Then after a while the lights are quenched and the band goes home, and you walk back beneath the moon to your hotel. All that artificial fire has not stained the white radiance of the guardians of the night. They whirl steadfast and remote and sparkling, turning the snow to glistening ivory and the shadows to ebony, as they “quire to the bright-eyed seraphim.” And all night long (thoughts come strangely and incongruously mixed in this intoxicating air) the patient and laborious ice-man will be clearing up the rink, and sprinkling it through the dark hours, so that to-morrow you shall have a virgin field for your quavering rockers.
The most absorbed votary of quavering rockers must not mind an occasional violation of his frozen sanctuary by day as well as by night, for there are entertainments known as ice-gymkhanas that must from time to time be permitted to those more frivolous than he. In other words, he will come down to the rink on some fine morning with perhaps a new and illuminating theory that shall make all his difficulties with regard to rockers vanish like breath on a frosty morning, to find his ice desecrated by the presence of crowds in gouties, and shovels and potatoes and sacks and barrels. Eager young people will put other eager young people on the shovels and race against each other: they will pick up a series of potatoes singly, and see who can deposit them most speedily in a receptacle placed at the end of the line. They will have obstacle-races and climb through barrels, or more probably stick in them, they will perform every imaginable antic on a surface which renders those antics most perilous, and they will assuredly shout with laughter all the time, and cut up the ice in a manner that makes the grim skater’s heart to bleed. But it really is all great fun, and if he finds he cannot bear it he had better go for a walk until it is over. The best plan of all, however, when such things are going on is to join in them. The worst that can happen to you is that you are disqualified for some profoundly unsatisfactory reason.
But the main point for parents and guardians to remember is, that they will feel quite different, when they are at a sufficient altitude on a sunny day, from what they do when they are coming out of the twopenny tube into a London fog. An exhilaration, approaching, as I have said, to a sort of intoxication, will invade their stately limbs, and they will feel inclined to do all kinds of things which their sober and city minds tell them are silly and ridiculous. But then a sober and city mind, like the tubercle bacillus, cannot live in this enchanted atmosphere. Fortunately or unfortunately, it does not quite die, for it slowly resumes its activity when they have returned to Cromwell Road, and they will find that it is probably quite unimpaired by this temporary anæsthetic of the air at 4000 feet up in winter. They need not feel afraid of becoming schoolboys permanently again, or of behaving like the adorable Mr. Bultitude when his son had changed places with him in Mr. Anstey’s Vice-Versa. Their business capacities will be quite unimpaired when they get home: indeed they will very likely prove to have been brightened up by such experiences.
And already the year is on the turn again, and these foolish long summer days are beginning to get short. Very soon it will be time to settle whether we go to A——, or B——, or try that new place C——.... And then people speak well of D——, but on the other hand E——, which we went to three years ago, has got a new ice-run, and the rink has been enlarged. But there is more sun at F——, and even in that awful winter of 1911-1912, when Switzerland was a mere puddle, G—— held out against the thaw. But the hotels at H—— are very comfortable, and the ski-ing is good, though not so good as at I——.... That is the only Debating Society in which I enjoy taking a part.
Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co.
at Paul’s Work, Edinburgh
The original Drawings in colour by C. Fleming Williams reproduced in this book are for sale.