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.