“Je suis anglaise,” she murmured as the window came down into place.
“Je le crois, madame. Mais comment-voulez-vous-mon-dieu-vous-autres-anglais-qu’on-chauffe-les-coupés?”
She was left to pictures framed and glazed.
Berne was a snowstorm blotting out everything but small white green-shuttered houses standing at angles about the open space between the station and the little restaurant across the way, their strangeness veiled by falling flakes, flakes falling fast on freshly fallen snow that was pitted with large deep-sunken footprints. The electric air of dawn had softened, and as she plunged, following the strides of a row of footprints, across to her refuge, it wrapped her about, a pleasant enlivening density, warmed by the snow. Monstrous snowstorm, adventure, and an excuse for shirking the walk to the Bridge and its view of the Bernese heights. She was not ready for heights. This little secret tour, restricted to getting from train to breakfast and back again to the train, gave her, with its charm of familiar activity in a strange place, a sharp first sense of Switzerland that in obediently following the dictated programme she would have missed. But coming forth, strengthened, once more into the snow she regretted the low walking-shoes that prevented the following up of her glad meeting with the forgotten details of the continental breakfast, its tender-crusted rolls, the small oblongs of unglistening sugar that sweetened the life-giving coffee, by an exploration of the nearer streets.
Presently their talk fell away and the journeying cast again its full spell. Almost soundlessly the train was labouring along beside a ridge that seemed to be the silent top of the world gliding by, its narrow strip of grey snow-thick sky pierced by the tops of the crooked stakes that were a fence submerged. From time to time the faint clear sound of a bell, ting-ting, and a neat toy station slid by half buried in snow.
“I don’t dislike those kind of breakfasts myself,” she said and turned her face to the window. Her well-cut lips had closed unpressing, flowerlike. Both the girls had the slender delicate fragility of flowers. And strength. Refined and gentle, above a strength of which they were unaware. They were immensely strong or they would not appear undisturbed by their long journeying, would not look so exactly as if they were returning home in an omnibus from an afternoon’s shopping in their own Croydon.
They had come so far together that it would seem churlish, with the little terminus welcoming the whole party, to turn away from them. And she liked them, was attached to them as fellow adventurers, fellow survivors of the journey. The falling into the trap of travellers’ freemasonry was inevitable: a fatal desire to know the whence and the whither, and, before you are aware of it you have pooled your enterprise and the new reality is at a distance. But so far it had not come to that. There were no adieux. They had melted away, they and their things, lost in the open while she, forgetful of everything but the blessed cessation, had got herself out of the train.
The station was in a wilderness. High surrounding mountains making it seem that their half-day’s going up and still up had brought them out upon a modest lowland. There was no sign from where she stood of any upward track. Sheds, dumped upon a waste of snow beyond which mountains filled the sky and barred the way.
Fierce-looking men in blue gaberdines and slouch hats, lounging about. One of these must be attacked and bargained with for a sleigh. But there were no sleighs to be seen, nothing at all resembling a vehicle, unless indeed one braved the heights in one of those rough shallow frameworks on runners, some piled with hay and some with peeled yellow timbers, neatly lashed. Perhaps a sleigh should be ordered in advance? Perhaps here she met disaster. …
The man knew her requirements before she spoke and was all hot-eyed eagerness, yet offhand. Brutish, yet making her phrases, that a London cabby would have received with deference, sound discourteous. In his queer German he agreed to the smaller sum and turned away to expectorate.
The large barn-like restaurant was empty save for a group of people at the far end, forgotten again and again as she sat too happy to swoop the immense distance between herself and anything but the warm brownness of the interior and its strange quality, its intensity of welcoming shelter—sharp contrast with the bleak surrounding snow. Switzerland was here, already surrounding and protecting with an easy practised hand. And there was a generous savouriness. … She could not recall any lunching on an English journey affording this careless completeness of comfort.
Incompletely sharing these appreciations her tired and fevered body cowered within the folds of the beneficent fur-coat seeking a somnolence that refused to possess it. Fever kept her mind alert, but circling at a great pace round and round amidst reiterated assertions. Turn and turn about they presented themselves, were flung aside in favour of what waited beyond, and again thrust themselves forward, as if determined, so emphatic they were, not only to share but to steer her adventure. And away behind them, standing still and now forever accessible, were the worlds she had passed through since the sleet drove in her face at Newhaven. And ahead unknown Oberland, summoning her up amongst its peaks.
And hovering vehement above them all hung the cloud of her pity for those who had never bathed in strangeness—and its dark lining, the selfish congratulation that reminded her how at the beginning of her life, in the face of obstructions, she had so bathed and now under kindly compulsion was again bathing. And again alone. Loneliness, that had long gone from her life, had come back for this sudden voyaging to be
