In the Mountains

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

The weather after all hasn't broken. We have had the thunderstorm and the one bad day, and then it cleared up. It didn't clear up back to heat again—this year there will be no more heat—but to a kind of cool, pure gold. All day yesterday it was clearing up, and towards evening there came a great wind and swept the sky clear during the night of everything but stars; and when I woke this morning there was the familiar golden patch on the wall again, and I knew the day was to be beautiful.

And so it has been, with the snow come much lower down the mountains, and the still air very fresh. Things sparkle; and one feels like some bright bubble of light oneself. Actually even Mrs. Barnes has almost been like that,—has been, for her, astonishingly, awe-inspiringly gay.

'Ah,' she said, standing on the terrace after breakfast, drawing in deep draughts of air, 'now I understand the expression so frequently used in descriptions of scenery. This air indeed is like champagne.'

'It does make one feel very healthy,' I said.

There were several things I wanted to say instead of this, things suggested by her remark, but I refrained. I mean to be careful now to let my communications with Mrs. Barnes be Yea, yea and Nay, nay—that is, straightforward and brief, with nothing whatever in them that might directly or indirectly lead to the encouragement of Dolly. Dolly has been trying to catch me alone. She has tried twice since Mrs. Barnes yesterday at tea told her I had asked them to stay on, but I have avoided her.

'Healthy?' repeated Mrs. Barnes. 'It makes one feel more than healthy. It goes to one's head. I can imagine it turning me quite dizzy—quite turning my head.'

And then she actually asked me a riddle—Mrs. Barnes asked a riddle, at ten o'clock in the morning, asked me, a person long since callous to riddles and at no time since six years old particularly appreciative of them.

Of course I answered wrong. Disconcerted, I impetuously hazarded Brandy as the answer, when it should have been Whisky; but really I think it was wonderful to have got even so near the right answer as Brandy. I won't record the riddle. It was old in Mrs. Barnes's youth, for she told me she had it from her father, who, she said, could enjoy a joke as heartily as she can herself.

But what was so surprising was that the effect of the crisp, sunlit air on Mrs. Barnes should be to engender riddles. It didn't do this to my pre-war guests. They grew young, but not younger than twenty. Mrs. Barnes to-day descended to the age of bibs. I never could have believed it of her. I never could have believed she would come so near what I can only call an awful friskiness. And it wasn't just this morning, in the first intoxication of the splendid new air; it has gone on like it all day. On the mountain slopes, slippery now and difficult to walk on because of the heavy rain of the thunderstorm, might have been seen this afternoon three figures, two black ones and a white one, proceeding for a space in a rather wobbly single file, then pausing in an animated group, then once more proceeding. When they paused it was because Mrs. Barnes had thought of another riddle. Dolly was very quick at the answers,—so quick that I suspected her of having been brought up on these very ones, as she no doubt was, but I cut a lamentable figure. I tried to make up for my natural incapacity by great goodwill. Mrs. Barnes's spirits were too rare and precious, I felt, not to be welcomed; and having failed in answers I desperately ransacked my memory in search of questions, so that I could ask riddles too.

But by a strange perversion of recollection I could remember several answers and not their questions. In my brain, on inquiry, were fixed quite firmly things like this,—obviously answers to what once had been riddles.