In the afternoon she had to go out with Loerke. Her tomorrow was perfectly vague before her. This was what gave her pleasure. She might be going to England with Gerald, she might be going to Dresden with Loerke, she might be going to Munich, to a girlfriend she had there. Anything might come to pass on the morrow. And today was the white, snowy iridescent threshold of all possibility. All possibility—that was the charm to her, the lovely, iridescent, indefinite charm—pure illusion. All possibility—because death was inevitable, and nothing was possible but death.
She did not want things to materialise, to take any definite shape. She wanted, suddenly, at one moment of the journey tomorrow, to be wafted into an utterly new course, by some utterly unforeseen event, or motion. So that, although she wanted to go out with Loerke for the last time into the snow, she did not want to be serious or businesslike.
And Loerke was not a serious figure. In his brown velvet cap, that made his head as round as a chestnut, with the brown-velvet flaps loose and wild over his ears, and a wisp of elf-like, thin black hair blowing above his full, elf-like dark eyes, the shiny, transparent brown skin crinkling up into odd grimaces on his small-featured face, he looked an odd little boy-man, a bat. But in his figure, in the greeny loden suit, he looked chétif and puny, still strangely different from the rest.
He had taken a little toboggan, for the two of them, and they trudged between the blinding slopes of snow, that burned their now hardening faces, laughing in an endless sequence of quips and jests and polyglot fancies. The fancies were the reality to both of them, they were both so happy, tossing about the little coloured balls of verbal humour and whimsicality. Their natures seemed to sparkle in full interplay, they were enjoying a pure game. And they wanted to keep it on the level of a game, their relationship: such a fine game.
Loerke did not take the toboganning very seriously. He put no fire and intensity into it, as Gerald did. Which pleased Gudrun. She was weary, oh so weary of Gerald’s gripped intensity of physical motion. Loerke let the sledge go wildly, and gaily, like a flying leaf, and when, at a bend, he pitched both her and him out into the snow, he only waited for them both to pick themselves up unhurt off the keen white ground, to be laughing and pert as a pixie. She knew he would be making ironical, playful remarks as he wandered in hell—if he were in the humour. And that pleased her immensely. It seemed like a rising above the dreariness of actuality, the monotony of contingencies.
They played till the sun went down, in pure amusement, careless and timeless. Then, as the little sledge twirled riskily to rest at the bottom of the slope,
“Wait!” he said suddenly, and he produced from somewhere a large thermos flask, a packet of Keks, and a bottle of Schnapps.
“Oh Loerke,” she cried. “What an inspiration! What a comble de joie indeed! What is the Schnapps?”
He looked at it, and laughed.
“Heidelbeer!” he said.
“No! From the bilberries under the snow. Doesn’t it look as if it were distilled from snow. Can you—” she sniffed, and sniffed at the bottle—“can you smell bilberries? Isn’t it wonderful? It is exactly as if one could smell them through the snow.”
She stamped her foot lightly on the ground. He kneeled down and whistled, and put his ear to the snow. As he did so his black eyes twinkled up.
“Ha! Ha!” she laughed, warmed by the whimsical way in which he mocked at her verbal extravagances. He was always teasing her, mocking her ways. But as he in his mockery was even more absurd than she in her extravagances, what could one do but laugh and feel liberated.
She could feel their voices, hers and his, ringing silvery like bells in the frozen, motionless air of the first twilight. How perfect it was, how very perfect it was, this silvery isolation and interplay.
She sipped the hot coffee, whose fragrance flew around them like bees murmuring around flowers, in the snowy air, she drank tiny sips of the Heidelbeerwasser, she ate the cold, sweet, creamy wafers. How good everything was! How perfect everything tasted and smelled and sounded, here in this utter stillness of snow and falling twilight.
“You are going away tomorrow?” his voice came at last.
“Yes.”
There was a pause, when the evening seemed to rise in its silent, ringing pallor infinitely high, to the infinite which was near at hand.
“Wohin?”
That was the question—wohin? Whither? Wohin? What a lovely word! She never wanted it answered. Let it chime forever.
“I don’t know,” she said, smiling at him.
He caught the smile from her.
“One never does,” he said.
“One never does,” she repeated.
There was a silence, wherein he ate biscuits rapidly, as a rabbit eats leaves.
“But,” he laughed, “where will you take a ticket to?”
“Oh heaven!” she cried. “One must take a ticket.”
Here was a blow. She saw herself at the wicket, at the railway station. Then a relieving thought came to her. She breathed freely.
“But one needn’t go,” she cried.
“Certainly not,” he said.
“I mean one needn’t go where one’s ticket says.”
That struck him. One might take a ticket, so as not to travel to the destination it indicated. One might break off, and avoid the destination. A point located. That was an idea!
“Then take a ticket to London,”
