She leapt to her feet with a cry, too appalled to care for the surprise of her neighbours. By the time she reached the pavement, the assault was over. Horse and peasant had turned the corner and were away down the road. She knew, if she pursued them, her Rumanian was not good enough to make her protest effective. Anyway, it would be ignored.
She gave up all thought of cakes or coffee and hurried back to the public garden. When she reached Guy, she could scarcely speak. Surprised by her agitation he said: ‘Whatever is the matter?’
She sat down, exhausted, and gulped back her tears. Seeing the peasant vividly, his brutish face absorbed and horribly gratified by the outlet for his violence, she said: ‘I can’t bear this place. The peasants are loathsome. I hate them.’ She spoke in a convulsion of feeling, trembling as she said: ‘All over this country animals are suffering – and we can do nothing about it.’ Feeling the world too much for her, she pressed her face against Guy’s shoulder.
He put his arm round her to calm her. ‘The peasants are brutes because they are treated like brutes. They suffer themselves. Their behaviour comes of desperation.’
‘It’s no excuse.’
‘Perhaps not, but it’s an explanation. One must try to understand.’
‘Why should one try to understand cruelty and stupidity?’
‘Because even those things can be understood: and if understood, they can be cured.’
He squeezed her hand, but she did not respond. He talked to distract her, but she remained withdrawn as though violated and unable to throw off the shock.
After a while he picked up his books again. ‘Why don’t you take a proper holiday?’ he said. ‘We’re quite well off at the present rate. Wouldn’t you like to take the boat to Athens?’
Her expression lightened a little. ‘You mean you would come with me?’
‘You know I can’t. Inchcape doesn’t want me to leave the country. And I have to prepare for the new term. But that’s no reason why you shouldn’t go.’
She shook her head. ‘When we go, we go together.’
After tea, Guy felt he had done enough for the day and was willing to take a walk. When they reached the forest, he looked in through the aisles of pines, all intent and silent as though each tree held its breath, and refused to enter. He said that within living memory it had been a haunt of bears. ‘Let’s keep to the road. It’s safer.’ The road carried them above the trees into the bare rock fields where the cold was keen. The sky was mottled with a little cloud and here and there a chill hung on the air like powdered glass. At first Harriet thought it was ash blown from a bonfire, then she found it was melting on her skin. She said with wonder: ‘It is snow.’ When they reached the first white pool of snow, she pressed her hand on it, leaving the intaglio of her palm and fingers. Much lighter and surer on her feet than Guy, excited by the rarefied air, she climbed at great speed until she was alone amid the silence of the topmost slopes. She heard Guy shout and, looking back, saw him standing a long way below, like an unhappy bear, defeated by the shifting rubble of the path. She sped down into his arms.
They returned to the hotel, which stood by a dimpled meadow that was covered with small flowers. Some cows had been driven on to the grass during their absence and Guy paused, unwilling to cross among them. He saw all the animals as potential enemies. He distrusted the Bucharest cab-horses and had even been frightened of Harriet’s red kitten. She took his hand and led him towards the nearest cow, which lifted its head to stare at them but did not cease to chew. Watching its mouth slipping loosely from side to side, Guy said: ‘These beasts are probably dangerous.’
Harriet laughed. ‘I love them,’ she said.
‘What, these frightful creatures?’
‘Not only these. All animals.’
‘How could you love something so totally different from yourself.’
‘Why not? I don’t simply love myself. I think I love them because they are different. They are innocent. They are hunted, harried, slaughtered by human beings who imagine they have a God-given right to destroy whenever it’s in their interest to destroy.’
Guy nodded. ‘You want to protect them. I can understand that. But why this extraordinary love for them? It doesn’t seem reasonable to me.’
She did not try to explain it. Guy, she knew, believed that man’s compassion for his own kind was the only true compassion to be found in this cold universe. She longed for proof of a more disinterested compassion; a supreme justice that would avenge all these tormented and helpless innocents. Trembling with her own excess of feeling, she stretched out her hand to the cow, but at the threat of her approach it moved warily backwards.
After supper, Guy lay on the bed propped with pillows and gave himself up again to his books. Harriet, drowsy from the mountain air, lay in the crook of his arm, happy in his warmth and contact. He paused in his reading to say: ‘You do not see much of Bella these days. Or Clarence either. You have made so few friends in Bucharest! Don’t you feel the need of people?’
She said: ‘Not when I have you – which isn’t often.’
‘You’ve quite enough of me. If you had more, you’d be bored.’
She glanced up at him, realised he believed this and smiled in denial, but he was not looking at her. She closed her eyes and slept.
When they came down to breakfast on Sunday and found Dobson sitting at one of the tables, Guy gave a great cry of ‘Why, hello.’ He would, Harriet knew, have been equally delighted had the newcomer been almost anyone known to them: and it might have been someone worse than Dobson who seemed charmed by the sight of them. He had driven up late the previous night ‘for a breath of air’, and would have only one day in Predeal. He suggested that after breakfast they should go for a walk together.
Harriet left it to Guy to make his excuses, but the invitation was too much for him. It was not only that he was a little flattered by it: he could not refuse the diversion of fresh company.
As they left the hotel, Dobson suggested they should visit a Russian church a couple of miles away, saying: ‘We might hear something interesting. I was enormously fortunate last time I went there. They were singing the Cantakion for the Dead.’
Dobson spoke on a note of such breathless anticipation that Guy paused only a moment before saying: ‘All right.’ At the same time he looked at Harriet as though she might save him, but she, a little piqued, said she would like nothing better.
They went behind the village, climbing steeply among small châlets and villas. The path was dusty, slippery with flints and overhung by old chestnut trees, their leaves ochred and reddened, forming parasols of colour that set the shade aglow. The ground beneath them was stained with trodden nuts and leaves. In one garden stood a giant rowan, weighted and bronzed with berries. Many of the villas were shuttered, their gardens overgrown as though they had been unvisited all summer.
The path dwindled, the houses were left behind, and they came out on to a plateau that stretched away into remote upland hills. They walked silently on the grass that was short, greyish and set with harebells and wild scabious.