When Mark woke easily and lightly, as a man only wakes in a mountain air; it was as if he had fallen out of the troubled earth into an infinite serenity of blue sky. The air, the earth, the mountainside, the very straw he lay on were bathed in azure light. Close to the half-open door, Ida lay like a boy exhausted by a long day’s play, her arm under her head, her face half buried. She slept so quietly, she hardly seemed to breathe. Looking down at Ida he felt a strange pang of pity and tenderness; he wanted to find something to cover her with against the chill of the dawn, but he had nothing, and if he pulled the hay over her, the sound of its rustling might wake her. Mark moved noiselessly out of the hut. Nothing living was in sight. The hut stood on a small patch of level ground, on the upper slope of the Oetzthal. Far below, the pass wound like a twisted ribbon deep into the mountain range. The upper Inn valley shrank in the dawn light; the Engadine mountains seemed to press nearer and nearer, the massive slopes of the Silvretto Alps towered up, a wall of indigo, against the pale blue of the sky. Across the valley the Zugspitze still crowned with snow shouldered its impressive height far above the lesser peaks. The stillness of the blue dawn was so intense that 186his own footsteps startled him. Far away he caught the faint murmur and splash of a waterfall. Just beyond the hut, in a patch of melted snow, a group of soldanellas lifted their violet bells, and trembled in the dawn as if their ragged-edged cups were moved by an inward terror.
When Mark reached the stream, he plunged head and shoulders into the icy water. The shock of the melted snow, the glory and the solitude of the mountain shook him into an uncontrollable joy. What life was like this life of the high mountains, so lonely and pure, cut off from all mankind? The blueness slowly faded from the air. One by one the natural colours of the earth took its place. The outcrop of rock through which the stream chuckled and tumbled, was close covered by a fine lacework of lichen, orange, yellow and grey. Among their cold shadows Mark found the first May flowers. These were the nurslings of frost and drought, avalanche and hurricane. Saxifrages twinkled like the stars before night steadies them into brilliance; silenus and buttercup-yellow primulas pushed slowly into the light. They were still surrounded by death but their dauntless beauty taking no account of it, quivered and danced to meet the day. Mark came upon a group as magical as their weird name; each wicked head of a Sclern witch had a brilliant collarette of brown beneath it, and moved with a dancing motion. Andreas had told him that the Sclern witches ride at night. Any small stick or stalk serves as a broomstick, and careful watchers can see them setting off by moonlight down the mountainside, though no human eye has ever been able to catch them at dawn, returning with their evil deeds accomplished, to mask themselves once more in the innocent guise of mountain Thrift, so innocent looking, as to deceive even that arch-detective – the sun. A shadow moved across a rock and 187looking upward Mark found Ida looking down at him, with mocking eyes.
‘Worshipping witches?’ she demanded. ‘A nice performance for a self-respecting schoolmaster to begin his day’s work on. When you’ve quite finished saying your prayers to those evasive ladies come and eat your breakfast under the seven enchanted firs! That’s where I brought us to last night. I know them well. Below us is the Wolf’s ravine, and if you don’t reach the firs in time the big bad wolves get you; and if you do reach them you are liable next morning to find that you have taken root, where you can never get out again, and simply become the eighth enchanted fir. Well, there are worse fates in the world to-day than to be turned into a firtree, so I thought we’d better risk it. The Golden Lamb has provided us with coffee in my thermos, and some of the sausages of that highly Christian pig!’
It was a gay and sumptuous meal and Mark was surprised to find that he could share the solitude with Ida without losing its incommunicable rapture.
She understood the mountain flowers, she even knew their most likely haunts, and respected their heroic persistence. She knew in how shady a spot a yellow violet will consent to grow; and where to find the rare and heavenly mountain forget-me-not.
But Mark did not tell her of the blue dawn, for fear that she might read into it something of the queer pang of tenderness he had felt, when he looked down at her. They talked in happy snatches all day long and all their differences seemed to vanish in the high world of beauty and remoteness.
They found as they climbed hour by hour, surmounting difficulties and avoiding dangers, how safely they could depend on each other’s skill and presence of mind. Neither 188had the defects that make mountain climbing an irksome or perilous business. Ida’s presence, never very physical, became more non-conducting than ever. She was not only a sexless companion but hardly more human or noticeable than a mountain wind. By the time the stars had begun to fade and the sun became dazzling, they reached an open ridge where there was no overhang. They took it in turn to lead and were not roped except when they crossed the glacier and found the rocks slippery and difficult to negotiate. The shadows began to lengthen, changing from blue to deep purple and at last to black. As they crossed the rough sea of grey and broken ice, the peaks before them became bathed in a deep rosy glow.
‘That is the Finsterhorn,’ Ida told him. ‘I spent a week once almost at the summit. There is a hut. We were climbing the Silvretta, dawn by golden dawn. Looking back on it, it seems incredible there was such a world. Everything was safe then – except ourselves – and now everything is dangerous – except ourselves. We have lost the power to be dangerous!’
‘Do you mean human beings have lost the power, or Austrians in particular?’ Mark asked her. ‘It seems to me it is only the human beings, who have now become dangerous – all our other problems we have either solved or are on the way to solving.’
‘I suppose I meant Austrians,’ Ida said after a pause. ‘Individually in those far-off days, some of us thought we had power – or it was thought of us.’
‘I always meant to ask you,’ Mark demanded, ‘that portrait in the library where you first took me, was it the last of the Archdukes?’
Ida was silent, while she took a long careful inspection of the pathless glacier in front of them. 189
‘Yes, he was one of them,’ she said at last. ‘The snow is bad here – very brittle and uncertain – also I am not wholly sure whether there are not a fresh crevasse or two since I was last here. The bridges are formidable rather than dependable, when found. You will let me lead perhaps for a time since I used to know this glacier so well – the portrait you mention was the last of our special Archdukes – Michel Salvator.’ She said no more, and Mark, too, was silent. They spent two hours crossing the glacier, most of it was sheer slogging endurance, but there were perilous instants, and they got across it only just in time, before daylight began to fail them. ‘Now there is nothing but a path,’ Ida told him, ‘only as there is a precipice or two, on one side of it, we had better wait for the moon – there she comes! We are only an hour from the Senner hut, so we need not hurry.’
For a moment they stood stock still looking at the May moon. An enormous orange ball slid slowly into sight round the nearest peak. She was preceded and followed by a wash of silvery light as mysterious and splendid as her own image.
She moved steadily upwards, like a great ship through a waveless sea, disappearing at times behind a peak, to flood them again with her strange light, the moment after. Mark and Ida stood almost under the peak; on a small rock platform, beneath it, a path wound down to an eyelid of land on which the Senner hut was perched, and where they could still see the dark forms of cattle grazing.
On one side of them was the peak itself and on the other, after a tumbled rock or two, they could look sheer down into bottomless space. Close against the sheer edge and silver clear in the broad moonlight perched a family of Edelweiss. They were near enough to see the hundreds of tiny flowers in star form, closely pressed together. Each 190velvety flower had a triple star, and wore it like a crown.
‘They are in a very dangerous spot,’ Ida whispered. ‘That is how they grow – these royal flowers! Don’t want them – don’t touch them! They call them Lad’s death in my valley. That is because the boys think their girls want them – and perhaps they do – for a girl can want very silly things sometimes.’
‘I used to think them overrated,’ Mark said, looking down at the flowers motionless in their silver glow, ‘but I was wrong. They are strangely beautiful. Shall I fetch you one?’
‘Are you mad?’ Ida asked fiercely. ‘Have you forgotten we are on a mission, you and I? And would you risk ending it for a piece of foolery a child could make out of a blanket?’
‘I think you are a little unjust,’ Mark said queerly, ‘and it doesn’t look half as unsafe to me – a mouthful of rock-climbing – as that glacier we have just crossed certainly was – at least half a dozen times.’
‘Well, that was different,’ Ida said grudgingly. ‘We had to cross the glacier – there was no other way of getting to the hut; but no one has to lean half-way over a precipice on a slippery rock to pick a flower.’
‘All right, I won’t,’ Mark said a little stiffly. ‘I only wanted to show you a token – a very small one – of my gratitude. I haven’t felt that I could express it hitherto but I do realize the risks you have run to help what I am trying to do; and I am grateful.’
‘Let’s sit down for a while and forget your gratitude and my temper,’ Ida told him. ‘We shan’t see a night like this twice in a lifetime. Have you ever been in love, Mark? This is a moment to talk of it if you have. I should say that you had learned very little about women. Every Englishman I’ve ever met has been half a monk! That makes one 191rather suspicious of the other half – if one happens to be a psychiatrist!’
‘I’m not a monk at all,’ Mark said crossly. He found himself sitting on a rock where he could see the moonlight shining on her hair. She sat a foot or two beneath him, and her face was in shadow. He watched her white, narrow hand, touching without hurting the moss that grew on the rock between them. He could see the long rosy tentacles of the moss almost as plainly as if it were day. This clear unreality of moonlight freed something in Mark, the personal barriers that were second nature to him by day became trivial in the sober vastness of the approaching night. The stars came out slowly one by one, very faint and lightless at first in the darkening blue, and then becoming colder and clearer until they shone like frost flowers.
‘There have only been two women in my life – and I’m thirty-four,’ Mark told her at last. ‘I suppose you think that’s rather like a monk too. Well one of these feelings – passions – affairs – whatever you like to call them – wasn’t monkish! I met a girl called Effie when I was twenty-one. She wasn’t happy at home – if girls ever are. She was rather a nervous, high-strung sort of a girl but very intelligent – ultimately she did uncommonly well at the University – though she didn’t stick to anything. Anyhow she had the idea that she didn’t want to get married for ages – if ever – and yet wanted to know a thing or two about life. In a way I think we were a good deal in love with each other, off and on. We quarrelled awfully but in the holidays we sailed a boat together and even took trips to France, and for two years we sort of planned most things together. We broke off after a rather worse row than usual. I don’t know now what it was about. We met once or twice after the row, but by then she’d taken up with another man whom she 192eventually married. I don’t think I minded very much by then, but I often remember Effie. She wanted everything quicker than I did – and rather more of it – if you know what I mean – while it was on and less after it was over. I’m exactly the opposite in love. I’m a slow starter. I want little rather than much – and I don’t want to dispose of what I’ve got too easily. Still, I’ve always had an idea that if I’d been rather older I could have appreciated Effie better; for one thing, she was plumb honest, and I find that’s rather a rare thing – if you’ll excuse my saying so – for a woman to be. I don’t mean to say that she didn’t tell lies, I daresay she did, but I know she never told herself any.’
‘You explain Effie very nicely,’ Ida said, taking out her cigarettes which, for once, Mark had noted with satisfaction, she had seemed to have forgotten, ‘so I suppose you were more in love with the other one – who was probably less honest – that you see is what – if what you say is true – is likely to have been the reason for it. I assure you that very few men like a woman most for her honesty!’
Mark hesitated. It had been easy enough to talk about Effie – he’d got over Effie – but in a sense he had not got over Mary. ‘I don’t know,’ he began a little uncertainly, ‘if Mary was honest or not – it is a little difficult when you haven’t lived with a woman – to understand exactly where honesty breaks down. Superficially she was intensely sincere, but probably you will say if she had been honest about our love – I should have lived with her. But there were, for both of us, pretty big obstacles. She had married a cousin of mine – a chap older a good deal than either of us – who’d had shell shock in the last war. He wasn’t very kind to her. I used to stay with them often. She never complained of him but I couldn’t help seeing. She had three children and loved her garden. Looking at those Edelweiss made me think of 193her. She was very graceful and liked playing Bach. She’d been well taught. We used to read the same books too. We fell in love – or knew that we were in love – very suddenly in the middle of a symphony concert. It was awfully sudden, painful, and just damned serious. We both knew it was quite impossible, only we kept trying to think it wasn’t. It seemed so very innocent somehow – just to have fragments of that intense and blinding intimacy every now and then. Sometimes Mary thought it could be managed and sometimes I did but never both of us together. We always knew that it could only end by being a cheat or a break. She wasn’t in the least an adventurous type. Her home was everything to her – and she wasn’t even vain. Her husband too – while he wasn’t kind or at all attractive – was in love with her. She couldn’t get over that – though he hated the children – and wasn’t really fit for marriage anyhow. Still I suppose he hadn’t realized that he wasn’t, any more than she had. The children, you see, were Mary’s life. That’s why our – our being together, if you can call it that, when it was only an intimacy of the heart – had to come to an end. We couldn’t, when it came to the point, either cheat or break. That was all there was to it, and yet it lasted many years – in fact I wasn’t sure till suddenly the other day that it was over. We tried not to meet, and yet in a way it was a pity – we were such friends. Effie and I never were – with us it had to be lovers or nothing. But if Mary were here now – both you and I would enjoy it! She never said stupid things or did unkind ones.’
‘I do both,’ Ida told him in a flat, hard voice. ‘Sometimes I say very stupid things because I don’t want to be kind – and sometimes because I do!’
Mark made no comment on this statement. He was, for a brief moment, comparing her in his mind with Mary. 194They had one thing, he thought and perhaps only one, in common – they made the passing moment more valuable with them than without them. After a prolonged silence Mark said, conscious of his daring, ‘You’re not much younger than I am – so I suppose you’ve been in love too?’
‘Oh, yes!’ Ida said, and for a long time Mark thought she was not going to say any more. At last she said, ‘It’s so stupid to say men are different from women. Of course they are and of course they aren’t! We’re all human, but I suppose here and there we’re human differently! I can tell, for instance, that that Mary business with you went deep – it isn’t very intelligible to an Austrian like myself that you didn’t let it go further, but I accept the fact that love in the air can take up a good deal of room! But after all I don’t believe it changed you! You are what you set out to be, aren’t you? The kind of man you were in your own mind before Mary is still the same man as you are after Mary? She didn’t, if you know what I mean, hoist you out of your own mind into hers, so that you can never, in any real sense, get back into your own again?’
‘Yes, I daresay that is so,’ Mark admitted. ‘I like to think I’m more what she wanted me to be – but I daresay I’m much the same really; besides I suppose if you haven’t actually lived with a woman you hardly know what it is that she does want you to be!’
‘You wouldn’t know after – necessarily,’ Ida told him rather sharply. She went on, after a brief pause; ‘anyhow, what I’m trying to explain is that before I fell in love I really was or thought I was a different being. Superficially anyhow I looked different even to myself. I was, for instance, innocent, unbelievably and drastically innocent, brought up among horses and men – without subterfuge – and on my merits, as it were, and no doubt they’d used a certain 195chivalry – as they must have supposed it – in my upbringing. I was mercilessly credulous, teachable – and what you really don’t think I now am – even sentimentally kind! I was like a head-long puppy – trusting all the world and bouncing into – and at – everything I fancied! Then I met a man who, as it were, started from scratch, for I was only sixteen, and he educated me for ten years; and now you see at least I don’t bounce any more. I’m very far from innocent. I don’t believe anything anyone tells me – unless I have to! and no one can teach me a thing! Not because I don’t want to learn but because I distrust any man who tries to tell me. Mark, I was in love, so much in love that I daren’t even now read Shakespeare’s Sonnets for fear they’ll make me scream!’
‘But it is over isn’t it?’ Mark said very gently. For a moment he wanted to touch the hand that played with the hard cool moss so close to his own. He was very sorry for her. Ida turned her head and he thought again how nearly beauty had moulded her features, or was she really beautiful, when her lips curved gently, and her strong chin looked less decisive and her eyes less cold?
Ida laughed. ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘it is over like a nightmare when you wake up in a light room and find you aren’t strangled after all, nor walking about with no clothes on and a train to catch at Basle railway station! But have you ever noticed, it’s what you wake with – the spirit of your dream – that haunts you all day? A lobster may cause a dream – but it’s you not a lobster that makes the dream it causes! But I’ll just prove to you how cured I am. Repeat to me – in your nice quiet English voice – one of Shakespeare’s sonnets – and I’ll not scream.’
‘All right!’ Mark agreed, ‘but give me a minute or two to think out one of my favourites. I only know a few, and I want to choose a suitable one. Suitable, perhaps, to us both.’ 196
‘They’re all suitable to anyone who has ever been in love – at different times,’ Ida murmured. ‘But certainly, choose!’
Mark moved a little so that he could see the Edelweiss and think of Mary. He began almost beneath his breath:
Farewell! thou are too dear for my possessing,
And like enough thou know’st thy estimate;
The charter of thy worth is thy releasing;
My bonds in thee are all determinate.
For how do I hold thee but by thy granting?
And for those riches where is my deserving?
The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting,
And so my patent back again is swerving.
Thyself thou gavest, thine own worth then not knowing,
Or me, to whom thou gav’st, else mistaking;
So thy great gift upon misprision making,
Comes home again, on better judgment making.
Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter
In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.
‘It sounds so deadly humble,’ Ida said almost in a whisper, ‘and yet the whole of disillusion lies in it. Shakespeare only wanted to believe he was not worth his lover. That would have been so much less a thing to get over! What no one can get over is to find out that it is one’s lover – not one’s self – who is worthless! If one is less worthy oneself, it’s not surprising and one can make one’s self better! But no one can make his lover better, not if he tries all his life long – with his heart’s blood! Besides the whole point of one’s lover – is that he couldn’t be better – he should be perfect!’
Mark privately thought that such a standard was too hard on any earthly lover, but there was something in her 197voice that kept him from any form of criticism. If she had been arrogant in her demands at least she had broken her own heart, as well as her lover’s, by her arrogance. ‘To me it didn’t mean quite that,’ Mark said gently. ‘I thought of it always as a splendid close. He had had, after all, something stupendous that he wanted. Now he must get on without it, but at least he knows he’s had the best there was to be had.’
‘Oh no! No! he hasn’t!’ Ida cried out in anguish. ‘He only had the dream – “on waking no such matter!”’
There was such pain in her voice that Mark dared say no more, but this time he did touch her hand – very gently – and very quickly taking his hand away – just that she might know if she cared to know that she had all his sympathy.
‘Oh,’ she said after a pause that seemed to them both strangely long and significant, ‘they have lit a candle in the hut below! Let us go down to them for in Senner huts, they go early to bed.’