Filled with morning light it seemed larger, a little important and quite self-sufficient, giving out its secret strangeness of a Swiss room, old; preexisting English visitors, proof, with its way of being, set long ago and unaltered, against their travelled hilarity. The little parlour piano, precious in chosen wood highly polished, with faded yellow keys and faded silk behind its trellis, was full of old music, seemed to brood over the carollings of an ancient simplicity unknown to the modern piano whose brilliant black and white makes it sound in a room all the time, a ringing accompaniment to the life of today.
But into this averted solitude there came to her again the sense of time pouring from an inexhaustible source: gentle, marvellous, unutterably kind. It came in through the window whose screened light, filling the small room and halting meditatively there, seemed to wait for song.
Drawing back the flimsy curtain from the window, she found it a door giving on a covered balcony through whose panes she saw wan sunless snowfields and beyond them slopes, patched with black pinewoods and rising in the distance to a high ridge, a smooth bulging thickness of snow against deep blue sky. The dense pinewoods thinned and as they climbed into small straggling groups with here and there a single file of trees, small and sharp-pointed, marching towards the top of the ridge.
Beautiful this sharp etching far-off of keen black pines upon the sunless snow and strange the clear deep blue of the sky. But mournful; remote and self-sufficient. Switzerland averted and a little discouraging.
The balcony extended right and left and a glimpse away to the left of mats hanging out into the open and a maid pouncing forth upon them with a beater sent her to the right, where the distance was obscured by a building standing at right angles to the house, a battered barn-like place, unbalconied, but pierced symmetrically by little windows; châlet, warm rich brown, darkened above by its sheltering, steeply jutting roof … beautiful. Its kindliness extended all about it, lending a warmth even to the far-off desolate slopes.
A door at her side revealed the dining-room lengthwise and deserted, and then she was round the angle of the house and free of its secret: its face towards the valley that was now a vast splendour of sunlight.
Every day, through these windows that framed the view in strips this light would be visible in all its changings. Standing at the one that glazed the great mountain whose gold had wakened her she discovered that the balcony was a verandah, had in front of it a railed-in space set with chairs and tables. In a moment she was out in the open light, upon a shelf, within the landscape that seemed now to be the whole delight of Switzerland outspread before her eyes.
Far away below, cleft along its centre by the irregular black line of its frozen river was the wide white floor of the valley, measuring the mountains that rose upon its hither side.
Those high, high summits, beetling variously up into the top of the sky, with bright patches of tawny rock breaking through their smooth whiteness against its darkest blue, knew nothing of the world below where their mountains went downward in a great whiteness of broadening irregular slopes that presently bore pines in single file upwards advancing from the dense clumps upon the lower ridges, and met in an extended mass along the edge of the valley floor.
Here and there, clear of the pinewoods, and looking perilously high and desolate, a single châlet made a triangular warm brown blot upon the dazzling snow.
In this crystal stillness the smallest sound went easily up to the high peaks; to the high pure blue.
Turning to bless the well-placed little hotel she met a frontage of blank windows, each with its sharply jutting balcony, jaws, dropped beneath the blind stare of the windows set forever upon a single scene. Hotel; queer uncherished thing. No one to share its life and make it live.
On a near table was a folded newspaper, thin, heavily printed, continental. Switzerland radiant all about her and the Swiss world within her hands—a reprieve from further seeing and a tour, into the daily life of this country whose living went on within a setting that made even the advertisements look lyrical.
The simple text was enthralling. For years she had not so delighted in any reading. In the mere fact of the written word, in the building of the sentences, the movement of phrases linking part with part. It was all quite undistinguished, a little crude and hard; demanding, seeming to assume a sunny hardness in mankind. And there was something missing whose absence was a relief, like the absence of heaviness in the air. Everything she had read stood clear in her mind that yet, insufficiently occupied with the narrative and its strange emanations, caught up single words and phrases and went off independently touring, climbing to fresh arrangements and interpretations of familiar thought.
And this miracle of renewal was the work of a single night.
The need for expression grew burdensome in the presence of the empty sun-blistered tables. Perhaps these lively clarities would survive a return journey through the hotel?
Voices sounded up from below, from the invisible roadway. English laughter, of people actively diverting themselves in the winter landscape. Far away within each one was the uncommunicating English spirit, heedless, but not always unaware, filling its day with habitual, lively-seeming activities. The laughter sounded insincere; as if defying a gloom it refused to face.
They passed out of hearing and the vast stillness, restored, made her look forth: at a scene grown familiar, driving her off to fresh seeking while it went its way towards the day when she would see it for the last time, giving her even now as she surveyed its irrevocably known beauty, a foretaste of the nostalgia that must rend her
