bouncing down a crumpled, stony bed, to make an unexpected six-mile detour through Germany, owing to the complicated contours of the land, before returning into Austria in a series of right-handed twists, to empty itself into the Bregenzer Ach, and eventually into Lake Constance south of Bregenz. Where the three streets met there was the usual village square, with a well-head and a modest Trinity column in the middle, and on all three sides—for in fact the square was an irregular triangle, dwindling towards the south into the stem of the Y—the beautiful, exuberant housefronts and shopfronts, the overhanging eaves, the mellow dark wood and virtuoso wrought iron that makes almost any small Austrian settlement look like a stage set for operetta. There was a baroque church, of no particular merit but of pleasing appearance, one restaurant that was not also an inn and two that were, and a confectioner’s noted for its rum babas. All the down-to-earth shops like the butcher’s and the baker’s and the ironmonger’s, lined the landward street. The two roads that embraced the end of the lake, and dwindled later into footpaths along its undulating shores, found room for the villas and gardens of the better-off, for a small public park nestling in the base of the Y like the dregs of the wine, and for the two larger of Scheidenau’s three hotels, which peered into each other’s windows across the placid surface, just where the arrow-straight clay-blue line of the Rulenbach’s inflow, coloured by mountain water, foundered and became invisible in the deeper, calmer blue. The third and smallest hotel, the Weisses Kreuz, faced the church across the broader end of the square.
Outside the village the farms and fields began, rolling, heaving, foothill fields white with the shaven stubble from which the harvest had been taken, and upland pastures scalloped like fish-scales from the marks of the scythe. The highest point visible from the square was the abrupt hummock of the castle hill just to the west of the lake, with its snaggle-toothed ruin on top, meanly reduced now to its last few feet of broken wall and a tangle of overgrown rubble, useless as a tourist attraction. Outcrops of bedrock and outcrops of masonry spattered the sides of the hill over an area of a square mile or so, and because of the rich rooting of trees and bushes it was sometimes difficult to tell which was which. In parts of the forlorn shell the practical natives had dumped rubbish, and there were rats as the only inhabitants; but still that scattered rash of worked stone erupting everywhere among the grass bore witness to the formidable extent of the place in its hey-day. The Waldmeisters, who owned the Goldener Hirsch, and had been there now for seven generations, took their name from an ancestor who had once been head forester to the Lords of Scheidenau.
The Goldener Hirsch, sprawled along the lake-shore on the western arm of the Y, with its shoulder turned solidly to the remnant of old splendours on the castle mound, was in a curious state of suspension between village
It was already September, and the high season dwindles away very rapidly when August ends. Yes, she had a room and a smile for the unexpected Englishman who had made no reservation. But the woman who showed Francis up to his room wore the full, flowered skirt, embroidered apron and laced bodice of old custom, and had her mane of black hair coiled on her head in the old heavy bun, and to judge by the waft of warm milk and cattle-flesh that drifted from her skirt as she walked ahead of him up the scrubbed wooden stairs, she had just come in from the cows.
The first-floor corridor was wide enough for a carriage and pair, the door she flung open for him broad enough to admit them two abreast. All-white, high ceiling, spacious walls, huge billow of medium-weight autumn feather- bed on the creamy-white natural wood bedstead. He was in the old part of the house; so much the better. The window looked sidelong on a large, ebullient, untidy garden, and only a sliver of the lake winked in at him. No room in the world could have been more at peace.
‘The gentleman is English?’ His German had been hesitant, and in any case the unmistakable stamp is always there, for some reason. He owned to his Englishness; he might as well.
‘The room will do?’ Her voice was low, abrupt and vibrant, curiously personal in uttering impersonal things.
‘The room will do beautifully, thank you.’ He dropped his bag on the luggage-stand, and felt for the keys of the hired car in his pocket, and the loose change under them.
‘A moment! I will open the window.’ The scent of her as she passed near to him was like the wild air from outside, part beast, part garden, part earth, part late summer foliage ripening towards its decline. She turned her head suddenly as she passed, so close that her sleeve brushed his, and he saw her face full, olive-dark and olive- smooth, and the great, bold, sullen, inviting eyes for once wide-open and glowing. But the next moment she was looking round the room with the glow veiled, and the faint, dutiful frown back on her brow.
‘No towels. I will bring.’
She was, he realized, a very striking woman, her tall figure as lithe as an Amazon, her features good, her hair splendid. Until he had looked at her so closely he had failed to notice that there was a flaw, for her articulation was so clear that there seemed to be no malformation in her palate. Only that small, vicious botch put in to spoil the pattern and embitter her life; her upper lip was split like a hare’s. The effect was not even ugly, prejudice aside; but prejudice is never very far aside from the hare-lip in an otherwise handsome woman.
She came with the towels, and he took them from her at the door. Her fingers touched his in the act. He was sure then that it had not been by accident that her breast, braced high by the black bodice, had brushed his sleeve as he had stepped past her into the room on entering.
‘If you should need anything, please call for Friedl. I shall be working below. I shall hear.’
‘Thank you, Fraulein Friedl. I’ll remember.’
Her eyelids rolled back for an instant, and again uncovered, so briefly that he could believe in it or not, as he chose, the buried volcano. Probably she had not much hope, but as a gesture of defiance against the world she persevered and deployed what little she had.
‘You are Herr Waldmeister’s daughter?’
The hare-lip quivered in what was not quite a smile. ‘His niece,’ she said, and walked away along the great, scrubbed corridor with her long stride, and left him there. But the slow, swaying walk, the erect back, the beautifully balanced head with its sheaf of black hair, all were still quiveringly aware of him until the moment when she passed from sight.
So that was one of the amenities, and one that wouldn’t be in the brochure, nor, he thought, available to everyone. Some special kind of chemistry had elected him. One cast-away hailing another, perhaps, for company in a huge and trackless sea. One insomniac welcoming another in the long, lonely, sleepless night.
He washed, and went down into the bar. There were voices in the garden and boats on the lake. Across the shining water the windows of the Alte Post blinked languidly in the sun. There were still plenty of visitors to keep
