Along the empty stretch towards the valley the blazing sun blotted out the distance so that it was pleasant to turn the next corner and be going again towards the expanse that ended at the white high-hung collar. The fresh stretch of gently sloping road was longer than the one above it and walking freely here she found that her gait had changed, that she was planking along in a lounging stride which brought ease to her bandaged legs and made more manageable her inflexible feet. With a little practice, walking could be a joy. Walking in this scene, through this air, was an occupation in itself. And she was being assailed by the pangs of a piercing hunger. Obtrusive; insistent as the hunger of childhood.
It would take a little longer to go back. It would be wise to turn now. At the corner ending this stretch. Suddenly it seemed immensely important to discover what there was round the corner. From the angle of the turning she could see the little bridge far away to the right, in profile, with pines stretching along the bank of what it spanned, that showed a little further on as a thin straight line steeply descending to join the serpentine that cut the white floor of the valley. Away to the right of the bridge straggling leafless trees stood in a curve. Behind them something moved; coming and going across the gaps between their trunks. Skaters.
Then for the girl and boy that reckless rush was just a transit; a means of getting to the rink, as one might take a bus to a tennis-court.
A voice greeted her from behind, surprising in its level familiarity until the finished phrase revealed the American, to whom, turning to find him standing before her, his toboggan drawn to heel by its rope, she gave the smile, not for him, the lover’s smile reviewing, as they passed her in inverse rotation while she made the long unwelcome journey into his world of an American in Europe, her morning’s gatherings.
But he had received it, was telling her that already she looked splendid, adding that when folks first came up they looked, seen beside those already there, just gass’ly. And for a moment the miscarriage was painful: to have appeared to drop even below his own level of undiscriminating hail-fellow-well-met. And for a fraction of a second as he stood before her in his correct garb she transformed him into an Englishman condemning her foolish grin—but there was his queer little American smile, that came to her from a whole continent and seemed to demand a larger face and form, a little smile dryly sweet, as misdirected as her own and during which they seemed to pour out in unison their independent appreciations and to recognise and greet in each other, in relation to the English world out here, fellow voyagers in a strange element.
It healed her self-given stripes that were, she reflected as they went on together up the hill, needless, since to him, as an American, her greeting would seem neither naive nor bourgeois. For all Americans are either undisturbedly naive and bourgeois or in a state of merely having learned, via Europe, to be neither. And this man, now launched in speech revealed himself by the way he had of handling his statements, as so far very much what he had always been.
Strange that it was always queer people, floating mysterious and intangible in an alien element who gathered up, not wanting them, testimonies that came from her of themselves.
All the way back to the Alpenstock he pursued his monologue, information, and in an unbroken flow that by reason of its temperature, its innocence of either personal interest or benevolent intention, left her free to wander. There was in his narrow, unresonant voice only one shape of tone: a discouraged, argumentative rise and fall, very slight, almost on two adjacent notes, colourless; as of one speaking almost unawares at the bidding of an endless uniform perception. She heard it now as statement, now merely as sound and for a moment as the voice of a friend while after informing her that he had done the valley run and climb each morning and taken today a last turn to add yet one more layer to his week’s sunburn, he remarked that the long zigzag was commonly deserted in the forenoon, folks mostly taking the other track, either to the rink, or further to the made run, or way beyond that to the skiing slopes.
When she was clear of the shop and crossing the road with the toboggan slithering meekly behind, the invisible distant slopes seemed lonely and her plan for getting immediately away to them postponed itself in favour of enjoying for a while the thrilled equilibrium with everything about her that was the gift of the slight pull on the cord she was trying to hold with an air of preoccupied negligence. Turning leisurely back from the short length of street ahead that too soon would show the open country, she came once more into the heart of the village and paid an unnecessary visit to the post-office, heard the toboggan pull up against the kerb and knew as she turned to abandon the cord that she had tasted the utmost of this new joy, and that when once more the cord was in her hands she must go forth and venture.
Out on the road beyond the village the pleasant even slithering alternated with little silent weightless runs, that at first made her glance back to see if the toboggan were still there. These little runs, increasing as the road began to slope came like reminders of its character, assertions of its small willingness for its task, enhancing its charm, calling her to turn and survey as she went its entrancing behaviour of a little toboggan.
But presently, and as if grown weary of gentle hints and
