“Don’t let me stop you,” said Hugh politely.
“I won’t. But I shall sing inside so that you won’t hear me. Was there ever such a morning? Oh, thank God for Davos!”
“Amen to that,” said Hugh.
Peggy, in spite of the fact that only a few minutes ago nobody had ever been hurt so much, gave a huge sigh of content, breathing in a gallon of the frozen sunny air, and giving it out again in a great puff as of smoke. All round them rose the white snow-clad hills, rising from shoulder to peak of glistening, dazzling surfaces. Just opposite and above them stretched the long single street of Davos, with its rows of big hotels, tailing off to the right into scattered houses and chalets, and among them she could just see the house where she was staying now with Edith and Hugh and Daisy, standing high above Davos-Platz, with broad wooden balconies, and front turned southward toward the blaze of the sun. Above the village hung little thin blue streamers of smoke from the fires, but these were scarcely visible, for it seemed as if nothing smoky or foggy could live long in this miraculous air. Above the village stretched black blots and clumps of pine-wood, from off which the snow had melted and fallen, as the leaves were warmed with the in-striking of the sun; above that again rose the peaks and spurs of the heaven-seeking hills. And over all stretched an incredible sky, bluer than the mind could otherwise conceive which had not seen it, more crystalline than glass, and as untainted as the snow it looked upon. And, shining there, was the keynote of the whole, the huge golden sun, divinity made visible, enough to turn the sourest Puritan into a Parsee. Sun, hot, unveiled sun, and the cleanness and purity of frost. That was Davos. Davos meant a great deal to Peggy just now; it meant all to Hugh.
He and Edith had come straight here after Munich, before the snow fell, and privately Hugh thought he had never seen so dreadful and dingy a place. The summer had been very hot, and where now the ineffable whiteness of the snow was spread, making the eye to dance and the heart to be glad, there stretched long weary spaces of faded green. And the worst of it was that it reminded them both in some distorted homesick manner of the down above Chalkpits. But the down above Chalkpits was to them, even as Hugh had said, the first act of the love-duet, where Edith had told him who was Andrew Robb, whereas the gray-yellow stretches of mountainside here were, so to speak, the walls and windows of a sickroom. Then had come rain, dreary, unremitting rain, when the heavens were shrouded, and a tiring, enervating wind called Föhn, blew out of the southwest. And the very interesting fact that the word Föhn was undoubtedly a corruption of the Latin Favonius did not seem to make it any better. Also they could not find a suitable house.
There was worse than that. The invalid life that Edith had to lead was an iron hand upon them both. She who had been so active, so indefatigable, had to lie down most of the day, out in a slightly leaky balcony, and watch the cloud-shroud over the hills, and the thick-ruled streaks of rain. She had to take her temperature and enter it on a chart; she had to adopt all the nameless little devices of the illness from which she suffered. To her it was all hateful to her pride, to him it was a degradation that she should have to suffer in these mean little ways. She, always splendid but always rebellious against the surrender to ailments, could scarcely bear that Hugh should see her thus. But slowly, by patience and by habit, the first-fruits of patience, she had grown used to it. Yet she felt at the end of the first three weeks that if she had known how horrible it was going to be, she would almost have refused to come here at all, have died standing and defiant, rather than fight her foe by these mean submissions. Also for the first fortnight the disease certainly attacked her more fiercely than before. Often she had felt tired at Munich, but not till now did she really know what mere tiredness could mean. She went to bed tired, but awoke to an infinitely greater degree of fatigue. Physical pain she had known before, but never had pain so undermined her as this. Then once she had another return of hæmorrhage, and Hugh had sat by her while a servant ran for the doctor, sponging, wiping.... She longed to tell him to go, to tell him that she would so infinitely sooner be alone. But he could not have borne that. Also she could not speak.
Yet in spite of the fiercer onslaught of the disease, in spite of the hæmorrhage, in spite of the dreadful fatigue, she felt that deep down somewhere, so deep that it showed as yet no surface-sign, she was better at the end of those first three weeks. She could not tell how; indeed, she had never felt so ill, yet there was, so to speak, a little raft of recovery beginning to form. Through hours of helplessness she felt it forming, and in spite of bad reports, gently told her, she knew it to be so. Foundations have to be dug, so that a house may arise, and the masons and builders have to go down that they may build up. It was thus that she felt it.
Then came a change. Rain ceased, and snow began. For four days it snowed without cessation, and still she lay out on her balcony, Hugh sitting by her, and rising now and again to shake the fallen flakes off the rug that covered her. And gradually through those four days they both began to be conscious of the change. It was very distant at first, and very faint, and it was through the nostril even more than through the eye which now saw, though veiled in the falling curtain of snow, the changed aspect, that it revealed itself. Something cold and clean was coming, the stale odour of dried grass had gone, and there was filtering into the air the odour of nothing at all, the absence of odour, the negative smell of the absence of smelling things. During these four days, too, Edith lost her temper at picquet, a game that occupied much of their evenings. Hugh hailed that secretly, privately, as he would have hailed an angel from Heaven. She had been utterly apathetic before; they had played but to pass the hours.
Then, still while the clean, sweet snow was falling, he found a house that might suit them. For days before they had constantly talked over the sort of house they wanted, and for days it appeared to be a matter of absolute indifference to Edith. To-night, however, it did not.
“Oh! but how stupid of you, Hughie!” she had said. “Why, of course, you ought to have gone to see the kitchen. All houses are uninhabitable unless the servants are comfortable. We had far better be in a hotel than in a house where the kitchen is a coal-cellar!”