So the two climbed slowly up the steep ledge of a road. This valley was just a mountain cleft, cleft sheer in the hard, living rock, with black trees like hair flourishing in this secret, naked place of the earth. At the bottom of the open wedge for ever roared the rampant, insatiable water. The sky from above was like a sharp wedge forcing its way into the earth’s cleavage, and that eternal ferocious water was like the steel edge of the wedge, the terrible tip biting in into the rocks’ intensity. Who could have thought that the soft sky of light, and the soft foam of water could thrust and penetrate into the dark, strong earth? But so it was. Hannele and Hepburn, toiling up the steep little ledge of a road that hung half-way down the gulf, looked back, time after time, back down upon the brown timbers and shingle roofs of the hotel, that now, away below, looked damp and wedged in like boulders. Then back at the next tourists struggling up. Then down at the water, that rushed like a beast of prey. And then, as they rose higher, they looked up also at the livid great sides of rock, livid, bare rock that sloped from the sky-ridge in a hideous sheer swerve downwards.

  In his heart of hearts Hepburn hated it. He hated it, he loathed it, it seemed almost obscene, this livid, naked slide of rock, unthinkably huge and massive, sliding down to this gulf where bushes grew like hair in the darkness and water roared. Above, there were thin slashes of snow.

  So the two climbed slowly on, up the eternal side of that valley, sweating with the exertion. Sometimes the sun, now risen high, shone full on their side of the gulley. Tourists were trickling downhill too: two maidens with bare arms and bare heads and huge boots: men tourists with great knapsacks and edelweiss in their hats: giving Bergheil for a greeting. But the captain said Good-day. He refused this Bergheil business. People swarming touristy on these horrible mountains made him feel almost sick.

  He and Hannele also were not in good company together. There was a sort of silent hostility between them. She hated the effort of climbing; but the high air, the cold in the air, the savage cat-howling sound of the water, those awful flanks of livid rock, all this thrilled and excited her to another sort of savageness. And he, dark, rather slender and feline, with something of the physical suavity of a delicate-footed race, he hated beating his way up the rock, he hated the sound of the water, it frightened him, and the high air hit him in the chest, like a viper.

  ‘Wonderful! Wonderful!’ she cried, taking great breaths in her splendid chest.

  ‘Yes. And horrible. Detestable,’ he said.

  She turned with a flash, and the high strident sound of the mountain in her voice.

  ‘If you don’t like it,’ she said, rather jeering, ‘why ever did you come?’

  ‘I had to try,’ he said.

  ‘And if you don’t like it,’ she said, ‘why should you try to spoil it for me?’

  ‘I hate it,’ he answered.

  They were climbing more into the height, more into the light, into the open, in the full sun. The valley cleft was sinking below them. Opposite was only the sheer, livid slide of the naked rock, tipping from the pure sky. At a certain angle they could see away beyond the lake lying far off and small, the wall of those other rocks like a curtain of stone, dim and diminished to the horizon. And the sky with curdling clouds and blue sunshine intermittent.

  ‘Wonderful, wonderful, to be high up,’ she said, breathing great breaths.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It is wonderful. But very detestable. I want to live near the sea-level. I am no mountain-topper.’

  ‘Evidently not,’ she said.

  ‘Bergheil!’ cried a youth with bare arms and bare chest, bare head, terrific fanged boots, a knapsack and an alpenstock, and all the bronzed wind and sun of the mountain snow in his skin and his faintly bleached hair. With his great heavy knapsack, his rumpled thick stockings, his ghastly fanged boots, Hepburn found him repulsive.

  ‘Guten Tag’ he answered coldly.

  ‘Grüss Gott,’ said Hannele.

  And the young Tannhäuser, the young Siegfried, this young Balder beautiful strode climbing down the rocks, marching and swinging with his alpenstock. And immediately after the youth came a maiden, with hair on the wind and her shirt-breast open, striding in corduroy breeches, rumpled worsted stockings, thick boots, a knapsack and an alpenstock. She passed without greeting. And our pair stopped in angry silence and watched her dropping down the mountain-side.

  XV

  Ah, well, everything comes to an end, even the longest up-climb. So, after much sweat and effort and crossness, Hepburn and Hannele emerged on to the rounded bluff where the road wound out of that hideous great valley cleft into upper regions. So they emerged more on the level, out of the trees as out of something horrible, on to a naked, great bank of rock and grass.

  ‘Thank the Lord!’ said Hannele.

  So they trudged on round the bluff, and then in front of them saw what is always, always wonderful, one of those shallow, upper valleys, naked, where the first waters are rocked. A flat, shallow, utterly desolate valley, wide as a wide bowl under the sky, with rock slopes and grey stone-slides and precipices all round, and the zig-zag of snow-stripes and ice-roots descending, and then rivers, streams and rivers rushing from many points downwards, down out of the ice-roots and the snow-dagger-points, waters rushing in newly-liberated frenzy downwards, down in waterfalls and cascades and threads, down into the wide, shallow bed of the valley, strewn with rocks and stones innumerable, and not a tree, not a visible bush.

  Only, of course, two hotels or restaurant places. But these no more than low, sprawling, peasant-looking places lost among the stones, with stones on their roofs so that they seemed just a part of the valley bed. There was the valley, dotted with rock and rolled-down stone, and these two house-places, and woven with innumerable new waters, and one hoarse stone-tracked river in the desert, and the thin road-track winding along the desolate flat, past first one house, then the other, over one stream, then another, on to the far rock-face above which the glacier seemed to loll like some awful great tongue put out.

  ‘Ah, it is wonderful!’ he said, as if to himself.

  And she looked quickly at his face, saw the queer, blank, sphinx-look with which he gazed out beyond himself. His eyes were black and set, and he seemed so motionless, as if he were eternal facing these upper facts.

  She thrilled with triumph. She felt he was overcome.

  ‘It is wonderful,’ she said.

  ‘Wonderful. And forever wonderful,’ he said.

  ‘Ah, in winter — ’ she cried.

  His face changed, and he looked at her.

  ‘In winter you couldn’t get up here,’ he said.

  They went on. Up the slopes cattle were feeding: came that isolated tong-tong-tong of cow-bells, dropping like the slow clink of ice on the arrested air. The sound always woke in him a primeval, almost hopeless melancholy. Always made him feel navré. He looked round. There was no tree, no bush, only great grey rocks and pale boulders scattered in place of trees and bushes. But yes, clinging on one side like a dark, close beard were the alpenrose shrubs.

  ‘In May,’ he said, ‘that side there must be all pink with alpenroses.’

  ‘I must come. I must come!’ she cried.

  There were tourists dotted along the road: and two tiny low carts drawn by silky, long-eared mules. These carts went right down to meet the motor-cars, and to bring up provisions for the Glacier Hotel: for there was still another big hotel ahead. Hepburn was happy in that upper valley, that first rocking cradle of early water. He liked to see the great fangs and slashes of ice and snow thrust down into the rock, as if the ice had bitten into the flesh of the earth. And from the fang-tips the hoarse water crying its birth-cry, rushing down.

  By the turfy road and under the rocks were many flowers: wonderful harebells, big and cold and dark, almost black, and seeming like purple-dark ice: then little tufts of tiny pale-blue bells, as if some fairy frog had been blowing spume-bubbles out of the ice: then the bishops-crosier of the stiff, bigger, hairy mountain-bell: then many stars of pale-lavender gentian, touched with earth colour: and then monkshood, yellow, primrose yellow monkshood and sudden places full of dark monkshood. That dark-blue, black-blue, terrible colour of the strange rich monkshood made Hepburn look and look and look again. How did the ice come by that lustrous blue-purple intense darkness? — and by that royal poison? — that laughing-snake gorgeousness of much monkshood.

  XVI

  By one of the loud streams, under a rock in the sun, with scented minty or thyme flowers near, they sat down to eat some lunch. It was about eleven o’clock. A thin bee went in and out the scented flowers and the eyebright. The water poured with all the lust and greed of unloosed water over the stones. He took a cupful for Hannele, bright and icy, and she mixed it with the red Hungarian wine.

  Down the road strayed the tourists like pilgrims, and at the closed end of the valley they could be seen, quite tiny, climbing the cut-out road that went up like a stairway. Just by their movements you perceived them. But on the valley-bed they went like rolling stones, little as stones. A very elegant mule came stepping by, following a middle-aged woman in tweeds and a tall, high-browed man in knickerbockers. The mule was drawing a very amusing little cart, a chair, rather like a round office-chair upholstered in red velvet, and mounted on two wheels. The red velvet had gone gold and orange and like fruit-juice, being old: really a lovely colour. And the muleteer, a little shabby creature, waddled beside excitedly.

  ‘Ach’ cried Hannele, ‘that looks almost like before the war: almost as peaceful.’

  ‘Except that the chair is too shabby, and that they all feel exceptional,’ he remarked.

  There in that upper valley there was no sense of peace. The rush of the waters seemed like weapons, and the tourists all seemed in a sort of frenzy, in a frenzy to be happy, or to be thrilled. It was a feeling that desolated the heart.

  The two sat in the changing sunshine under their rock, with the mountain flowers scenting the snow-bitter air, and they ate their eggs and sausage and cheese, and drank the bright-red Hungarian wine. It seemed lovely: almost like before the war: almost the same feeling of eternal holiday, as if the world was made for man’s everlasting holiday. But not quite. Never again quite the same. The world is not made for man’s everlasting holiday.

  As Alexander was putting the bread back into his shoulder-sack, he exclaimed:

  ‘Oh, look here!’

  She looked, and saw him drawing out a flat package wrapped in paper: evidently a picture.

  ‘A picture!’ she cried.

  He unwrapped the thing and handed it to her. It was Theodor Worpswede’s Stilleben: not very large, painted on a board.

  Hannele looked at it and went pale.

  ‘It’s good,’ she cried, in an equivocal tone.

  ‘Quite good,’ he said.

  ‘Especially the poached egg,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, the poached egg is almost living.’

  ‘But where did you find it?’

  ‘Oh, I found it in the artist’s studio.’ And he told her how he had traced her.

  ‘How extraordinary!’ she cried. ‘But why did you buy it?’

  ‘I don’t quite know.’

  ‘Did you like it?’

  ‘No, not quite that.’

  ‘You could never hang it up.’

  ‘No, never,’ he said.

  ‘But do you think it is good as a work of art?’

  ‘I think it is quite clever as a painting. I don’t like the spirit of it, of course. I’m too catholic for that.’

  ‘No. No,’ she faltered. ‘It’s rather horrid really. That’s why I wonder why you bought it.’

  ‘Perhaps to prevent anyone else’s buying it,’ he said.

  ‘Do you mind very much, then?’ she asked.

  ‘No, I don’t mind very much. I didn’t quite like it that you sold the doll,’ he said.

  ‘I needed the money,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Oh, quite.’

  There was a pause for some moments.

  ‘I felt you’d sold me,’ she said, quiet and savage.

  ‘When?’

  ‘When your wife appeared. And when you disappeared.’

  Again there was a pause: his pause this time.

  ‘I did write to you,’ he said.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Oh — March, I believe.’

  ‘Oh yes. I had that letter.’ Her voice was just as quiet, and even savager.

  So there was a pause that belonged to both of them. Then she rose.

  ‘I want to be going,’ she said. ‘We shall never get to the glacier at this rate.’

  He packed up the picture, slung on his knapsack, and they set off. She stooped now and then to pick the starry, earth-lavender gentians from the roadside. As they passed the second of the valley hotels, they saw the man and wife sitting at a little table outside eating bread and cheese, while the mule-chair with its red velvet waited aside on the grass. They passed a whole grove of black-purple nightshade on the left, and some long, low cattle-huts which, with the stones on their roofs, looked as if they had grown up as stones grow in such places through the grass. In the wild, desert place some black pigs were snouting.

  So they wound into the head of the valley, and saw the steep face ahead, and high up, like vapour or foam dripping from the fangs of a beast, waterfalls vapouring down from the deep fangs of ice. And there was one end of the glacier, like a great bluey-white fur just slipping over the slope of the rock.

  As the valley closed in again the flowers were very lovely, especially the big, dark, icy bells, like harebells, that would sway so easily, but which hung dark and with that terrible motionlessness of upper mountain flowers. And the road turned to get on to the long slant in the cliff face, where it climbed like a stair. Slowly, slowly the two climbed up. Now again they saw the valley below, behind. The mule-chair was coming, hastening, the lady seated tight facing backwards, as the chair faced, and wrapped in rugs. The tall, fair, middle-aged husband in knickerbockers strode just behind, bare-headed.

  Alexander and Hannele climbed slowly, slowly up the slant, under the dripping rock-face where the white and veined flowers of the grass of Parnassus still rose straight and chilly in the shadow, like water which had taken on itself white flower-flesh. Above they saw the slipping edge of the glacier, like a terrible great paw, bluey. And from the skyline dark grey clouds were fuming up, fuming up as if breathed black and icily out from some ice-cauldron.

  ‘It is going to rain,’ said Alexander.

  ‘Not much,’ said Hannele shortly.

  ‘I hope not,’ said he.

  And still she would not hurry up that steep slant, but insisted on standing to look. So the dark, ice-black clouds fumed solid, and the rain began to fly on a cold wind. The mule-chair hastened past, the lady sitting comfortably with her back to the mule, a little pheasant-trimming in her tweed hat, while her Tannhäuser husband reached for his dark, cape-frilled mantle.

  Alexander had his dust-coat, but Hannele had nothing but a light knitted jersey-coat, such as women wear indoors. Over the hollow crest above came the cold, steel rain. They pushed on up the slope. From behind came another mule, and a little old man hurrying, and a little cart like a hand-barrow, on which were hampers with cabbage and carrots and peas and joints of meat, for the hotel above.

  ‘Wird es viel sein?’ asked Alexander of the little gnome. ‘Will it be much?’

  ‘Was meint der Herr?’ replied the other. ‘What does the gentleman say?’

  ‘Der Regen, wir des lang dauern? Will the rain last long?’

  ‘Nein. Nein. Dies ist kein langer Regen.’

  So, with his mule, which had to stand exactly at that spot to make droppings, the little man resumed his way, and Hannele and Alexander were the last on the slope. The air smelt steel-cold of rain, and of hot droppings. Alexander watched the rain beat on the shoulders and on the blue skirt of Hannele.

  ‘It is a pity you left your big coat down below,’ he said.

  ‘What good is it saying so now!’ she replied, pale at the nose with anger.

  ‘Quite,’ he said, as his eyes glowed and his brow blackened. ‘What good suggesting anything at any time, apparently?’

  She turned round on him in the rain, as they stood perched nearly at the summit of that slanting cliff-climb, with a glacier-paw hung almost invisible above, and waters gloating aloud in the gulf below. She faced him, and he faced her.

  ‘What have you ever suggested to me?’ she said, her face naked as the rain itself with an ice-bitter fury. ‘What have you ever suggested to me?’

  ‘When have you ever been open to suggestion?’ he said, his face dark and his eyes curiously glowing.

  ‘I? I? Ha! Haven’t I waited for you to suggest something? And all you can do is to come here with a picture to reproach me for having sold your doll. Ha! I’m glad I sold it. A foolish barren effigy it was too, a foolish staring thing. What should I do but sell it. Why should I keep it, do you imagine?’

  ‘Why do you come here with me today, then?’

  ‘Why do I come here with you today?’ she replied. ‘I come to see the mountains, which are wonderful, and give me strength. And I come to see the glacier. Do you think I come here to see you? Why should I? You are always in some hotel or other away below.’

  ‘You came to see the glacier and the mountains with me,’ he replied.

  ‘Did I? Then I made a mistake. You can do nothing but find fault even with God’s mountains.’

  A dark flame suddenly went over his face.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I hate them, I hate them. I hate their snow and their affectations.’

  ‘Affectation!’ she laughed. ‘Oh! Even the mountains are affected for you, are they?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Their loftiness and their uplift. I hate their uplift. I hate people prancing on mountain-tops and feeling exalted. I’d like to make them all stop up there, on their mountain-tops, and chew ice to fill their stomachs. I wouldn’t let them down again, I wouldn’t. I hate it all, I tell you; I hate it.’

  She looked in wonder on his dark, glowing, ineffectual face. It seemed to her like a dark flame burning in the daylight and in the ice-rains: very ineffectual and unnecessary.

 

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