The Croydon party disappeared round a bend and again there was silence and a mighty inattention. But her man, come round from lashing on her luggage, was getting into his seat just as he was, coatless and gathering up the reins with bare hands.
“Euh!”
The small sound, like a word spoken sotto voce to a neighbour, barely broke the stillness, but the sleigh leapt to the pull of the horse, and glided smoothly off. Its movement was pure enchantment. No driving on earth could compare to this skimming along on hard snow to the note of the bells that was higher than that of those gone on ahead and seemed to challenge them with an overtaking eagerness. Gay and silvery sweet, it seemed to make a sunlight within the sunless air and to call up to the crinkled tops of the mountains that were now so magnificently in movement.
“Euh-euh!”
On they swept through the solidly impinging air. Again the million needles attacking. In a moment they were round the bend and in sight of the large sleigh, a moving patch upon the rising road.
“Euh-euh-euh,” urged the driver laconically, and the little sleigh flew rocking up the slight incline. They were overtaking. The heavier note of the bells ahead joined its slower rhythm to their swift light jinglings. The dark mass of the Croydon party showed four white faces turned to watch.
“You are well off with your fur-coat,” cried the father as her sleigh skimmed by. They had looked a little crouched and enduring. Not knowing the cold she had endured in the past, cold that lay ahead to be endured again, in winters set in a row.
Ringing in her head as she sped upwards along the road narrowing and flanked by massive slopes whose summits had drawn too near to be seen, were the shouted remarks exchanged by the drivers. They had fallen resonantly upon the air and opened within it a vision of the sunlit heights known to these men with the rich deep voices. But there was the hotel. …
After all no one was to witness her apprenticeship. And to get up within sight of the summits was worth much suffering. Suffering that would be forgotten. And if these were Oberland men, then there was to be ski-running tomorrow. Si-renna, what else could that mean? Patois, rich and soft. Doomed to die. Other words gathered unawares on the way came and placed themselves beside those ringing in her ears. Terminations, turns of sound, upon a new quality of voice. Strong and deep and ringing with a wisdom that brought her a sense of helpless ignorance. The helpless ignorance of town culture.
The thin penetrating mist promised increasing cold. The driver flung on a cloak, secured at the neck but falling open across his chest and leaving exposed his thinly clad arms and bare hands.
She pulled high the collar of her fur-coat, rimy now at its edges, and her chin ceased to ache and only her eyes and cheekbones felt the thin icy attacking mist that had appeared so suddenly. The cold of a few moments ago numbing her face had brought a hint of how one might freeze quietly to death, numbed and as if warmed by an intensity of cold; and that out amongst the mountains it would not be terrible. But this raw mist bringing pain in every bone it touched would send one aching to one’s death, crushed to death by a biting increasing pain.
She felt elaborately warm, not caring even now how long might go on this swift progress along a track that still wound through corridors of mountains and still found mountains rising ahead. But night would come and the great shapes all about her would be wrapped away until they were a darkness in the sky.
If this greying light were the fall of day then certainly the cold would increase. She tried to reckon how far she had travelled eastwards, by how much earlier the sun would set. But south, too, she had come. …
The mist was breaking, being broken from above. It dawned upon her that they had been passing impossibly through clouds and were now reaching their fringe. Colour was coming from above, was already here in dark brilliance, thundery. Turning to look down the track she saw distance, cloud masses, light-soaked and gleaming.
And now from just ahead high in the mist, a sunlit peak looked down.
Long after she had sat erect from her warm ensconcement, the sunlit mountain corridors still seemed to be saying watch, see, if you can believe it, what we can do. And all the time it seemed that they must open out and leave her upon the hither side of enchantment, and still they turned and brought fresh vistas. Sungilt masses beetling variously up into pinnacles that truly cut the sky high up beyond their high-clambering pinewoods, where their snow was broken by patches of tawny crag. She still longed to glide forever onwards through this gladness of light.
But the bright gold was withdrawing. Presently it stood only upon the higher ridges. The colour was going and the angular shadows, leaving a bleakness of white, leaving the mountains higher in their whiteness. The highest sloped more swiftly than the others from its lower mass and ended in a long cone of purest white with a flattened top sharply aslant against the deepening blue; as if walking up it. It held her eyes, its solid thickness of snow, the way from its blunted tower it came broadening down unbroken by crag, radiant white until far down its pinewoods made a gentleness about its base. Up there on the quiet of its topmost angle it seemed there must be someone, minutely rejoicing in its line along the sky.
A turn brought peaks whose gold had turned to rose. She had
