he would be a wise old man “with an eye for a pretty face,” wise
with the wisdom that already was cheating him of life.
There was no hope for him. His youth had left him Vereker, his chum
whose sunny simplicity had always disarmed him, who did not resent his
portentous manner. From women he would have, till old age, flattery for
his strength. From his workers nothing but work, and respect for his
English justice and honesty. It was inconceivable that anyone should
ever pierce his armour; the ultimate male density backed by “means” and
“position.”
His pose had found its bourne in his present position of authority, his
state of being bound to present a god-like serenity; and it had become
so habitual that even when it was put out of action he could not
disencumber himself of it. At this moment, for lack of proper feminine
response from across the table, it was actually embarrassing him. To
proper feminine response, charming chatter or charming adoring silence
he would pay tribute, the half respectful, half condescending interest
of the giant in his hours of ease.
Unable any longer to endure silently, she rode across him with speech;
pictures, for Vereker, of her yesterday’s adventure. Lively and shapely,
inspired by the passage of wrath. Her voice had a bright hard tone,
recognisable as the tone of the lively talker.
She was aware of the friend accepting her as the bright hard mondaine;
at once attentive, his pose relaxed so far as to be represented only by
the eyebrows left a little lifted and still knitting his deliberately
contemplative brow. He was looking, poor dear, at the pictures, enjoying
them, their mechanism, their allusions. And she, for a weary empty
interval, was being a social success. It was a victory for the friend, a
bid for his approval.
Vereker was puzzled, meeting a stranger; a little taken aback. But when
grown weary of the game of brightly arranged exaggerations, she relapsed
into simplicity, he recovered at once and again brought forth his
ski-club. The friend sat by while one after another the persuasive
arguments came forth, smiling with the slightly lifted brow that was now
his apology for smiling at all.
And suddenly he was grave, intent as he had been at the first moment;
this time towards the door, outside which sounded Daphne’s eager
breathless voice and ceased in the doorway. Her swift slight footsteps
crossed the room and brought her to a standstill just in sight, gazing
at the stranger.
He remained grave, darkly gazing. Vereker, half-risen, eager to be off,
was looking at him in the manner of a hostess arrested in giving the
signal for departure. For a moment the man and the child stared at each
other, and then she moved stealthily, rounding the table-end. A light
came into his unsmiling face. With a rush she was upon him, mouth set,
eyes blazing, clenched fists beating upon his breast.
“_Eaden_,” she panted, “evil, _evil_ Eaden.”
There was no defence, no display of comic fear, no wrist-catching
dominance. And when she desisted and stood back still searching him with
grave face a little thrust forward in her eagerly-thinking way, he
turned more sideways from the table, to attend while hurriedly with the
air of one having other business on hand and no time to waste, she
catechised him. He answered simply, with just her manner of one cumbered
with affairs and eager nevertheless to contrive meetings; devouring all
the time with his eyes the strange hurried little face, the round wide
eyes set upon something seen afar.
They had recognised each other. To the rest of the party she was a
quaint, precocious child. This man saw the strange power and beauty of
the spirit shining in those eyes almost round, almost protruding, and,
if there had been in the blue of them, that toned so gently into the
pearly blue surrounding, a shade more intensity of colour, merely
brilliant.
“You _must_,” she said, her lips closing firmly on her ultimatum, head a
little out-thrust, hands behind back. “You’d better go now,” with a
glance at the group that had gathered round. She pattered swiftly away
to her table in the background.
“Daphnee’ll always get what she wants with her nagging,” said the Skerry
youth standing by.
“She will get what she wants with her beaux yeux,” said Miriam warmly,
and saw the little form panting along its ardent way up through life,
seeking and testing and never finding, in any living soul.
“_Yes_,” groaned Eaden and impatiently sighed away the wrath in his eyes
set upon the departing figure of the youth. Again they were lit and
gentle and as if still gazing upon Daphne. He sat for a moment, paying
tribute to a suddenly found agreement before joining Vereker held up at
the door in the little crowd of newly-arriving breakfasters.
* * * * *
It was something like cycling in traffic, only that this scattered
procession making for the rink seemed all one party. The _achtungs_ of
those starting on their journey from the top of the slope rising behind
her rang out like greetings, and the agonised shrieks coming up from
below as one and another neared the gap visible now in the distance as
an all-too-swiftly approaching confusion of narrowly avoided disasters,
were full of friendly laughter: the fearless laughter of those
experienced in collisions. For a moment she was tempted to steer into
the snow and wait until the road should be clear. But the sudden
sideways swerve of a toboggan just ahead called forth unawares her first
_achtung_. It rang, through the moment which somehow manœuvred her clear
of the obstacle, most joyously upon the air and hailed her—seeming to be
her very life sounding out into the far distances of this paradise,
claiming them as long ago it had claimed the far distances surrounding
outdoor games—and sent her forward one of the glad fellowship of
reckless tobogganners whom now unashamed she could leave to go along her
chosen way.
Ignoring yells from behind she slowed to pass the gap and its glimpse of
the descending track dotted with swiftly gliding humanity, took the
sharp bend beyond it and was out of sight careering down the first slope
of the valley run with sky and landscape sweeping upwards, mountains
gigantically sweeping upwards to the movement of her downward rush.
The dreaded bends arrived each too swiftly with its threat of revealing
upon the smooth length of the next slope an upward-coming sleigh or
village children steering down at large. Slope after slope showed clear
and empty, each steeper than the last, and here and there a patch of ice
sent her headlong, sent the landscape racing upwards until her heels
could find purchase for a steadying dig and bring back the joy of
steering forward forever through this moving radiance.
The fencing was growing lower, almost buried in deep snow. A sweeping
turn and ahead, at the end of a long smooth slope, the floor of the
valley, the end. From a drive of both heels she leaned back and shot
forward and flew, feet up, down and down through the crystal air become
a rushing wind, until the runners slurred into the soft snow, drove it
in wreaths about her, and slowed and stopped dead leaving her thrown
forward with the cord slack in her hands, feet down, elbows on knees
come up to meet them, a motionless triumphantly throbbing atom of
humanity in a stillness that at once kept her as motionless as itself to
listen to its unexpected voice: the clear silvery tinkle, very far away,
of water upon rock; some little mountain stream freed to movement by the
sun, making its way down into the valley. She listened for a while to
the perfect little sound, the way it filled the vast scene, and
presently turned to search the snowy levels, longing to locate it and
catch a glimpse, defying distance, of the sunlit runnel. The mountains
were cliffs upon the hither side, their shoulders and summits invisible
until one looked up to find them remote in the ascended sky.
Down here at their feet was _terra firma_, broad levels on either side
the windings of the frozen river that was trimmed here and there with
bare trees sparse and straggling, their gnarled roots protruding through
the snow that bulged its rim. A bird-cry sounded from a tree at the
roadside; on silent wings a magpie, brilliant in sunlit black and white
sailed forth and away across the wastes of snow. Birds and the tinkling
runnel, the sole inhabitants of this morning solitude.
* * * * *
Whose magic survived the long backward climb and the run down to the
rink amidst the sociable echoes of the morning’s tumult, survived the
knowledge that in the minds of these busy skaters it was merely the
bottom of the hill; nothing to do down there unless you were going on
down to the station to meet and sleigh up with someone newly arrived.
Here on their tree-encircled rink they were together all day as in a
room. Passing and re-passing each other all day long. Held together by
the enchantment of this continuous gliding. Everyone seemed to be
gliding easily about. Only here and there a beginner shuffled along with
outstretched jerking arms and anxious face. It was skating escaped from
the niggardly opportunities of England and grown perfect. Long sweeping
curves; dreaming eyes seraphic, even the sternest betrayed by the
enchantment in their eyes. There were many of these in this English
crowd. Many who knew there was absurdity in the picture of grown persons
sweeping gravely about for hours on end. Only a great enchantment could
keep them in countenance and keep them going on. Envy approached and
stared her in the face. But only for a moment. She could skate, rather
better than the beginners. In a day or two she could be sweeping
enchantedly about. It was a temptation answered before it presented
itself, only presenting itself because it could move more quickly than
thought: to be racing about on a sled was a reckless flouting of the
prescribed programme, but innocent, begun in forgetfulness. To have come
and seen, to sit and stroll about each day just seeing, would have been
joy enough.
But when she looked across from the grey crowded rink and its belt of
ragged bare trees to the mountains standing in full sunlight and filling
half the opposite sky and saw away above the pinewoods ascending beyond
the little bridge the distant high white saddle of the pass with its
twin peaks rising on either side—they startled her with their heightened
beauty. These enchanted skaters, cooped upon their sunk enclosure had
enlivened the surrounding scene not only by bringing forgetfulness of
it, but because she knew the secret of their bliss, had shared long ago
the experience that kept them confined here all day.
Gliding, as if forever; the feeling, coming even with the first
uncertain balance, of breaking through into an eternal way of being. In
all games it was there, changing the aspect of life, making friends
dearer, making even those actually disliked dear, as long as they were
within the rhythm of the game. In dancing it was there. But most
strongly that sense of being in an eternal way of living had come with
skating in the foggy English frost. And this it must be that kept all
these English eagerly and shamelessly fooling about on bladed feet;
eternal life.
It might be wrong. Wells might be right. Golf. There must be a secret
too in golf. The mighty swipe, the swirl of the landscape about the
curving swing of the body, the onward march? All these must count even
if the players think only of the science of the game, only of excelling
an opponent. Even in safe and easy games there is an element of
eternity, something of the quality there must be in sports that include
the thrill of the life-risk. Savage sports. Fitness, the sense of
well-being of the healthy animal? But what _is_ health? What _is_ the
sense of well-being?
“We know _nothing_. That at least you must admit: that we walk in
darkness.”
“And proclaim ourselves enlightened by awareness of the fact.”
A figure swinging swiftly up the rink, a different movement cutting
across the maze of familiar movements, drawing her eyes to follow it
until it was lost and watch until again it came by: clothed in uniform
purplish brown close-fitting, a belted jerkin, trousers, slenderly
baggy, tapering down into flexibly fitting boots. A strong lissome body
that beautifully shaped its clothing and moved in long easy rushes,
untroubled by shackled feet.
He was not perhaps doing anything very wonderful, just rushing easily
about, in the manner of a native of some land of ice and snow. But he
transformed the English skaters to jerking marionettes, clumsily
clothed, stiff-jointed. Visibly jointed at neck and waist, at knees and
ankles and elbows. Their skating seemed now to be nicely calculated
mechanical balancing of jointed limbs, each limb trying to be
autonomous, their unity, such as it was, achieved only by methods
thought out and carefully acquired. They seemed to be giving exhibitions
of style, with minds and bodies precariously in tune. He was style
spontaneously alive. His whole soul was in his movements.
She made her way to a near bench under the trees to watch for him.
Sitting there with her feet upon the ice she became one with the
skaters, felt their efforts and controls, the demand of the thin hard
blade for the perpetual movements of loss and recovery. Not all were
English, skating with reservations. Here a little Frenchman with arms
folded on his breast came by as if dancing, so elegantly pointed were
the swinging feet above which gracefully he leaned now forward now back.
Effortlessly. In his stroke there was no jerk of a heavy-muscular drive,
yet he covered as much space as the English, and more quickly. Behind
him an Englishwoman with a bird’s-wing pointing back along the side of
her little seal cap, going perfectly gracefully in smooth slight sweeps;
serene.
Near at hand two men practised trick skating, keeping clear the space
about them with their whirling limbs. They swept about with eyes intent,
and suddenly one or other would twirl, describe a circle with an
outflung leg and recover, with an absurd hop. Clever and difficult no
doubt, but so very ugly that it seemed not worth doing. The stout man’s
hop seemed as though it must smash the ice. Between their dervish whirls
they talked. They were arguing. Amiably quarrelling; the occasional
hysterical squeal in the voice of the stout man revealing “politics.”
They were at loggerheads over the housekeeping, the lime-lit, well-paid,
public housekeeping, “affairs,” the difficult responsible important
business that was “beyond the powers of women,” that was also “dirty
work for which women were too good”; wrangling. The stout man executed a
terrific twirl and brought up facing his opponent who had just spoken.
He advanced upon him bent and sliding, arms dangling low: “Just _so_,”
he chanted amiably and, recovering the upright, presented a face really
foolish, a full-moon foolishness, kindly perfection of inability to see
further than his good British nose: “We’re back at what I told Hammond
this morning: we _can’t afford_ to ignore the _Trades Union
Secretaries_.” With a swift turn he was off before the other man could
respond, skating away beyond their enclosure, smiling his delight,
staring ahead, with wise eyes, at nothing at all but the spectacle of
his opponent caught out and squashed.
The spectacle of his complacency was profoundly disquieting. He was the
typical kindly good-natured John Bull. Gently nurtured, well-educated,
“intelligent,” ready to take any amount of time and trouble in “getting
at facts” and “thinking things out.” And he was a towering bully.
Somewhere within his naïve pugnacity was the guilty consciousness of
being more pleased in downing an opponent than concerned for human
welfare. There was no peace of certainty in him. He had scored and was
flushed with victory. And all over English politics was this perpetual
prize-fighting. The power of life and death was in the hands of men
playing for victory; for their own side.
Morning and evening in some hotel that big man’s voice boomed
incessantly. Behind it a kindly disposition and a set of fixed ideas. No
mind.
“Don’t you skeete?”
Making for the bench, bent forward to reach it hands first was the
younger Croydon girl; behind her the other, rallentando, balancing to a
standstill.
She had greeted them, ere she was aware, with the utmost enthusiasm.
Smiling in their way, a gentle relaxation of the features that left them
composed, they stood about her, pleased to see and greet a stranger who
was also an old friend, renewing their great adventure. At the same time
they were innocently rebuking her outbreak.
In her suburban past she had instinctively avoided their kind, scented a
snare in their refined gentility, liked them only for the way, in the
distance, going decorously in pretty clothes along tree-lined roadways,
they contributed to the brightness of spring. Meeting them out here,
representative of England, the middle-class counterparts, in their
ardent composure, of the hotel people who so strangely had received her
as a relative, she wanted in some way to put forth her claim as one who
knew of old their world of villa and garden, their gentle enclosed
world.
“It’s glorious; we’re having a lovely tame,” said the younger, looking
away down the rink: an English rose, thoroughly pretty in the
characterless English way, shapely sullen little face, frowning under
the compulsion of direct statements. Her hair, that in the train had
been a neat bun, hung now in a broad golden plait to her waist where its
ends disappeared behind a large black bow like a bird with wings
outspread.
And now with one seated close on each side of her it was with difficulty
that she attended to their talk so clearly did it exhibit their world as
a replica of the one just above it: as a state of perpetual urbane
association; conformity to a code in circumstances more restricted, upon
a background more uniform, and searched by the light of a public opinion
that was sterner than the one prevailing above. All the bourgeois
philistine in her came forth to sun itself in their presence, zestfully
living their lives, loving their friends and relatives, ignoring
everyone who lived outside the charmed circle.
One against the other, they joyously relived the short time whose
sunburn had so becomingly accentuated their Blair Leighton fairness.
Their stories centred round the success or breakdown of the practical
jokes that seemed to be the fabric of life at their hotel ... all the
old practical jokes: even apple-pie beds. In and out of these stories
went Mr. Parry who was presently pointed out upon the ice; a stout
little dark man skating about at random, his movements visibly hampered
by the burden of his sociability, his eyes turning, to the detriment of
his steering, towards everyone he passed in his search for prey.
“He makes us all _roar_; every evening.”
There were others, some whose names and their rôles, as assistants or
willing victims of the schemes of Mr. Parry seemed sufficiently to
describe them, and, as central decoration in the picture, these two
girls newly arrived and certainly Mr. Parry’s most adored recruits,
ready trained by a brother in the science of practical joking, yet not
hoydenish; demure and sweet and, to his loneliness, the loneliness of an
undignified little man, not quite grotesque, and incapable of inspiring
romantic affection, figures of romance.
Growing weary of their inexhaustible theme—of waiting for the emergence
of some sign of consciousness of the passing moment, a dropping of
references backwards or forwards, that would leave them in league
together, there as individuals—she pressed them for personal impressions
of the adventure in its own right, the movement into strangeness, the
being off the chain of accustomed things. They grew vague, lost interest
and fell presently into a silence from which she pulled them by an
enquiry about the plait.
In the midst of the story of the plait and just as some people were
being pointed out who still thought them three sisters, two with their
hair up, and one with a plait who did not appear at dinner, came a
longing to escape, the sense of a rendez-vous being missed, with the
scene and the time of day. But her preparations for flight were stayed
by their payment for her interest in the plait. They plied her with
questions; presently they were offering to lend her skating-boots, and
choosing from amongst the guests at their hotel, people she would like.
They were pitying her, thinking that she must be having a poor time and
determined at once that she should do more than just stand upon the
edge, sunning herself in the glow of the life they were finding so
entrancing.
But her contemplation of the desert that must be, from their point of
view, the life of a woman obviously poor and apparently isolated, took
her for a moment far away, and when she returned the link between them
was snapped. Her silence had embarrassed their habit of rapid give and
take. Making vague promises, she took leave, rescued by their immediate
reversion to the forms of speech set for such occasions, from holding
forth upon the subject of the dead level of happiness existing all over
the world independent of circumstances. They would have thought her both
pious and insane.
* * * * *
All the afternoon they had been in harmony, strolling and standing about
together in the snow until there seemed nothing more to say; and after
each run there had been something more to say. Till Italy lost all
strangeness but its beauty and he had seemed a simpler Michael free from
Michael’s certainty that everyone in the world was marching to
annihilation. It was the discovery of a shared sense of life at first
hand that had made them not fear saying the very small things.
And suddenly there was a wall, dividing. No more communication possible;
the mountains grown small and bleak and sad and even now, in being alone
upon the promontory there was no peace, in all the wide prospect no
beauty.
Why was it so much a matter of life and death, for men as for women? Why
did each always gather all its forces for the conflict?
If all he said were a part of the light by which he lived he should have
been able to remain calm. But he had not remained calm. He had been
first uneasy, then angry, and then sorry for the destruction of their
friendship.
“The thing most needed is for men to _recognise_ their illusion, to
leave off while there is yet time their newest illusion of life as only
process. Leave off trying to fit into their mechanical scheme a being
who lives all the time in a world they have never entered. They seem
incapable of unthinking the suggestions coming to them from centuries of
masculine attempts to represent women only in relation to the world as
known to men.”
It was then he was angry.
“How else shall they be represented?”
“They _can’t_ be represented by men. Because by every word they use men
and women mean different things.”
Probably Italian women led men by the nose in the old way, the way of
letting them imagine themselves the whole creation. And indeed the
problem presently will be: how to save men from collapsing under their
loss of prestige. Their awakening, when it comes, will make them
pitiful. At present they are surrounded out in the world by women who
are trying to be as much like them as possible. That will cease when
commerce and politics are socialised.
“Art,” “literature,” systems of thought, religions, all the fine
products of masculine leisure that are so lightly called “immortal.” Who
makes them immortal? A few men in each generation who are in the same
attitude of spirit as the creators, and loudly claim them as humanity’s
highest spiritual achievement, condoning in those who produce them any
failure, any sacrifice of the lives about them to the production of
these crumbling monuments. Who has decreed that “works of art” are
humanity’s highest achievement?
Daphne, preceded by her hurried voice; followed by her maid carrying a
tray. She came swiftly in her manner of a small panting tug, eyes
surveying ahead with gaze too wide for detail.
“Put it there; near the lady.”
Hitching herself into a chair, she sighed deeply, but not to attract
attention, nor in the manner of a conversational opening. She had,
without self-consciousness, the preoccupied air of one who snatches a
tiresome necessary meal, grudging the expense of time. All her compact
stillness was the stillness of energy momentarily marking time. Her
face, distorted by efforts, mouth firmly closed, with a goodly bite of
the stout little roll, was busily thinking and talking. Continuous.
There was no cessation in her way of being, no dependence, none of the
tricks of appeal and demand that make most children so quickly
wearisome. Yet she was a baby sitting there; a lonely infant, rotund.
Her face came round, so perfectly impersonal in its gravity that Miriam
knew the irrepressible smile with which she met it for an affront, felt
herself given up to the child’s judgment, ready to be snubbed.
For a moment the round eyes surveyed her, deep and clear, a summer sea
in shadow, and then, with her head a little butted forward in the way
she had of holding it during her breathless sentences, she hurriedly
swallowed her mouthful and cried:
“You’re _nice_! I didn’t know!” Condemnation and approval together.
Scarcely daring to breathe she waited while the child drew near,
shouting for her maid who came grumbling and departed smiling when the
tables were drawn side by side.
“That’s-my-beecely-German-nurse-I-hate-her.”
“She talks German with you?”
“She talks. I don’t listen. She has a beecely voice. Vicky Vereker says
she can’t helper voice, can’t help being a silly stupid and Evil Eaden
didn’t say anything and Vicky said show him how she speaks.”
“And did you?”
“I should have been _sick_. Evil Eaden’s gone ski-ing again. Evil Eaden
likes Napoleon and Vicky doesn’t; he wouldn’t.”
“Why do you like Napoleon so much?”
“Because I like him because he’s the good dear little big one. Everybody
is the big silly small one almost.”
Meditating on Napoleon as a pattern for womanhood, Miriam heard the
returned ski-ers arrive upon the platform and watched the eager calm
little face that was still busily talking, for a sign.
“When I’ve done my beecely edjacation, when I go back to Indja,” it was
saying, looking out with blind eyes across the bright intolerable
valley.
Vereker’s voice, gently vibrant and sunny, sounded near by, and a deep
groan from Eaden just visible, collapsed in one of the small green
chairs.
“I’ve got to go now,” said Daphne, relinquishing her second roll and
sliding to the floor. Covering the small space with her little
quick-march, she pulled up in front of Eaden and stood surveying, hands
behind back, feet a little apart, head thrust forward. Napoleon in a
pinafore.
“You’re dead beat, that’s what you are.”
“Daphne, I am. I’m a broken man. Don’t pound me. But you may stroke me
if you like.”
On a table at his side stood a large brown bear on ski, his gift to her,
bought on his way home from the old woman at the corner and that now
they were surveying together. She had approached it with two little
eager steps and pulled up just short with her arms at her sides, volubly
talking just out of hearing but to his delight who heard and watched
her. Between her sallies she sought his face, to bring him to
contemplate and agree. Did it please her? She had not yet handled it.
Could anything please her? The giver and the giving were calling forth
her best, that moved him and Vereker as men are moved at the sight of
life in eager operation, spontaneous as they never seem to be,
commanding and leading them. Vereker was amused. Eaden disarmed and
delighted, protective of a splendour. Suddenly she seized the bear in
her arms and held it while she talked and put it carefully down and
looked back at it as she turned with her little quick-march to someone
calling from the house.
“It’s all right, Daphne.” Eaden’s voice eager, free of its drawl, crying
out in pity and wrath. He had leapt from his chair and was gathering and
fixing together the detached parts, bear and ski and pole found by
Daphne returned, lying as if broken upon the table at his side. She
stood speechless, a little forlorn child red-cheeked and tearful in
dismay. A little way off stood the Skerry youth with his grin.