“Were you solitary?”
“Very,” Anne said, smiling. “I brought myself up, and very badly. Look behind. The mountains are closing; now that they have let us out, they shut their portals.”
She was silent again, and Wareham, quick to read her moods, humoured her. The boat moved slowly along, slowly it seemed, when the great surroundings filled the eye. The heavens were blue, but here and there a white cloud drifted lazily, or caught the mountain snow-beds, and curled round them, like a vaporous reminder of their fate. The lovely vivid green of the young summer crept up and down the mighty hills, softening the rude scars of centuries until they looked no more than delicate and shadowy indentations; the stern granite blossomed into tender rose and grey, and the water-world below gave back all this and more. Every now and then the men who were rowing exchanged a word: they had grave steadfast faces.
“Talk to them,” Anne said suddenly at last. “Ask them about their lives.” Wareham struggled obediently.
“My questions are obliged to be simple,” he said. “And I am even more anxious the answers should be. A universal language. Is it a dream?”
“We are pleased to infer that it is our own which will serve the purpose, but by the time the idea has developed into fact it may be Japanese.”
“To become a ruling nation they will have been forced to adopt ours.”
“Oh, British arrogance! However, I do not wish it. Uniformity is always dull, and I would rather suffer shame from my own ignorance than have all the world patted down to one dead level. There is dignity in the unknown. When I hear these men talk, I can’t help imagining that what they say would be worth hearing, if I could only understand, though probably it is about nothing more valuable than as to how many gulden they may get for their hay, if, indeed, any of them ever sell anything. Do ask them that.”
“I can’t,” Wareham confessed. “My conversation is chiefly made up of nouns and notes of interrogation.”
“Well, what have you extracted?”