What had brought this wakening so near to the edge of night? The mountains were still wan against a cold sky, whitening the morning twilight with their snow.
How long to wait, with sleep gone that left no borderland of drowsiness, until the coming of their gold?
And in a moment she had seen forever the ruby gleaming impossibly from the topmost peak: stillness of joy held still for breathless watching of the dark ruby set suddenly like a signal upon the desolate high crag.
It could not last, would soon be plain sunlight.
Already it was swelling, growing brighter, clearing to crimson. In a moment it became a star with piercing rays that spread and slowly tilted over the upper snow a flood of rose.
Each morning this miracle of light had happened before her sleeping eyes. It might not again find her awake. But it had found her awake, carried her away in a moment of pure delight that surely was absolution? And when presently the rose had turned to the familiar gold creeping down to the valley it was more than the gold of yesterday. In watching its birth she had regained the first day’s sense of endless time. To-day was set in advance to the rhythm of endless light.
To-day was an unfathomable loop within the time that remained before the end of Eaden’s visit, his short allowance that added, by being set within it, to her own longer portion. His coming had brought the earlier time to an end; made it a past, expanding in the distance. And beyond his far-off departure was a group of days with features yet unseen. Looking back upon that distant past it seemed impossible that the crest of her first week was not yet reached.
Yet the few days that seemed so many had already fallen into a shape. Morning blessedness of leisure smiled down upon by the mountains again tawny in their sunlight, witnessed to by every part of the house wandered through; rich sense of strength unspent; joy of mere going out again into the wide scene, into the embrace of the crystal air; the first breath of its piny scent, of the scent of snow and presently the dry various scents confined within the little street, messengers of strange life being lived close at hand; the morning dive into the baking warmth of the post-office to find amongst the English vehement at their pigeon-holes the sharpest sense of being out in the world of the free; then the great event, the wild flight down to the valley’s sudden stillness.
The afternoon with Guerini; but, after yesterday, there might be no afternoon with Guerini: freedom instead, for fresh discovery until tea-time, on the promontory in the midst of unpredictable groupings. Sunset and afterglow, high day moving away without torment or regret; the mountains, turning to a darkness in the sky; telling only of the sure approach of the deep bright world of evening.
The gold-lit evening feast was still momentous, still under the spell of the setting, the silent host who kept the party always new.
And it was in part the setting, the feeling of being out of the world and irresponsible, that last night had kept Eaden a docile listener. He had heard a little of the truth, at least something to balance the misrepresentations of socialism in the Tory press. But he had heard in a dream, outside life. Sitting on the stairs, huge in his meek correctness of evening dress. There was, to be sure, in face of Vereker’s determination, nothing else for him to do. But it was with one consent that they had all three subsided on the wide stairs, secure from the intrusions that menaced the little salon.
And it was only for a moment she had sunned herself in the triumph of being claimed, forcibly enthroned in the sustaining blue gown upon the red-carpeted stairs with the best of the hotel’s male guests a little below on each side of her. After that moment there was only effort, the effort to make things clear, to find convincing answers to Vereker’s questions.
And there were no witnesses, only Guerini, coming from the salon and apologetically past them up the stairs; and the maids, passing to and fro.
There is no evening social centre in this hotel, no large room. That is why these sports-people like it. The day is concentrated within the daylight. The falling away after dinner is a turning towards the next day’s work.
That Grindelsteig hotel must be rather fascinating. She thought I shared her disapproval of people “running up and down balconies and in and out of each other’s rooms all night long.” I did. Yet they are only carrying out my principles....
She despises even those who come out for sport unless all day they are risking life and limb. So fragile and brittle-looking, so Victorian and lacy, yet living for her ski-parties with picked people from the other hotels; going off at dawn, swallowed up until dinner-time and then, straight to bed.
The social promise of the first evening has miscarried. The social centre is the Oberland Ski-club; the rest, a mere putting in of time. I am living on the outskirts, looking for developments in the wrong place; have seen all there will be to see until the end of my stay.
Into the golden sunlight fell the clashing of morning sleighbells describing the outdoor world. Listening to them she felt the vast surroundings that lately had become a setting, owing part of its entrancement to the delightful sense of success in a charming social atmosphere, re-asserting themselves in their own right, accusing her of neglect, showing the days winding themselves off to an end that would leave her in possession only of the valley road and the fields beyond the bridge.
The dawn had wakened to remind her. Watching the coming of the light she had been restored to her first communion with it, back in the time when the people downstairs had seemed superfluity, thrown in with the rest. When all was over they would appear in the distance: bright figures of a momentary widening of her social horizon, unforgotten, but withdrawn into their own element; not going forward into her life as this winter paradise would go forward, brightening her days with the possibility of reunion.
This morning she would break the snare, be a claimant for a lunch packet, an absentee for the whole day. With the coming of the far-off afternoon, Guerini, looking down from his window on to the promontory either to escape or to claim her company, would find no one there.
Even in terror there was gladness of swift movement that left her pressed like a niched effigy into the wall of the drift as the beast pranced by, revealing in its wake a slouching peasant; clear brilliant eyes brooding amidst unkempt shagginess, pipe at an angle of jaunty defiance to the steep his heedless tramping brought so near.
She was honourably plastered with snow and the precious package that had leapt and might have hurled itself into the void was still safely on its string about her neck, but the narrow rising path bereft of its secrecy by evidence of homely levels above of field and farm was perhaps only a highway for humiliating perils. More cows might be coming round the bend; a whole herd. There might be—it would harmonise with the way life always seemed to respond to deliberate activity with a personal challenge—on this very day the dawn had drawn her away from beaten tracks, a general turning out of cattle for an airing; mountain cattle, prancing like colts.
Man and cow were now upon the widening path, approaching the sloping field with the barn at the end, the cow trotting swiftly ahead, through the half buried posts beside the sunken open gate, and now careering hither and thither with flying tail, the powdery snow flung in wreaths about its course. It was half mad of course, poor thing, with the joy of release from one of those noisome steamy sheds whose reek polluted the air surrounding them and saddened the landscape with reminder of the price of happiness: oblivion of hidden, helpless suffering.
But in summer-time this air-intoxicated captive would stand knee-deep in rich pasture; mild. Its colouring was mild, soft tan and creamy white, in ill-arranged large blots; and with its short legs, huge bony mass of head and shoulders from which the spine curved down as if sagging beneath the weight of the clumsy body, it missed the look of breeding, the even shape and colouring of lowland cattle. Its horns, too, had no style, rose small and sharp from the disproportionate mass of skull.
Almost without warning, so slight in the dense pinewood was the sound of its muffled gliding, the sled was upon her, heavy with piled logs and a ruffian perched upon them: slithering headlong, fitting and filling the banked path from side to side. Somehow she flung herself upon the root-encumbered bank, somehow hitched her feet clear of the sled as it rushed by. The villain, unmoved and placidly smoking, had not even shouted.
No time to shout, no use shouting she murmured breathless, smiling at the absurd scene, a treasure now that danger was past, a glimpse into local reality. But danger was past only for the moment. This pleasant wide path she had mistaken for a woodland walk winding and mounting safely amidst the peace of the pinewoods was a stern highway, almost a railway; formed like a railway to the exact dimensions of its traffic.
Intently listening, going swiftly where the sides of the track were too high for an escaping sprawl, she toiled on and up and came presently to a gap and a view of the small hut seated clear of the pines, high against the pure blue upon its curve of unblemished snow, come down now nearly to her level and revealed as a châlet with burnished face, inhabited: above its chimney the air quivered in the heat of a clear-burning fire.
The hotel lunch, opened upon the trestle table, looked pert, a stray intruder from the cheap sophisticated world of to-day into these rich and ancient shadows. The old woman, but for her bell-like, mountainy voice, was a gnarled witch moving amongst them, unattained by the cold light from the small low windows that struck so short a way into the warmly varnished interior.
And it seemed by magic that she produced the marvellous coffee in whose subtle brewing was a sadness, the sadness of her lonely permanence above the waste of snow and woods—old grandmother, a living past, her world disappeared, leaving only the circling of the seasons about her emptied being.
In this haunting presence the triumph of distance accomplished, the delicious sense of known worlds waiting far below, world behind world in a chain whose end was the far-off London she represented here in this high remoteness, could not perfectly flourish, came in full only when the silence had had time to fill itself with joy that was too strong to be oppressed by the departed ancient voice that was like the echo of a sound falling elsewhere.
Again, recalling the far-off morning, a dark barn-like room. But the woman opened a door at the end of it, led the way through a passage still darker: another door and she was out upon the edge of the world, upon a dilapidated little grey balcony jutting over an abyss. As far as sight could reach were sunlit mountain tops range beyond range till they grew far and faint.
Faced alone, the scene, after the first moment’s blissfully ranging perception, was saddened in its grandeur through the absence there of someone else perceiving. Thousands, of course, had seen it from this perch in the centre of the row of slummy little balconies. But so splendid was the triumph of the unexpected mountains ranged and lit that no company, even exclamatory, could break their onslaught. Alone, there was too heavy a burden of feeling in the speechless company of this suddenly revealed magnificence.
The woman coming out with the tea that one day she must take here accompanied, was brisk about the view: an adjunct, thrown in gratis with her refreshments which were good and which presently caused the mountains, turned away from, to be felt preparing a friendliness; becoming the last, best reward of her day’s accomplishments.
The way home down and down and across the levels to the rink and up the little homely slope into Oberland would be a jog-trot taken half asleep to the haven of things small and known amidst which she would sit renewed, to-day’s long life-time stilled to a happy throbbing of the nerves, a bemused beaming in the midst of friends. Its incidents blurred that would come back one day clearer, more shining than all the rest?
Warned by a growing chill she turned to face the mountains in farewell and found them lit by the first of the afterglow. Far away in the haze beyond the visible distance a group of slender peaks showed faintly, rose-misted pinnacles of a dream-city from whose spires would presently gleam the rubies of farewell.