The clouds were a rebuke; for being spell-bound into imagining this
bright paradise inaccessible. The world’s weather cannot be arranged as
a conversation with one small person. Then how did the rebuke manage to
arrive punctually at the serenest moment of self-congratulation? As if
someone were watching ...
She looked levelly across the sunny landscape and the clouds were out of
sight. But there was a movement in the air, a breeze softly at work
ousting the motionless Oberland air.
She walked ahead, further and further into the disconcerting change.
Everything was changed, the whole scene, reduced to homeliness. She
caught herself drooping, took counsel and stiffened into acquiescence:
“I might have known. I’m accustomed to this. It removes only what I
thought I couldn’t give up. Something is left behind that can’t be taken
away”—and heard at once within the high stillness the familiar sound of
life, felt the sense of it flowing warmly in along the old channels, and
heard from the past in various tones, amused, impatient, contemptuous:
“You _are_ philosophical.” Always a surprise. What did they mean with
their “philosophical”? The alternative was their way of going on
cursing, missing everything but the unfavourable surface.
Someone has said that there is nothing meaner than making the best of
things.
The clouds made soft patches of shadow upon the higher snow. Beside the
angular sharp shadows growing upon the northern slopes they were
blemishes, smudgy and vague. But free, able to move and flow while the
mountains stood crumbling in their places.
The clouds were beautiful, slowly drifting, leaving torn shreds upon the
higher peaks.
Upon the ridge beyond the cloaked silence of the little wood the breeze
blew steadily from across the levels—that were strangely empty; no sign
of moving specks making for the further ridge. Hurrying along the track
she recalled too late the slightness of the information upon which she
had built her idea of the golden scene; the gay throng, herself happily
in the midst.
Without a single clear idea of the direction she had trusted to the
bright magic to draw her to itself.
The subtly changed air and the melancholy clouds re-stated themselves,
became the prelude to disaster. The increasing wind and the cloud-bank
hiding the distant mountains were proclaiming the certainty of
punishment well-deserved: to wander at a loss and miss the Fest.
She glanced at her afternoon in retrospect: aimless walking in a world
fallen into greyness and gloom, into familiarity that was already
opening the door to the old friend, at whose heart lived a radiance
out-doing the beams shed by anticipation over unknown things.
But all the time the ski-ing which now she was not to see would be going
forward, mocking her until she could forget it; until the hours it
filled should have passed into others bright enough to melt regret.
Climbing the rise beyond the levels she was at once climbing up to find
the Fest, would plod the landscape until she found it, late, but still
in time to share and remember. She reached the crest beyond the
rise—there it was: a small shape, like an elongated horseshoe, upon a
distant slope. Black dots close-clustered in a strange little shape upon
the wastes of snow, defying the wastes of snow.
There was plenty of space. Gaps on each side of the track and even
towards the top of the rise where people were grouped more closely about
the comforting, the only festal sign, looking like an altar with its
gold-embroidered, red velvet frontal. Nothing could be seen behind its
shelf but a small hut upon the levels that extended backwards until the
pinewoods began with the rising mountain-side.
Where to stand? Up amongst the connoisseurs to see the start, half-way
down with a view of the ski-ers coming, or at the bottom of the row
amongst the black-clothed natives standing about in scattered groups in
the loose snow.
Choosing a place half-way down she became one of the gathered crowd of
Oberland visitors lining the smoothed and steeply sloping course. They
were all there. The black and distant dots had become people in every
fashion of sport’s-clothes, standing on skis, sitting on toboggans,
stamping about in the snow, walking up and down; and all waiting, all
looking betweenwhiles expectantly up the track towards the deserted
altar. There was a good deal of talking. Here and there the incessant
voices of men who make a hobby of talking. But most of them talked
intermittently, in the way of these leisured English who veil their
eagerness as they wait half apologetically and wholly self-consciously
for a show. There patiently they would wait, good-humoured, not deigning
to be disturbed, not suffering anything to disturb their pose of amused
independence that looked so like indifference and masked a warmth.
Just across the way was a stout lady in a seal-skin coat and curiously
different snow-boots. She sat sturdily bunched on her toboggan and they
stuck out in front of her, close-fitting, the rubber soles curving
sharply to the instep and neatly down again into the shape of a heel.
She clasped a camera and her sallow heavy face was drawn into a frown
that remained there while she turned towards a voice sounding from over
the way:
“.... and we’ll just be _here_ till judgment _day_.”
“I was told,” she answered at large with face upraised, deep furrows
from nose to chin giving strength to her hanging cheeks, “I was to see
sky-jumping, but I see no men on their skys to jump.”
American continuousness held up in Europe, brought to despair by the
spectacle of tolerance.
Sunlight had gone and on the slope of the breeze small snowflakes
drifted down to the snow. For a while it seemed as though the gathering
in the white wilderness were there in vain.
From the group of black figures at the top of the rise a deep Swiss
voice sang out an English name. Heads were craned forward, but the altar
remained empty. The confronted rows were transformed. Each life, risen
to gazing eyes, waited in a stillness upon the edge of time.
The knickerbockered tweed-clad form arrived upon the shelf from nowhere,
leaped, knees bent and arms outspread, forward through the air upon the
long blades that looked so like thin oars flattened out, came down, arms
in upward-straining arches, with a resounding whack upon the slope and
slid half-crouching, gaining the upright, fully upright with hooked arms
swinging, at full speed to the bottom of the hill, went off in a wide
curve and was stopped, swaying, just not falling, in wreaths of whirling
snow.
Achievement. Thrilling and chastening. Long ago someone had done this
difficult thing for the first time, alone, perhaps driven by necessity.
Now it was a sport, a deliberate movement into eternity, shared by all
who looked on. She felt she could watch forever. Cold had withdrawn from
the snow and from the drifting flakes. One after another the figures
appeared at the top of the rise and leapt, making the gliding race to
the sound of cheers that now broke forth each time the forward rush
followed the desperate dive. For those who crashed and rolled, slanting
ski and sloping helpless body rolling over and over down the slope,
there was comment of laughter silly and cruel. Yet one man sliced his
face with a ski-point and one had lain stunned at the bottom of the
slope ...
Vereker came at last, looking very young and lightly built, leaping
neatly and far, and gliding easily upright, to the accompaniment of
frantic cheering, at a splendid pace down the slope and far on into the
loose snow and round in a sweeping curve that encircled a distant
sapling and left him facing up the track half-hidden in a cloud of
churned-up snow.
He was the best. Length of jump, pace, style. The best of the English.
And kind life had led her to him for speech, for the recovery of shared
things; and was making now more memories that fitted with the rest.
Skied onlookers were planking sideways up and down the course,
flattening it. Snow still fell thinly. The distant mountains were lost
in mist. The forgotten scene was utterly desolate. Warmth flowing forth
from within made a summer in its midst.
“Tsoor-_boo_-chn!” The strong spell-binding peasant name filled out the
ringing cry. Switzerland was coming, bringing its so different life of
mountain and pinewood, its hardy strength, perhaps to outdo the English
in this brave game.
Here he came, in black against his snow, deep velvety black against the
snow, gliding past the little hut with a powerful different gait. It was
partly his clothes, the way they seemed all of one piece, closely
fitting, without angles. And his size, huge. From the edge of the shelf
he leapt high into the air and seemed to stand there against the sky, in
a dream. Down he swooped, sailing, dreaming, to the track, rose smoothly
from the terrific impact and smoothly went his way.
What could be more beautiful? He was heavy and solid, thickly built. But
with his shapely clothing and smooth rhythmic movement he made the
English graceless and their clothes deliberately absurd.
All the Swiss, though some were rough and ungainly, moved with that
strong and steady grace. But Zurbuchen was the best. It was he who would
live in her memory, poised against the sky like a great bird.
* * * * *
“You took photographs?”
“For him,” smiled Vereker with his quizzical affectionate glance. “To
remind him of what he has to do next year. But we’ll share them. Yours
will remind you that next year you won’t be let off.” Eaden remained
silent and expressionless.
“They will look strange amongst your cypress groves.”
“They will look passing strange.”
“You will come out again?” She wanted neither to know nor to seem to
want to know, but Vereker had left him there for a moment on her hands.
She was caught in the social trap. Expected, being a woman, not to walk
off alone, but to wait and provide, while she waited, suitable
entertainment, some kind of parlour trick. For a moment it seemed as
though he would not answer. He was silent and used to stillness, yet
embarrassed now by stillness in the presence of a perceiving witness.
Another woman would not seem to perceive. Would have given her question
the semblance of sincerity.
“No,” he said suddenly. “If I go away at all next year I shall go east.”
“When you’ve ’eard the East a-callin’....” She turned to look towards
the returning Vereker. Eaden gazed away towards the snowy distances. He
was taking his farewell. To-morrow he would be gone back to his chosen
isolation, uninfluenced. Tender-hearted lover of brave souls, of Daphne,
and who yet would bring so little to his love-making. He stood in his
heavy silence, heavy man’s silence of waiting for recognisable things.
“Yes, that man knew what he was talking about.” Suddenly his friendly
beam and a forward approaching step, a turning away, at the first hint
of something he had heard before, from his formal preoccupation,
preoccupation with a glimpse of the next break in his unknown southern
life. She had nothing more to say. Vereker was at hand who had held them
at truce together. But now without Vereker they were at truce, the only
kind of truce he could understand.
For a moment she was aware, far away in the future, of one of whom he
was the forerunner, coming into her life for mortal combat.