“I been pottering. My ski are at Zurbuchen’s bein’ repaired.”
“But what a perfect Swiss name. Like oak, like well-baked bread.”
To get away now. Sufficient impression of the Alpenstock people perpetually strenuous, living for sport, and, redeeming its angularity, the rich Swiss background: Zurbuchen. But Mrs. Harcourt’s glance of surprised delight—there was amusement too, she didn’t think Swiss names worth considering—meant that she was entertained, anticipating further entertainment; to which she would not contribute.
“No. I’m supposed to sit about and rest. Overwork.”
“You won’t. Lots of people come out like vat. You’ll soon find resting a baw out heah.”
“Should like a little sleep. I’ve had none for two nights.”
“Stop in bed tomorrow. Have your meals up.”
“Mm. …”
For a moment Mrs. Harcourt waited, silent, not making the movement of departure that would presently bring down the shadow of returning loneliness her words had drawn so near; keeping her leaning pose, her air of being indefinitely available.
The deep bell of her voice dropped from its soft single note to a murmur rising and falling, a low narrative tone, hurrying.
Through the sound still coming and going in her mind of the name Mrs. Harcourt had so casually spoken, bringing with it the sunlit mountains and the outer air waiting in tomorrow, Miriam heard that the people at the Alpenstock were all right—with the exception of the two sitting at dinner on Mrs. Harcourt’s left, “outsiders” of a kind now appearing in Oberland for the first time. Saddened by their exclusion, embarrassed by unconscious flattery, Miriam impulsively asked their name and glowed with a sudden vision of Mrs. Corrie, of how she would have embraced this opportunity for wicked mondaine wit. Mrs. Harcourt, for a moment obediently reflecting, said she had forgotten it but that it was somefing raver fwightful. Everyone else, introduced by name, received a few words of commendation—excepting the Russian and the American. The Russian would be just a foreigner, an unfortunate, but the American surely must be an outsider? Insincerely, as if in agreement with this division of humanity by exclusion, she put in a question, and while Mrs. Harcourt pulled up her discourse to say, as if sufficiently, that he was staying only a couple of days and passed on to summon other hotels to the tribunal, she was glad that the Russian had been left untouched. Harry Vereker, fine, a first-class sportsman and altogether nice chap, was already lessened, domesticated, general property in his niceness; but the Russian remained, wistfully alone: attractive.
“… hidjus big hotel only just built; all glass and glare. It’ll be the ruin of Oberland. No one’ll come here next year.”
Though still immersed in her theme Mrs. Harcourt was aware, when next she glanced to punctuate a statement, if not exactly that instead of the object she offered it was herself and her glance that was being seen—the curious steeliness of its indignation—at least of divided attention, a sudden breach in their collaboration; and immediately she came to the surface, passing without pause to her full bell note, with an enquiry. Hoping to please. But why hoping to please?
This abrupt stowing away of her chosen material might be a simple following of the rules of her world; it suggested also the humouring of a patient by a watchful nurse, and since she had the advantage of not being in the depths of fatigue this perhaps was its explanation; but much more clearly it spoke her years of marriage, of dealing with masculine selfishness. And she was so swift, so repentant of her long, enjoyable excursion, that it was clear she had suffered masculine selfishness gladly. Neither understanding nor condemning. It had not damaged her love and she had suffered bitterly when it was removed.
Suffering was pleading now in her eyes off their guard in this to-and-fro of remarks that was a little shocking: the reverberation of a disaster.
Now that it was clear that her charming behaviour from the first might be explained by the attraction there was for her in a mannish mental hardness, that she sought in its callousness both something it could never give, as well as entertainment, and rest from perpetual feeling, she ceased to be interesting. She herself made it so clear that she had nothing to give. Offering her best help, what in the way of her world would be most useful to one newly arrived, she was yet suppliant; and afraid of failure, haunted by the fear of a failure she did not understand and that was perhaps uniform in her experience.
Miriam found her own voice growing heavy with the embarrassment of her discoveries and her longing to break this so eagerly woven entanglement. Trying again for cooling generalities she had the sense of pouring words into a void. The gentle presence hovered there, played its part, followed, answered, but without sharing the effort to swim into the refreshing tide of impersonality; without seeing the independent light on the scraps of reality she was being offered. No wonder perhaps: they were a little breathless. She was scenting apology and retreat. And did not know that it was retreat not at all from herself, but from her terrible alacrity and transparence: the way the whole of her was at once visible. All her thoughts, her way of thinking in words, in set phrases gathered from too enclosed an experience. Enclosed. To be with her was enclosure. The earlier feeling of being encompassed that was so welcome because it was so womanly, so exactly what a man needs in its character of kindly confessor and giver of absolution in advance, had lost value before the discovery of this absence of vistas, this frightful sense of being shut in with assumptions about life that admit of no question and no modification.
Again the dead husband intruded; his years of life at this woman’s side, his first adoration of her, and then his weariness, fury of weariness whose beginnings she felt herself already tasting, so
