In spite of her contempt for tobogganing she was going warily, slowing
up a little at the bends, a gnome in an extinguishing cowl, Mrs.
Harcourt, carelessly carrying her long past and the short future that so
strangely she regarded as indefinite, looking forward, making plans for
next winter with eager school-girl eyes; carelessly bringing the life
she carried about with her down to the valley this afternoon with
brusque cameraderie, her day-time manner.
Her company added something to the joy of flying through the
backward-flowing landscape. But it was shortening the run and fitting it
within reduced surroundings—making it show as it showed to her within
her larger scale of movement.
Here already was the steepest bend of the run, with the patch of black
ice across its middle. Mrs. Harcourt had passed it safely and
disappeared. It was past and a group of people came into sight midway
down the next slope: two figures pushing off and Mrs. Harcourt at the
side of the track, dismounted, beating her skirt. She had collided,
managed to run into them; a collision and a humiliating smash ...
“Fools! Fooling all over v’place. Had to slam into v’side.”
“A blessing the fence is broken just here.”
“Not their fault I’m not smashed up. I was yellin’ for all I was worth.”
“It’s _really_ dangerous when you can’t see what’s ahead. Someone said
tobogganing accounts for more accidents than any other sport.”
“Don’t wonder, with so many idjuts about. Where’s Daphne?”
“Held up, poor little soul. A broken cord, just as they were starting;
the maid went in for another.”
“Paw kid. She’ll be too late. No good waiting.”
They mounted and sped off one behind the other through a scene that was
now the child’s vast desolation. In place of joyous flight, selfish, in
which Daphne had been forgotten, came now this absurd urgency to arrive.
Mrs. Harcourt felt it. She was sorry, in her kindliness, for Daphne’s
disappointment, but saw nothing of the uselessness of arriving without
her. Thought of nothing but herself, her determination, her hatred of
being beaten. This made a shelter. Under the shelter of Mrs. Harcourt’s
determination to be there because she had said she would be there it was
possible to be seen rushing uselessly to the last farewell.
Another bend. Beyond it a sleigh coming up and Mrs. Harcourt carefully
passing it and the other tobogganers drawn up in the snow. It was safely
past. Mrs. Harcourt was getting ahead. Going recklessly. Even for her
there was something more in this desperate urgency than the mere
determination to arrive.
If she too were to arrive it was now or never. Now, at once, in the
midst of this winding ice-patched roadway, she must give herself up to
what she had learned on the safe snowfields and never yet dared to try
here until the last clear slope was reached. Lifting her feet to the
bar, leaning back to swing free and steer by weight she let herself go.
The joy of flight returned, singing joy of the inaccessible world to
which in flight one was translated, bringing forgetfulness of everything
but itself. Bend after bend appeared and of itself her body swayed now
right now left in unconscious rhythm. The landscape flew by,
sideways-upwards, its features indistinguishable. She was movement,
increasing, cleaving the backward rushing air.
At the last slope she was level with Mrs. Harcourt, safely, triumphantly
returned to the known world, passing her, flying down so blissfully that
arrival would now be nothing but an end to joy. Flying down towards two
small figures standing on the level, turned this way, watching up the
incline down which speeded, superfluously, absurdly, just these two
women.
“Where’s Daphne?” said Eaden in his rich, indolent voice; looking over
their heads, staring up the slope.
While Mrs. Harcourt’s deep bass, still staccato with her anger, told the
brief tale, she watched the pain and wrath in his face, strong man’s
sympathy of pain with this child to whose spirit he gave homage, anger
with those who had deserted her. Her useless explanation flickered about
him unspoken, silenced by the pain she shared.
“It’s no good, old man,” said Vereker gently, watch in hand: “we must be
off.”
Formal hand-shaking. To Mrs. Harcourt’s padding of sociable remarks he
paid no heed, keeping his eyes still above her on the bend at the head
of the slope until he turned to tramp off with Vereker, to the sound of
Vereker’s kindly, sunny voice.
“Paw kid. Eaden was frightfully wrath. Thought we ought to have brought
her.”
“I couldn’t have dared, down those slopes, on a small single,” said
Miriam wearily. But the judge within stood firm. She had not thought of
trying.
The now distant men were marching swiftly, reaching the point where the
road sloped downwards; had reached it and were settling on their
toboggans. A face came round. Miriam looked back up the slope still
cruelly empty, and round again to see the men seated, gliding off,
lessening. Their caps vanished below the level of the ridge. And now the
upward slope held a single small toboggan coming headlong. Daphne had
made the run alone.
“How _dare_ you let him go?”
Miriam moved forward surprised by her own approach. Her mind was filled
with the simple selfish truth. The wrath-blazing eyes saw it, recognised
her for what she was and turned away to the wastes of snow:
“Eaden, my Eaden ... I shall _never_ see him again.” Tears flowed from
the wide eyes and swiftly down the face so little convulsed by grief
that bent her, standing there with arms sideways out as if to save her
from falling, to keep her upright, facing her loss, fists clenched to
fight her woe. Of themselves Miriam’s arms reached forth to stay the
torment.
Incredibly Daphne was clinging, sobbing with hidden face: “Do you love
me—do you love me?” She held her without speaking, silenced while still
the broken voice went on, by the sense of being carried forward into a
world known only by hearsay and that now was giving forth all about them
in the stillness its ethereal sounds—sounds she had sometimes felt
within a gentle wind.
Daphne’s head was raised and her flushed face busy in eager speech as
they went forward together over the snow. When presently she assured her
that one day Eaden would come back, the child pulled upon her arm and
spoke in a new way of her new love. She spoke no more of Eaden, walking
sturdily uphill, eagerly talking, sunned for a while in humble helpless
love that soon must be removed.
* * * * *
With Eaden’s departure holding Vereker away until to-morrow and Mrs.
Harcourt disappeared upstairs with all those who sought sleep and early
rising, the hotel was empty, strange again and going its independent way
as on the day of her arrival. The presence of Guerini hidden away in the
little salon where daily he had spent his unimaginable evening of a
Milan business man on holiday, increased its emptiness, made it as
desolate as the world of his thoughts.
He must have learned something in seeing her evening after evening—not
in the least goloshy in her blue gown of many colours—seated on the
crimson stairs between the two Englishmen, in seeing discussion prevail
over personalities; new world for him of men seeking, without
sentimental emotion, without polite contempt, conversation with a woman.
Had any light dawned in him? Would he show any grace of dawning light?
She went into the little salon and there he was, rising to greet her,
with the look of a man penned within an office, the look upon his low
Italian brow of worry left over from his daily life. He looked common
too, common and ordinary—she wondered now that she could ever have
mistaken him for a musician wandered from Russia. But beside the
pathetic appeal of his commonness, supporting it, was the appeal of his
disarray, his obvious gladness and relief, like Michael coming back
after a last, final explanation and dismissal, saying impenitently: “You
whipped me yesterday, to-day you must not whip.” He was extraordinarily
like Michael in his belief in the essential irrelevance of anything a
woman may say.
It was his last evening in Oberland and the first time they had found
themselves alone together since the afternoons in the snowfields that
were now so clearly in his mind as he stood still turning over those
hopeless little old Swiss books, but turned towards her as she ensconced
herself in the chair from which so long ago she had watched Vereker at
the piano. Yet their life together had gone on. The grim little room was
full of it.
Again she had that haunting sense of being a collection of persons
living in a world of people always single and the same. Mrs. Harcourt,
she reflected as she said the books were like faded flowers, was
fastidiously selective and always one person, one unfaltering aspect.
Vereker, Eaden, all the others. Yet the lives she lived with each one
were sharply separated lives, separable parts of herself, incompatible.
The life she lived with Guerini, beginning unconsciously that first
evening when he had turned upon her throughout dinner his brown stare,
hurrying forward during their afternoons in the snow, ending with their
quarrel, begun again with the reproachful gaze he had sent across the
table on the evening of her truancy, had persisted during the
intervening time and was now marching off afresh on its separate way.
It was clear that these close questionings held not only the remains of
his surprise over the nature of the things that had separated them but
also his determination to try to see these things as she saw them. They
revealed much pondering, not over the things in themselves but over
their power with her, and presently it was clear that he meant to see
her again. She sat ensconced, considering him, measuring the slow
movement of his thoughts, the swiftness of the impressions he was
drawing from his attention to every inflection of her voice.
She knew she ought to go, that she was building up with every moment she
stayed in the room a false relationship. The cordiality of her voice,
its dreamy animation, was not for him nor made by him. It told its tale
to her alone. His talk of London had taken her thoughts there and she
saw it afar, vivid with charmed and charming people. For the first time
she was seeing London as people whose secret had revealed itself during
this last two weeks, and was at this moment beginning consistently to
live her life there as in future it would be lived, as she had lived it,
but unconsciously and only intermittently, during the past year.
This man appealed, she realised it now, from the first to a person who
no longer existed, to a loneliness that during the past years had been
moving away from her life. It was only in its moving that she had
realised its existence. This man saw her still as lonely and
resourceless; and also as interesting, something new in his narrow
experience. He too was lonely, had an empty life, in the busy business
man’s way of having an empty life: no centre and a lonely leisure. And
he was more than half bent on offering her the chance that so often in
the past had been at her elbow, of pretending herself into a single
settled existence, a single world, safe. Even now it was a temptation.
But it was the Italian background that was the real temptation. As soon
as he talked of settling himself in London he was lessened, and the
temptation disappeared. Life as a single conversation in a single place
with the rest of the world going by might seem possible when thought of
in all the newness of Italy. In London it at once fell into proportion
and became absurd.
In London was Hypo, held up, at any rate saying he was held up, and not
now so much awaiting her decision as taking it for granted. A big
shadow, that might turn into sunshine. A gleaming shadow that lost its
brightness as she faced it. And, behind it, a world that perhaps took
most of its glamour from this uncertain shadow.