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.