The drawing-room was very dark; she felt her way swiftly through it past the familiar objects, and the conservatory door opened on a flood of silvery light. She saw the high, shining disk of the moon, and the great black poplar tree that grew in the neighbouring garden seemed vast against the sky. As she stepped out, she made herself think of Diamond in “At the Back of the North Wind.” It was like stepping into a fairy-tale; only something more sweet and solemn than a fairy-tale, as that book was; something, for all its beauty, a little awful. But when she looked down from the moon, the sky, the poplar, there was only sweetness. The fragrance that had solicited her seemed now to welcome her, to clasp and caress her. The pansies were all looking up at her. On the wall Madame Alfred Carrière was more beautiful than she had ever before seen her, her pale flowers and buds making a constellation against the darkness.
She walked round the path, looking at it all, so glad that she had come, smiling—a child in fairyland, or a spirit arrived in Paradise and finding it strange yet familiar—as Paradise should be. Perhaps, she thought, dying would be like that: a stepping out from the darkness into something vast and solemn that would slowly gather about one into well-known and transfigured shapes, into white pansies growing thickly at one’s feet. She stooped in the moonlight and passed her hands over their upturned faces. They were flowers entranced, neither sleeping nor awake; and she felt, as her fingers touched their soft, dewy petals, as if their dreams with their whiteness flowed into her. To leave them was like leaving her very self, yet the parting now was all peace and innocent acquiescence, like them, and she was still smiling as she whispered to them, “Good-bye, darlings.”
III
SWITZERLAND was like the opera, and for her first months there Miss Glover felt as if she watched it from a box—very much at the back and looking past many heads at the vast display. Everything that Florrie had said was true: the scenery was more magnificent than she could have imagined, oppressively more, and the people, again oppressively, more interesting. They were, these people, engaged all of them in trying to keep alive, and, when they failed in that, in dying, dying under one’s eyes from day to day; and in the publicity of such occupations there was something as abnormal as was the size of the mountains. Some of these people she came to know a little—those, usually, who had given up: the dear little Russian girl who, alas, died in December; the sulky, affectionate French boy; and the large yet wasted German singer who made Miss Glover think of a splendid fruit keeping still its shell of form and colour while eaten away inside by wasps. Fraülein Schmidt liked to have her play Schubert and Schumann songs to her, and still tried to sing attainable passages here and there in a queer, booming, hollow voice that made Miss Glover, again, think of the wasps imprisoned and buzzing. But most of the people remained parts of the spectacle to her. They engaged, when they were well enough, in winter sports; they talked together of books she had never heard of, and of things she had never thought of; and often, moreover, she could not understand what they said, as her languages did not extend beyond rather simple French and German, and Dante with a dictionary.
The only other English person there was a young man who made her think of the Prince Charlie roses; he was sombre and delicate and beautiful and did not talk to anybody, sitting apart and reading all day long. Miss Glover wondered a good deal about him, and watched him sometimes from her place on the snow-sifted balcony when they lay there encased in fur bags and buttressed with hot-water bottles. His name was Lord Ninian Carstairs; and that was like the roses, too.
Once, when they were alone on the balcony, their recumbent chairs near one another, he lifted his eyes suddenly and found hers fixed upon him, and perhaps their wistful and ingenuous absorption touched him, for, flushing faintly,—he was a shy young man,—he asked if she were feeling better.
She said she couldn’t quite tell. It was difficult to tell what one felt, didn’t he find? Everything was so different; so exciting in a way; and when one was excited one felt, perhaps, better than one was.
Lord Ninian laughed shortly at that, and said that he didn’t feel excited; he wished he could.
“I’m depressed, too, sometimes,” said Miss Glover; and then he sighed.
“One gets so abominably homesick in this hole,” he said.