Mountains

The inn, up in the rough stony town of the high mountains, was forlorn enough. There were some dogs and chickens about the door of it, in the wet street.

The woman who came to the door of the inn was one of those thin, dark pale, quiet women about whom there is always something sympathetic and sad. She said, she feared the inn could do us little honour; we must forgive, because of the war.

The stone hall was narrow and cold, the stairs went straight up from the farther end of it, and two doors opened from it on either side of it.

The woman took our wraps, and put them down on a table that there was by the entrance door.

Before the door to the right, down by the stairs, there was a small, fat, blonde baby standing, a little round-headed boy baby, in a black blouse, knocking on the door and crying and calling "Georgeot." He did not turn to look at us at all, but went on always knocking and crying.

The woman said, "You see, we never expect any one now, but if Monsieur and Madame will be indulgent—this is the dining-room, Madame," she opened one of the doors on the left, and went ahead of us into the dark room, and groped to the window to throw back the blinds.

We went to one of the bare tables, and she arranged it for us, not talking to us any more. And after a while fetched us potatoes and cheese, and sour bread and red wine which tasted of the roots and stems of vines.

Whenever she left the door a little open behind her, we could hear the baby in the hall sobbing and calling for "Georgeot." We asked her, "But the poor little soul, what is the matter that he calls like that?"

She told us it was his father he was calling. She said he had been hearing her call his father "Georgeot." His father had been home for six days' leave, and was gone back just this morning. "You understand," she said, "my husband had not seen his baby in eleven months, and he had him every minute in his arms; and since he is gone the baby will not go away from his door, or stop calling for him."

She did not seem to want to talk any more about it, and we pretended to find our lunch most excellent.

When we went out into the hall again she had picked the baby up, and was standing with him in her arms, there by his father's door. She patted his yellow head down against her shoulder, but he still went on crying for "Georgeot."

It was raining hard out in the grey street.

In a shop under a vaulting, that the crook of a shepherd Saint had blessed through hundreds of years, I bought a queer sort of woolly beast for the baby.

But the baby did not care for it at all.

Going on yet higher up into the mountains, we met a dreary little funeral, coming down under umbrellas. The coffin, under a black cloth, was pushed along in a two-wheeled cart by a woman and a very old man. Some women and two or three old people followed, and some children and dogs.

It was not the funeral of a soldier, only of some one uselessly dead.

III

Rain, sunshine, wet black rock, great blue and black and purple clouds, clear azure spaces, snows, lifted drifted crests of snow, like waves arrested—all this as we went up, and up, with a rainbow like a bridge across the valley we were leaving behind us.

Up and up and up, into the young joy of the mountains, young as at the beginning of the world, joyous above all things. What do they care, the great mountains? They stand quite still, and all things pass. They lift their heads, and do not even know.

A baby cried because its father was gone away to war. Its mother did not cry at all.

A stranger came by and cried, not because of those especial people, but because of the world.

A little funeral straggled down the hill in the rain.

None of it mattered.

I thought, we went up high above all griefs.

Some children and a woman, from a hut up in the snow, came to beg of us.

I thought, for what did they need to beg, they, who had the everlasting snows? I thought, how absurd to beg for bread to live, in a place where death would be so pure and clear, would ring out so joyously. I thought, how nice it is that all the roads of life lead up to death. And that death, however come to, is so high a thing.

It was terribly cold. The snow was over us and under us, as the clouds were.

In the round basin circled with snows, the ancient hospice—that is no more a hospice, from which its old possessors have been driven away—stands white, beside the white road, in the close-cropped pasture. The sheep and tawny rough cattle were the only things that stirred. The smoke of the hospice chimneys stayed quite motionless in the golden air.

The air rang like a golden bell.

The music of the cow-bells was no more distinct a music than that of just the golden ringing of the air.

They lighted a fire in the stove of the long white refectory, and we had tea and bread and butter and honey beside it.

There were no guests in the hospice. The little white stone rooms, that used to be the monks' cells, had floors of red-brick tiles and thick walls, and each cell had one deep narrow window.

The woman who built our fires, and fetched our tea, and showed us to our little white stone rooms, was not old, but looked very old and sad. She had a red knitted shawl and big gold ear-rings, and big brown dumb eyes.

We went out into the music of the sunset, every mountain peak was singing. It was utterly still, except for the sheep-bells and cow-bells. The silence was a great music, joyous and grave.

I am sitting up in bed, writing by the light of two candles; it is a golden light, in the pure white moonlight that fills the cell.

The slit of a window opposite the bed is wide open, and the moonlight floods in.

I am so cold, I have put on my big travelling coat.

The moonlit air tastes of mountain tops. The stillness is immense in the small room. All the silences of the world are in the room.

I cannot see the moon, nor the snow peaks; only the sky of sheer moonlight, and a dark dim mountain, looming.

I am so glad to be awake and cold.

While I was writing, something happened. An ugly sound broke the spell. Some one was coming to the hospice. There was the sound of a motor-bicycle, from a long way off, coming through the stillness. There was the calling of its horn and then it was at the door.

I heard the door open, and a cry of delight; and a man's young voice, joyous, high-keyed, intense, and a woman's voice, laughing and sobbing.

VII

I saw the sun come up out of the snow, I saw all the marvellous things that there are between darkness and dawn.

I had made myself stay awake the whole night through, to not lose one minute of the mountains. The mountains were mine, from sunset through the dusk and the dark and the moonlight, to the dark again, and through that other so different dusk that is before the dawn, to the sun's great silent rising, and the full glory of the day.

VIII

It was the son of the woman of the gold ear-rings and the red shawl, who had come home in the night, unexpected, for six days' leave.

He was out in the morning pastures, a tall lean mountain boy, with gleaming white teeth, and brown eyes like his mother's, but laughing, and with absurd dimples in his brown young face.

His mother was out with him in the dawn, the red shawl over her head, keeping close beside him as he went swinging across the pastures, her short step almost running by his long step.