But that time was infinitely far away beyond the days during which she was to live perpetually with this scene that clamoured now to be communicated in its first freshness.
The writing at top-speed of half-a-dozen letters left arrival and beginning in the past, the great doorway of the enchantments she had tried to describe safely closed behind her, and herself going forward within them. With letters to post she must now go forth, secretly, as it were behind her own back, into Oberland; into the scene that had seemed full experience and was but its overture.
The letters were disappointing. Only in one of them had she escaped expressing yesterday’s excited achievements and set down instead the living joy of today. And this for the one to whom such joy was incredible. But all were warm with affection newly felt. The long distance not only made people very dear—in a surprising way it rearranged them. Foremost amongst the men was Densley of the warm heart and wooden head wildly hailed. His letter, the last and shortest, wrote itself in one sentence, descriptive, laughing, affectionate. How it would surprise him. …
Life, she told herself as she crossed the hall trying to drown the kitchen sounds by recalling what had flashed across her mind as she wrote to Densley, is eternal because joy is. “Future life” is a contradiction in terms. The deadly trap of the adjective. Pourquoi dater? Even science insists on indestructibility—yet marks for destruction the very thing that enables it to recognise indestructibility. But it had come nearer and clearer than that.
Fawn-coloured woolly puppies, romping in the thick snow at the side of the steps as though it were grass, huge, as big as lion cubs, with large snub faces, and dense short bushy coats trying to curl, evenly all over their tubby tumbling bodies … St. Bernards, at home in their snow. They flung themselves at her hands, mumbling her gloves, rolling over with the smallest shove, weak and big and beautiful and with absurd miniature barkings.
The hotel was at the higher end of the village and from its steps she could see down the narrow street to where the little church and its white cloaked sugar-loaf spire obscured the view and away to the right set clear of the village and each on the crest of a gentle slope, the hotels, four, five, big buildings, not unbeautiful with their peaked roofs and balconies and the brilliance of green shutters on their white faces. And even the largest, Mrs. Harcourt’s “hidjus big place” recognisable by its difference, a huge square plaster box, patterned with rows and rows of uniform windows above which on its flat roof a high pole flaunted a flag limp in the motionless air, looked small and harmless, a dolls’ house dumped casually, lost in the waste of snow.
If these hotels were full, there were in the village more visitors than natives. But where were they? The vast landscape was empty. From its thickly mantled fields came the smell of snow.
Lost when she went down the street in a maze of fugitive scents within one pervading, and that seemed to compose the very air: the sweet deep smell of burning pinewood. Moving within it as the crowded little shop windows went by on either hand were the smells of dried apples and straw and a curious blending of faint odours that revealed themselves—when presently summoning an excuse for the excitement of shopping, at the cost of but a few of the multitude of small coins representing an English sovereign, she gained the inside of the third general store between the hotel and the church—as the familiar smell of mixed groceries; with a difference: clean smells, baked dry. No prevailing odour of moist bacon and mouldering cheese; of spilt paraffin and musty sacking, and things left undisturbed in corners. No dinginess. And though shelves and counter were crowded, every single thing gleamed and displayed itself with an air.
But there were no Swiss biscuits. Only a double row of the familiar square tins from Reading, triumphantly displayed by the gaunt sallow-faced woman whose ringing voice was as disconcertingly at variance with her appearance as was her charmed manner with the eager cunning that sat in her eyes. She asked for soap and the woman set wide the door of an upright glass case in which were invitingly set forth little packets bearing names that in England were household words.
She glanced back at the biscuits. Petit-Beurre were after all foreign and brought with them always the sight of Dinant and its rock coming into view, ending the squabble about the pronunciation of grenouille, as the Meuse steamer rounded the last bend. But catching sight above the biscuits of a box of English nightlights she chose a piece of soap at random and fought while she responded to the voluble chantings accompanying the packing of her parcel, with the nightmare vision of bedrooms never bathed in darkness, of people never getting away into the night, people insisting, even in rooms where brilliance can be switched on at will, on the perpetual presence of the teasing little glimmer; people who travel in groups and bring with them so much of their home surroundings that they destroy daily, piecemeal, the sense of being abroad.
Regaining the street in possession of a replica of the tablet she had unpacked last night, she found that the busy midst of the village lay just ahead where the way widened to encircle the little church. Many shops, some of them new-built, with roomy windows, and the lifeless impersonal appearance of successful provincial stores. There were more people here, more women in those heavy black dresses and head-shawls, more bloused and bearded men, crossing the snowy road with swift slouching stride. A post-office, offering universal hospitality.
As if from the bright intense sunlight all about her, a ray of thought had fallen upon the mystery of her passion for
