Turning away she caught sight of an old woman amazingly wrapped up, peering at her from inside a little booth set down in the snow on the other side of the way. A shelf laden with small things in carved wood protruded in front. She crossed to look at them. Silently with slow fumbling movements the old woman displayed her wares. Bears. Bears on ski, on toboggans, bears in every kind of unbearlike attitude. Intricate model châlets, useless and suggesting, imagined in England, nothing but the accumulation of dust. But there was an owl, with owlish dignity, very simply and beautifully carved. Her eyes returned to it and the old woman put forth an aged freckled hand and grasped its head, which went easily back upon a hinge and left revealed a clean white china inkwell.
“Kipsake,” said the old woman huskily.
“Danke schön. Ich komme wieder,” smiled Miriam escaping, followed by hoarse cacklings of praise.
Out upon the roadway fenced between dazzling snowfields, the end of the valley came into sight, new, but faintly reproachful, having waited too long, and complaining now about the lateness of the hour. Certainly it was worthy of a whole self, undistracted. But there was tomorrow, many tomorrows. She had done with the street and the shops save as a corridor, growing each day more dear, to daily fulfilment of the promise of this prospect whose beauty she was clearly recognising. And more than its beauty. Its great, great power of assertion, veiled for the moment by distractions, but there. Wonderfully beautiful was the speech and movement of the far-off smooth pure ridge of snow, rising high against the deepest blue of the sky, linking twin peaks.
Some of the near slopes were dotted with people, tiny figurines mitigating the snowfields and the towering mountains: the sounds of English voices ringing out infinitesimal in the wide space, yet filling it. Shutting out the scene, yet intensifying it; bringing gratitude for their presence.
That remained even after the quaint peaked hoods of brilliant white or mauve, the effective skirts and jerseys of a group of women passing in the roadway had rebuked with their colours, clean and sharp against the snow, her tweed that in London had seemed a good choice, and her London felt hat.
But though the clever clothes of these people brought a sense of exile they were powerless to rouse envy or any desire. Envy was impossible in this air that seemed, so sharp was every outline, to be no longer earth’s atmosphere but open space, electric.
Perhaps even this morning there was time to get clear, to be if only for a few moments, along some side track alone with the landscape, walking lightly clad in midsummer sun through this intensity of winter.
The road was dropping and growing harder. No longer crunching under her feet, the snow beaten flat showed here and there dark streaks of ice, and her puttee-bandaged legs, flexible only at the knees, felt like sticks above her feet lost and helpless in the thick boots that seemed to walk of themselves.
The dropping road took a sharp turn towards the valley, showing ahead a short empty stretch and another sharp turn, revealing it as the winding trail up which she had come last night. On the right it was joined by a long track running steeply down into a wilderness of snow in the midst of whose far distances appeared high up a little bridge half hidden amongst pines. The track was dotted with pygmy forms.
“Ash-tongue!” A fierce hoarse voice just behind, and joining it another, clear and ringing: “Ach-tooooong.”
Plunging into the roadside drift she turned in time to see a toboggan bearing upon it a boy prone, face foremost eagerly out-thrust, shoot down the slanting road, take the bend at an angle that just cleared the fence and dart at a terrific pace down the slope towards the wilderness; followed by the girl with the ringing voice, lightly seated, her toboggan throwing her up as it bumped skimming from ridge to ridge down the uneven road. She took the bend smoothly with space to spare and flew on down the slope with lifted chin and streaming hair. Both mad. Children of the reckless English who had discovered the Swiss winter.
This terrific scooting was not the tobogganing of which she had heard in London. Two more figures were coming, giving her excuse to wait lest they were coming her way and watch their passing from the drift that was like warm wool, knee-deep. They were women, coming slowly, paddling themselves along with little sticks. They took the bend with ironic caution and went on down the slope, still furiously stabbing the snow with their little sticks, their high, peaked cowls making them look like seated gnomes.
Aware of intense cold invading her feet, she plunged out into the road and was beating her snow-caked puttees when an intermittent grinding sound approaching brought her upright: an aged couple side by side, white-haired and immensely muffled, sitting very grave and stern behind the legs protruding stiffly on either side the heads of their toboggans and set from moment to moment heels downwards upon the road to check a possible increase of their slow triumphant pace. Triumph. Behind the sternness that defied the onlooker to find their pose lacking in dignity was triumph. Young joy; for these who might well be patrolling in bath-chairs the streets of a cathedral town.
And they left the joyous message: that this sport, since pace could so easily be controlled, might be tested at once, alone, without instruction, this very afternoon. A subtle change came over the landscape, making it less and more; retiring a little as who should say: then I am to be henceforth a
