III

III

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 today 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 tomorrow.

And when there came a warning swift clumping of hobnailed 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 skier 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 weekends 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 today 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 tonight. 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 summerhouse 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 ashtray. 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; preexisting 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 today.

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 today. 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 rearranged 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 faraway 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 springtime 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 toothbrushes 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 pigeonholes, 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 whitewashed 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 beehive 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. Cowbells. 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 tomorrow, many tomorrows. 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 pygmy 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 naive nor bourgeois. For all Americans are either undisturbedly naive 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 today a last turn to add yet one more layer to his week’s sunburn, he remarked that the long zigzag 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 skiing 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 p

（本文超出站点单文档体积上限，已截断）