III—THE BLAND WANDERER
In the drawing-room to-night an old and solitary, but blandly cheerful, female wanderer recounted numerous accidents at St. Moritz: legs broken in two places, shoulders broken, spines injured; also deaths. Further, the danger of catching infectious diseases at St. Moritz. “One very large hotel, where everybody had influenza,” etc. These recitals seemed to give her calm and serious pleasure.
“Do you think this place is good for nerves?” she broke out suddenly at me. I told her that in my opinion a hot bath and a day in bed would make any place good for nerves. “I mean the nerves of the body,” she said inscrutably. Then she deviated into a long set description of the historic attack of Russian influenza which she had had several years ago, and which had kept her in bed for three months, since when she had’ never been the same woman. And she seemed to savour with placid joy the fact that she had never since been the same woman.
Then she flew back to St. Moritz and the prices thereof. She said you could get pretty reasonable terms, even there, “provided you didn’t mind going high up.” Upon my saying that I actually preferred being high up, she exclaimed: “I don’t. I’m so afraid of fire. I’m always afraid of fire.” She said that she had had two nephews at Cambridge. The second one took rooms at the top of the highest house in Cambridge, and the landlord was a drunkard. “My sister didn’t seem to care, but I didn’t know what to do! What could I do? Well, I bought him a. non-inflammable rope.” She smiled blandly.
This allusion to death and inebriety prompted a sprightly young Yorkshirewoman, with the country gift for yarn-spinning, to tell a tale of something that had happened to her cousin, who gave lessons in domestic economy at a London Board School. A little girl, absent for two days, was questioned as to the reason.
“I couldn’t come.”
“But why not?”
“I was kept.. . Please ‘m, my mother’s dead.”
“Well, wouldn’t you be better here at school? When did she die?”