the glaciers made me feel my body and quickened all those
disregarded dreams. I saw the sheathed beauty of women's forms all
about me, in the cheerful waitresses at the inns, in the pedestrians
one encountered in the tracks, in the chance fellow travellers at
the hotel tables. "Confound it!" said I, and talked all the more
zealously of that greater England that was calling us.
I remember that we passed two Germans, an old man and a tall fair
girl, father and daughter, who were walking down from Saas. She
came swinging and shining towards us, easy and strong. I worshipped
her as she approached.
"Gut Tag!" said Willersley, removing his hat.
"Morgen!" said the old man, saluting.
I stared stockishly at the girl, who passed with an indifferent
face.
That sticks in my mind as a picture remains in a room, it has kept
there bright and fresh as a thing seen yesterday, for twenty
years…
I flirted hesitatingly once or twice with comely serving girls, and
was a little ashamed lest Willersley should detect the keen interest
I took in them, and then as we came over the pass from Santa Maria
Maggiore to Cannobio, my secret preoccupation took me by surprise
and flooded me and broke down my pretences.
The women in that valley are very beautiful-women vary from valley
to valley in the Alps and are plain and squat here and divinities
five miles away-and as we came down we passed a group of five or
six of them resting by the wayside. Their burthens were beside
them, and one like Ceres held a reaping hook in her brown hand. She
watched us approaching and smiled faintly, her eyes at mine.
There was some greeting, and two of them laughed together.
We passed.
"Glorious girls they were," said Willersley, and suddenly an immense
sense of boredom enveloped me. I sawmyself striding on down that
winding road, talking of politics and parties and bills of
parliament and all sorts of dessicated things. That road seemed to
me to wind on for ever down to dust and infinite dreariness. I knew
it for a way of death. Reality was behind us.
Willersley set himself to draw a sociological moral. "I'm not so
sure," he said in a voice of intense discriminations, "after all,
that agricultural work isn't good for women."
"Damn agricultural work!" I said, and broke out into a vigorous
cursing of all I held dear. "Fettered things we are!" I cried. "I
wonder why I stand it!"
"Stand what?"
"Why don't I go back and make love to those girls and let the world
and you and everything go hang? Deep breasts and rounded limbs-and
we poor emasculated devils go tramping by with the blood of youth in
us!…"
"I'm not quite sure, Remington," said Willersley, looking at me with
a deliberately quaint expression over his glasses, "that picturesque
scenery is altogether good for your morals."
That fever was still in my blood when we came to Locarno.
13
Along the hot and dusty lower road between the Orrido of Traffiume
and Cannobio Willersley had developed his first blister. And partly
because of that and partly because there was a bag at the station
that gave us the refreshment of clean linen and partly because of
the lazy lower air into which we had come, we decided upon three or
four days' sojourn in the Empress Hotel.
We dined that night at a table-d'hote, and I found myself next to an
Englishwoman who began a conversation that was resumed presently in
the hotel lounge. She was a woman of perhaps thirty-three or
thirty-four, slenderly built, with a warm reddish skin and very
abundant fair golden hair, the wife of a petulant-looking heavy-
faced man of perhaps fifty-three, who smoked a cigar and dozed over
his coffee and presently went to bed. "He always goes to bed like
that," she confided startlingly. "He sleeps after all his meals. I
never knew such a man to sleep."
Then she returned to our talk, whatever it was.
We had begun at the dinner table with itineraries and the usual
topographical talk, and she had envied our pedestrian travel. "My
husband doesn't walk," she said. "His heart is weak and he cannot
manage the hills."
There was something friendly and adventurous in her manner; she
conveyed she liked me, and when presently Willersley drifted off to
write letters our talk sank at once to easy confidential undertones.
I felt enterprising, and indeed it is easy to be daring with people
one has never seen before and may never see again. I said I loved
beautiful scenery and all beautiful things, and the pointing note in
my voice made her laugh. She told me I had bold eyes, and so far as
I can remember I said she made them bold. "Blue they are," she
remarked, smiling archly. "I like blue eyes." Then I think we
compared ages, and she said she was the Woman of Thirty, "George
Moore's Woman of Thirty."
I had not read George Moore at the time, but I pretended to
That, I think, was our limit that evening. She went to bed, smiling
good-night quite prettily down the big staircase, and I and
Willersley went out to smoke in the garden. My head was full of
her, and I found it necessary to talk about her. So I made her a