“Hates them?”
“Would like to make a big bonfire and burn’m all up.”
Miriam was silent, searching the green eyes for Daphne.
“Yes, that’s Daphne. She’s mad about Napoleon. Reads all the books. Has’m in her room. I have to expound when she gets stuck. Won’t say her prayers till we’ve read a bit of Bony. Won’t say ‘make me a good girl.’ Says ‘make me a man and a sojer.’ She and Eaden are as thick as thieves. He’s an angel to her. I’ve got to be hoff. Goin’ to the Curse-all for lunch. Maud’s there. She’s goin’ south tomorrow with the Chisholmes.”
“Before the Fest?”
“Chisholmes have got to pick up their kid somewhere. Maud’s had enough of Switzerland for this year.”
VII
The clouds were a rebuke; for being spellbound into imagining this bright paradise inaccessible. The world’s weather cannot be arranged as a conversation with one small person. Then how did the rebuke manage to arrive punctually at the serenest moment of self-congratulation? As if someone were watching …
She looked levelly across the sunny landscape and the clouds were out of sight. But there was a movement in the air, a breeze softly at work ousting the motionless Oberland air.
She walked ahead, further and further into the disconcerting change. Everything was changed, the whole scene, reduced to homeliness. She caught herself drooping, took counsel and stiffened into acquiescence: “I might have known. I’m accustomed to this. It removes only what I thought I couldn’t give up. Something is left behind that can’t be taken away”—and heard at once within the high stillness the familiar sound of life, felt the sense of it flowing warmly in along the old channels, and heard from the past in various tones, amused, impatient, contemptuous: “You are philosophical.” Always a surprise. What did they mean with their “philosophical”? The alternative was their way of going on cursing, missing everything but the unfavourable surface.
Someone has said that there is nothing meaner than making the best of things.
The clouds made soft patches of shadow upon the higher snow. Beside the angular sharp shadows growing upon the northern slopes they were blemishes, smudgy and vague. But free, able to move and flow while the mountains stood crumbling in their places.
The clouds were beautiful, slowly drifting, leaving torn shreds upon the higher peaks.
Upon the ridge beyond the cloaked silence of the little wood the breeze blew steadily from across the levels—that were strangely empty; no sign of moving specks making for the further ridge. Hurrying along the track she recalled too late the slightness of the information upon which she had built her idea of the golden scene; the gay throng, herself happily in the midst.
Without a single clear idea of the direction she had trusted to the bright magic to draw her to itself.
The subtly changed air and the melancholy clouds restated themselves, became the prelude to disaster. The increasing wind and the cloud-bank hiding the distant mountains were proclaiming the certainty of punishment well-deserved: to wander at a loss and miss the Fest.
She glanced at her afternoon in retrospect: aimless walking in a world fallen into greyness and gloom, into familiarity that was already opening the door to the old friend, at whose heart lived a radiance outdoing the beams shed by anticipation over unknown things.
But all the time the skiing which now she was not to see would be going forward, mocking her until she could forget it; until the hours it filled should have passed into others bright enough to melt regret.
Climbing the rise beyond the levels she was at once climbing up to find the Fest, would plod the landscape until she found it, late, but still in time to share and remember. She reached the crest beyond the rise—there it was: a small shape, like an elongated horseshoe, upon a distant slope. Black dots close-clustered in a strange little shape upon the wastes of snow, defying the wastes of snow.
There was plenty of space. Gaps on each side of the track and even towards the top of the rise where people were grouped more closely about the comforting, the only festal sign, looking like an altar with its gold-embroidered, red velvet frontal. Nothing could be seen behind its shelf but a small hut upon the levels that extended backwards until the pinewoods began with the rising mountainside.
Where to stand? Up amongst the connoisseurs to see the start, halfway down with a view of the skiers coming, or at the bottom of the row amongst the black-clothed natives standing about in scattered groups in the loose snow.
Choosing a place halfway down she became one of the gathered crowd of Oberland visitors lining the smoothed and steeply sloping course. They were all there. The black and distant dots had become people in every fashion of sport’s-clothes, standing on skis, sitting on toboggans, stamping about in the snow, walking up and down; and all waiting, all looking betweenwhiles expectantly up the track towards the deserted altar. There was a good deal of talking. Here and there the incessant voices of men who make a hobby of talking. But most of them talked intermittently, in the way of these leisured English who veil their eagerness as they wait half apologetically and wholly self-consciously for a show. There patiently they would wait, good-humoured, not deigning to be disturbed, not suffering anything to disturb their pose of amused independence that looked so like indifference and masked a warmth.
Just across the way was a stout lady in a sealskin coat and curiously different snow-boots. She sat sturdily bunched on her toboggan and they stuck out in front of her, close-fitting, the rubber soles curving sharply to the instep and neatly down again into the shape of a heel. She clasped a camera and her sallow heavy face was drawn into a frown that remained there while she turned towards a voice sounding from over the way:
“… and we’ll just be here till
