And this ballade was joy. Eternal Sommerabend; and now tomorrow’s Swiss sunlight. Someone there was downstairs to whom it was a known and cherished thing, who was perhaps wise about it, wise in music and able to place it in relation to other compositions.
Its charm she now saw, coming to it afresh and with a deepened recognition, lay partly in the way it opened: not beginning, but continuing something gone before. It was a shape of tones caught from a pattern woven continuously and drawn, with its rhythm ready set, gleaming into sight. The way of the best nocturnes. But with nothing of their pensiveness. It danced in the sky and tiptoed back to earth down the group of little chords that filled the pause, again sprang forth and up and came wreathing down to touch deep lower tones who flung it to and fro. Up again until once more upon down-stepping chords it came into the rhythm of its dance.
It was being played from memory, imperfectly, by someone who had the whole clear within him and in slowing up for the complicated passages never stumbled or lost the rhythm or ceased to listen. Someone choosing just this fragment of all the music in the world to express his state: joy in being up here in snow and sunlight.
When the gown was on, the creasing was more evident; all but the enlivening strange harmony of embroidered blues and greens and mauves was a crisscross of sharp lines and shadows.
For the second time the long loud buzzing of the downstairs bell vibrated its summons through the house.
Standing once more before the little mirror that reflected only her head and shoulders she recreated the gown in its perfection of cut, the soft depths of its material that hung and took the light so beautifully.
“Your first Switzerland must be good. I want your first Switzerland to be good.” And then, in place of illuminating hints, that little diagram on the table: of life as a zigzag. Saddening. Perhaps he was right. Then, since the beginning had been so good, all a sharp zig, what now waited downstairs, heralded by the creased dress, was a zag, equally sharp.
The dining-room, low ceiled and oblong, was large and seemed almost empty. Small tables set away towards a window on the right and only one of them occupied, left clear the large space of floor between the door at which she had come in and a table, filling the length of the far side of the room where beside a gap in the row of diners a servant stood turned towards her with outstretched indicating hand.
No one but the servant had noticed her entry. Voices were sounding, smooth easy tones leaving the air composed, as she slipped into her place in a light that beside the unscreened glare upstairs was mellow, subdued by shades. The voices were a man’s across the way—light and kindly, ’Varsity, the smiling tone of one who is amiable even in disagreement—and that of the woman on her left, a subdued deep bass. Other voices dropped in, as suave and easy, and clipping and slurring their words in the same way; but rather less poised.
The tone of these people was balm. Sitting with eyes cast down aware only of the subdued golden light, she recalled her fleeting glimpse of them as she had crossed the room, English in daily evening dress, and was carried back to the little world of Newlands where first she had daily shared the evening festival of diners dressed and suave about a table free of dishes, set with flowers and elegancies beneath a clear and softly shaded light: the world she had sworn never to leave. She remembered a summer morning, the brightness of the light over her breakfast tray and its unopened letters and her vow to remain always surrounded by beauty, always with flowers and fine fabrics, and space and a fresh clean air always close about her, playing their part that was so powerful.
And this little wooden Swiss hotel with its baked air and philistine fittings was to provide thrown in with Switzerland, more than a continuation of Newlands—Newlands seen afresh with experienced eyes.
The clipped, slurred words had no longer the charm of a foreign tongue. Though still they rang upon the air the preoccupations of the man at the wheel: the sound of “The Services” adapted. But clustered in this small space they seemed to be bringing with them another account of their origin, to be showing how they might come about of themselves and vary from group to group, from person to person—with one aim: to avoid disturbing the repose of the features. Expression might be animated or inanimate, but features must remain undisturbed.
Then there is no place for clearly enunciated speech apart from oratory; platform and pulpit. Anywhere else it is bad form. Bad fawm.
She felt she knew now why perfect speech, delightful in itself, always seemed insincere. Why women with clear musical voices undulating, and clean enunciation, are always cats; and the corresponding men, ingratiating and charming at first, turn out sooner or later to be charlatans.
The nicest people have bad handwriting and bad delivery.
But all this applied only to English, to Germanics; that was a queer exciting thing, that only these languages had the quality of aggressive disturbance of the speaking face: chin-jerking vowels and aspirates, throat-swelling gutturals … force and strength and richness, qualities innumerable and more various than in any other language.
Quelling an impulse to gaze at the speakers lit by discovery, she gazed instead at imagined faces, representative Englishmen, with eyes and brows serene above rapid slipshod speech.
Here too of course was the explanation of the other spontaneous forms of garbling, the extraordinary pulpit speech of self-conscious and incompletely believing parsons, and the mincing speech of the genteel. It explained “nace.” Nice, correctly spoken, is a convulsion of the lower face—like a dog snapping at a gnat.
She had a sudden vision
