No one but an Englishman would have hidden his face in a bowl of milk, and have shaken his red ears in such painful confusion.
'Yes,' he said, 'I am.'
And I started almost out of my skin at the unexpected London accent. It was as if one suddenly found oneself in the Tube.
'So am I,' I said. 'Where have you come from?'
Then he began, like a general explaining his plans, to tell me. He had walked round over the Furka Pass, had been on foot four or five days. He had walked tremendously. Knowing no German, and nothing of the mountains, he had set off alone on this tour: he had a fortnight's holiday. So he had come over the Rhône Glacier across the Furka and down from Andermatt to the Lake. On this last day he had walked about thirty mountain miles.
'But weren't you tired?' I said, aghast.
He was. Under the inflamed redness of his sun- and wind- and snow-burned face he was sick with fatigue. He had done over a hundred miles in the last four days.
'Did you enjoy it?' I asked.
'Oh yes. I wanted to do it all.' He wanted to do it, and he had done it. But God knows what he wanted to do it for. He had now one day at Lucerne, one day at Interlaken and Berne, then London.
I was sorry for him in my soul, he was so cruelly tired, so perishingly victorious.