It was done before she knew what she was doing, an instant after she had knocked the pan spinning out of his light grasp into mid-stream, her thin and ragged self-control bursting like tissue before the intolerable flame of her resentment. The torrent of words came afterwards: she saw his smile quietly, and lashed out in sudden fear at the good-humored white flash of his teeth, but her clenched fist met empty air.
He bent her over his knee and did exactly what he had promised to do, with an impersonal efficiency quite devoid of heat. When he released her she was sobbing with impotent rage and real stinging pain. She turned and ran blindly up the bank: if she had had a knife she would have driven it into his throat, but without it her one idea was to get away. Half unconsciously she found the path which he had pointed out as the one that ran into Austria. There must be a road somewhere further on: there would be cars, someone would give her a lift. Her eyes were hot and swimming with shame and anger.
Then she looked back and saw him following her. She glimpsed his tall figure through the trees, rucksack on back, swinging lithely along without making any effort to overtake her. She plunged on till her lungs were bursting and the agony of her stiffened joints made every step a torture, but he was always the same distance behind, unhurried and inescapable as doom. She had to rest or fall down.
“Go away! Go away!” she cried, and struggled on with her heart pounding.
The trees thinned out, and she saw telegraph poles on the other side of a field. She ran out into the road. A truck was coming towards her, headed south: she stood in the middle of the road and waved to it till it stopped.
“Take me wherever you’re going!” she babbled. “Take me to Innsbruck! I’ll pay you anything you ask!”
The driver looked down at her uncomprehendingly.
“Innsbruck?” He pointed down the road. “Dorthin. Aber es ist sehr weit zu laufen—”
She pantomimed frantically, trying to make him understand. Why couldn’t she speak German?... And then the Saint’s clear voice spoke coolly from the side of the road, in the driver’s own idiom.
“Permit me to introduce my wife. A little family argument. Please don’t bother. She’ll get over it.”
The driver’s mouth and eyes opened in an elaborate “Ach, so!” of intelligence, the bottomless sympathy of one woman-ridden male to another. He chuckled, and engaged his gears.
“Verzehen Sie, mein Herr! Ich habe auch eine Frau!” he flung backwards as he drove on.
Belinda’s strength drained out of her. She threw herself down at the side of the road and wept, with her face hidden in her arms. The Saint’s quiet voice spoke from above her head like the voice of destiny.
“It’s no good, Belinda. You can’t run away. Life has caught up with you.”
Days followed through which she moved in a kind of fog — days of physical exhaustion, dark rooms in inns, meals tastelessly yet ravenously devoured, washing of dishes and ruin of manicured hands, lumpy beds on the bare ground, scorching sun, dust, sweat, rain, and cold. Once, after a day of ceaseless drizzle, when she had to sleep in her sodden clothes on earth that squelched under the flimsy groundsheet, she was certain she must catch pneumonia and die, and felt cruelly injured when the fresh air and healthy life refused even to let her catch a cold in the nose. She had those moods of self-pity when any added affliction would have been welcome, so that she could have looked up to Heaven like Job and protested that no one had ever suffered so much.
Self-pity alternated with the hours when her mind was filled with nothing but murderous hatred of the man who was always beside her, calm and unchanging as a mountain, blithely unruffled in good weather and bad. She carried out the tasks he set her because she had no choice, but she swore she would die before he could say he had broken her spirit. At first she washed the frying-pan perfunctorily, and brought it back with scraps of earth still clinging to the stubborn traces of egg. He said nothing about it, but that night he scrambled only two eggs and gave them to her, gray and gritty with the remains of mud she had left.
“That’s your ration,” he said remorselessly. “If you don’t like it, have the pan clean next time.”
Next time she finished her scouring with the towel, and when she wanted to wash she tried to take his. He stopped her.
“Egg is grand for the complexion,” he said. “But if you object to drying your face on a dishcloth, the usual remedy applies — plus washing the towel.”
Sometimes she thought she would steal his knife while he slept and cut his throat: the impulse was there, but she knew she would have been lost without him. Even when the rain had poured all day and everything was drenched, he conjured dry wood out of empty air and had a fire going in no time; he introduced unexpected variety into their simple fare, and robbed orchards for apples with abandoned enthusiasm of a schoolboy. He was never bad-tempered or at a loss: he smoothed difficulties away without appearing to notice them. For thirty-six hours after her spanking she sulked furiously, but it made no mark on his tranquility. The tension of labored silence slipped perforce into a minimum of essential conversation — strained and hostile on her part, unfailingly natural and good-humored on his. Three days passed before she discovered that his eyes were soundlessly laughing at her.
Nothing is more difficult than for two people to be together every hour of the day and punctiliously ignore each other’s existence. Nothing, she found out miserably, can grow more irksome than keeping alive a grudge against someone who is utterly untroubled by rancor. Sometimes the loneliness of her self-imposed silence welled up on her so that she could have shrieked aloud for relief. Imperceptibly, the minimum of essential remarks seemed to increase. Every detail of their daily life became an excuse for some trivial speech which it was torment to resist. She found herself chattering for a quarter of an hour about the pros and cons of boiled and fried onions.
And then came the incredible night when she slept straight through until morning, and woke up contented. For a while the feeling baffled her, and she lay on her back and puzzled about it.
And then it dawned on her in a surprising flash. She was no longer tired! They had covered twenty miles the previous day, by the Saint’s reckoning, and yet her limbs felt supple and relaxed, and her feet were not sore. Had they chosen an exceptionally soft piece of ground on which to camp, or had her body learned to adapt itself to the unyielding couch as well as to the abrupt changes from heat to cold? She could not understand it, but the night lay behind her as an interval of unbroken rest, blissful as a child’s or a wild animal’s. The consciousness of her surroundings came to her with a sense of shock. They had rolled into their blankets high up on a wooded slope on the southern shores of the Achensee: from where she lay she could see fragments of the placid waters of the lake gleaming like splinters of pale blue grass between the trees. On her left, the woods curved up and away in a rich green rolling train to the mighty shoulders of a white-capped peak that took the morning light to its brow in glistening magnificence. When she looked directly upwards, nothing came between her gaze and the arching tent of the sky where three fluffy white clouds floated slowly eastwards with the red glow of the recent sunrise catching them like the reflection of a fire. She had never really seen a sky before, or the glory of trees and rolling hills.
Belinda drank in a picture of unimagined beauty whose very strangeness made it unforgettable. In truth it was nothing scenically startling, not in any way the kind of view to which tourist excursions are run: it was only an odd corner of the natural splendor of the world, all of which is beautiful. But it was the first corner of the world to which the eyes had ever been opened with emotion, a starting point of undreamed-of experience which must be for ever as unique as all beginnings. Dazed with it as if she had awakened on a different planet, she climbed out of her blankets at last and searched mechanically for comb and mirror. The reflection that met her eyes seemed like the portrait of a stranger. Wind and sun had tinted a delicate gold into her skin, and there was a soft flush in her cheeks that had never been there before unless she dabbed it on. Her lips were riper, her eyes clearer and brighter than she had ever thought Nature could make them. She was entranced with herself.