It was a burden too heavy to be borne. The good Swiss soup had turned her bright fever of fatigue to a drowsiness that made every effort to sit decently upright end in a renewed abject drooping that if only she were alone could be the happy drooping of convalescence from the journey.
Their talk had gone on. It was certain that always they would talk. Archipelagoes of talk, avoiding anything that could endanger continuous urbanity.
In the midst of a stifled yawn the call to a fortnight’s continuous urbanity fell upon her like a whip. Dodging the blow she lolled resistant to the sound of bland voices. An onlooker, appreciative but resistant; that, socially, would be the story of her stay. A docile excursion, even if they should offer it, into this select little world, would come between her and her Switzerland. Refusal clamoured within her and it was only as an afterthought that she realised the impossibility of remaining for a fortnight without opinions.
The next moment, hearing again the interwoven voices as a far-off unison of people sailing secure on smooth accustomed waters, she was bleakly lonely; suppliant. Nothing showed ahead but a return with her fatigue to sustain the silence and emptiness of a strange room. She was turning to glance at the woman on her left when the deep bass voice asked her casually if she had had a good journey. Casual cameraderie, as if already they had been talking and were now hiding an established relationship under conventionalities.
The moment she had answered she heard the university voice across the way remark, in the tone of one exchanging notes with a friend after a day’s absence, that it was a vile journey, but all right from Berne onwards, and looked up. There he was, almost opposite, Cambridge, and either history or classics, the pleasant radiance of lit. hum. all about him, and turned her way bent a little, as if bowing, and as if waiting for her acknowledgment—with his smile, apology introduction and greeting beaming together from sea-blue eyes set only ever so little too closely together in a neatly tanned narrowly oval face—before regaining the upright.
Her soft reply, lost in other sounds, made a long moment during which, undisturbed by not hearing, he held his attitude of listening that told her he was glad of her presence.
The close-set eyes meant neither weakness nor deceit. Sectarian eyes, emancipated. But his strength was borrowed. His mental strength was not original. An uninteresting mind; also he was a little selfish, with the selfishness of the bachelor of thirty—but charming.
The party was smaller than she had thought. The odd way they were all drawn up at one end of the table made them look numerous. Spread out in the English way they would have made a solemn dinner-party, with large cold gaps.
Someone asked whether she had come right through and in a moment they were all amiably wrangling over the pros and cons of breaking the journey.
Staring from across the table was a man alone, big oblong foreigner dwarfing his neighbours, and piteous, not to be looked at as the others could who fitted the scene; not so much sitting at table with the rest as set there filling a space. His eyes had turned towards a nasal voice suddenly prevailing; sombre brown, wistfully sulking below eyebrows lifted in a wide forehead that stopped unexpectedly soon at a straight fence of hair. Oblong beard reaching the top of stiff brown coat. Russian, probably the Chopin player.
“Anyone’s a fool who passes Parrus without stopping off at least a few hours.”
A small man at the end of the row, opaque blue eyes in a peaky face, little peaked beard, neat close-fitting dress clothes. Incongruous far-travelled guest of little Switzerland.
He was next the window, with the nice man on his right. Then came the big Russian exactly opposite and again naively staring across, and beyond him a tall lady in a homemade silk blouse united by a fichu to the beginning of a dark skirt; coronet of soft, coiled white hair above a firmly padded face with polished skin, pink-flushed, glimmering into the talk, that was now a debate about tomorrow’s chances, into which sounded women’s voices from the table behind, smooth and clear, but clipped, free-masonish like the others. To the right of the coronetted lady an iron-grey man, her husband, gaunt and worn, with peevishly suffering eyes set towards the door on the far side of the room. Fastidious eyes, full of knowledge, turned away. He was the last in the row and beyond him the table stretched away to the end wall through whose door the servants came and went. His opponents were out of sight beyond the bass-voiced woman on the left, whose effect was so strangely large and small: a face horse-like and delicate, and below her length of face increased by the pyramid of hair above her pointed fringe, a meeting of old lace and good jewellery.
To her own right the firm insensitive hand, that wore a signet ring and made pellets of its bread, belonged to just the man she had imagined, dark and liverish, but with an unexpectedly flattened profile whose moustache, dropping to sharp points, gave it an expression faintly Chinese; a man domestic but accustomed to expand in unrestricted statement, impatiently in leash to the surrounding equality of exchange. Beyond him his wife, sitting rather eagerly forward, fair and plump, with features grown expressionless in their long service of holding back her thoughts, but, betraying their secret in a brow, creased faintly by straining upwards as if in perpetual incredulity of an ever-present spectacle, and become now the open page of the story the mouth and eyes were not allowed to tell.
At her
