Loerke did not take the toboganning very seriously. He put no fire and intensity into it, as Gerald did. Which pleased Gudrun. She was weary, oh so weary of Gerald’s gripped intensity of physical motion. Loerke let the sledge go wildly, and gaily, like a flying leaf, and when, at a bend, he pitched both her and him out into the snow, he only waited for them both to pick themselves up unhurt off the keen white ground, to be laughing and pert as a pixie. She knew he would be making ironical, playful remarks as he wandered in hell—if he were in the humour. And that pleased her immensely. It seemed like a rising above the dreariness of actuality, the monotony of contingencies.
They played till the sun went down, in pure amusement, careless and timeless. Then, as the little sledge twirled riskily to rest at the bottom of the slope,
“Wait!” he said suddenly, and he produced from somewhere a large thermos flask, a packet of Keks, and a bottle of Schnapps.
“Oh Loerke,” she cried. “What an inspiration! What a comble de joie indeed! What is the Schnapps?”
He looked at it, and laughed.
“Heidelbeer!” he said.
“No! From the bilberries under the snow. Doesn’t it look as if it were distilled from snow. Can you—” she sniffed, and sniffed at the bottle—“can you smell bilberries? Isn’t it wonderful? It is exactly as if one could smell them through the snow.”
She stamped her foot lightly on the ground. He kneeled down and whistled, and put his ear to the snow. As he did so his black eyes twinkled up.
“Ha! Ha!” she laughed, warmed by the whimsical way in which he mocked at her verbal extravagances. He was always teasing her, mocking her ways. But as he in his mockery was even more absurd than she in her extravagances, what could one do but laugh and feel liberated.
She could feel their voices, hers and his, ringing silvery like bells in the frozen, motionless air of the first twilight. How perfect it was, how very perfect it was, this silvery isolation and interplay.