Miss May Ford and Miss Clara James were seated in the outside, covered vestibule of the Hôtel Edelweiss which was all adorned with flowers; they were seated at a table and were taking tea placidly and waiting. Two men were with them; one was Massimo Granata, the Italian, one of the oldest lovers of the mountains and sojourners in the Engadine, with his face of an old child, that is rickety and ill, where above the yellowishness of the rugged skin, above the scanty, colourless beard and bony cheek-bones, only the eyes had a ray of divine goodness, while his awkward body, badly dressed in a coarse grey mountain suit, abandoned itself on a seat as if disjointed, while his knotted, shrunken hands were sorting bunches of fresh edelweiss on a table and making nosegays of them; the other was Paul Léon, an Italian by origin, whose family must have been called Leone at Perugia, whence he came, but which had been changed into Léon after living thirty or forty years in France—Paul Léon, the French poet, much discussed and much admired for his lofty genius, his pride, and his wit, now of a cutting irony, now benevolent. At Sils Maria they found Miss May Ford, with a tender and sensible soul beneath a cold appearance, and Miss Clara James, the daughter of England's greatest spiritualist, an illustrious philosopher and poet who had died three years previously, but who was not dead to his daughter, since she spoke with him every night or believed she spoke with him, and she had remained an old maid so as to be able to have communication with the world of spirits; Massimo Granata, who every day made long walks, had climbed the most impenetrable paths and scrambled up the steepest rocks, solely through this invincible love of his of the mountains and his loving quest of mountain flowers; and Paul Léon, the friend of Miss James, who despised the follies of the sojourners at St. Moritz Bad and scoffed at the cosmopolitans of the "Palace" and the "Kulm," and who in his poetic pride lodged in a little inn at Sils Maria and every day went to watch the little window where Friedrich Nietzsche had worked for fourteen springs and summers in a very modest furnished house, and in a very modest room of that house, Paul Léon who loved the country and that district where he had come for years, every year withdrawing from the advance of the ever-invading crowd from district to district in the search for solitude, who loved Massimo Granata as an ideal type of moral beauty, and admired Miss James for her noble, daughterly hallucination.
The circle grew larger when Lilian and Lucio arrived; the greetings were sympathetic, for all knew and understood. May Ford offered tea, as was natural, to Lucio, who to please her accepted, and to Lilian, who refused sweetly. Massimo Granata offered Lilian a large nosegay of edelweiss, gathered two hours ago not far from the glacier of Fexthal, gathered with his fleshless, rickety hands that had such soft gestures, as he touched the flowers gathered after a four hours' walk to "Edelweisshalde." Lilian pressed and immersed her rather too heated face in those delicate, glacial flowers, like stars, as if to seek there a refuge for her ardour. And scoffing, gracious, efficient Paul Léon, who had been Lucio Sabini's friend for years, incited him to fence in a dialogue and a diatribe against all the people who come to live a life à outrance in a land of simplicity and peace, against the snobs who nowadays penetrated everywhere, who climbed the virgin heights and disturbed the sky and earth and waters of the Engadine. Paul Léon, a little mocking, a little serious, took Lucio Sabini, since he was fashionable, a born aristocrat, and because of the surroundings in which he lived, and as an annual frequenter of all the great cosmopolitan meeting-places, for a representative of all that world écœurant, dégôutant, oui, dégôutant—il n'y a pas d'autre mot. To his amazement Lucio Sabini was silent and smiled, without defending that society of fictitious and real millionaires, of real Princes and Serene Highnesses, whose kingdoms are as large as kerchiefs, of false beautiful women, of false rich women—everything false, everything artificial, everything sham up there in a land of truth and purity. Lucio, as if absorbed, made no replies. At a certain point when Paul Léon cursed, with a sarcastic and refined curse, the lie of those people, whose impetuous and atrocious motto was, Evviva La Vita, Lucio started and replied simply:
"Vous avez raison, mon ami."
Paul Léon gave a fleeting glance at Lilian Temple and smiled.
CHAPTER XII
On the golf links that extend from the extremity of the Hôtel Kulm, climbing and descending the whole of the hill of Charnadüras, and which are so green that not even the players' feet have succeeded in making them less green, early in the afternoon the slow, strange parties of golfers kept appearing, to the wonderment of bystanders who did not understand the game, as they leaned over the little hurdles and watched with staring eyes which at last became tired and annoyed at understanding nothing. They kept appearing, to the surprise of wayfarers who stopped a moment to see a man in white shirt-sleeves or in a bright flannel waistcoat with long sleeves, advancing along the course, sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely, holding his club in his hand, stopping as he brandished it in an aimless blow, and then resuming his way, followed always by a boy who carried, by a shoulder-strap, a leather bag, which seemed like a pagan quiver; a silent, patient boy, who regulated each step to that of the player, who crouched sometimes as he did, and finally vanished in his wake. Continuously from the green beneath the great tent of the Golf Club, where the inexpert remained to take lessons under the direction of two or three professionals, the players started whither the game and their more or less skill led them, and their rough outlines grew less and less in the far distance, till at times the links, or the horizon, became perfectly deserted, as if no players existed, as if they had been dissolved by the air or swallowed by the earth. The spectators who had come, as if on some doubtful invitation, to see a game of golf, saw the man and woman disappear without understanding the reason, and shrugging their shoulders they departed, laughing at and mocking golfers, particularly the Germans, who laughed among themselves and with their wives; more especially because it was an English game the Germans found it idiotic, itiote, as they pronounced it, when they wished to talk French. And the wayfarers, after a minute of contemplation and waiting, went again on their way, especially as they read on certain wooden posts the notice: "Prenez garde aux balles du golf." Balls? Where were the balls? How? The golfers, when they made a stroke, seemed to be assailing the air as if with a sudden movement of madness, and afterwards they looked like solitary vagabonds who were walking without a fixed goal, in spite of the respectful and silent companionship, at ten paces distance, of the urchin laden with the bag of clubs.
Those who played in the early afternoon were truly solitary lovers of that curious sport which obliges one to walk much in silence, in a sustained and concentrated attention, in the open country, in a peculiar search for a ball and one's opponent, in a broad horizon, neither feeling heat nor cold, exercising not only the muscles, but even a little—really a little—the intellect. They were great solitaries, who fled from society because they frequented her too much at other times of their day; great solitaries who loved contact with the open air and fields and woods, in contrast with the confined, heavy life they were forced to lead elsewhere; great solitaries who for a secret reason, sad, perhaps, or tragic, but secret and dissembled, now hated man and woman; great solitaries whose age and experience had divorced them from games of love, of vanity, and perhaps of ambition. In fact, the early golfers were the real, keen golfers, and for the most part middle-aged men and women. Among such were the Comte de Buchner, an Austrian diplomat, a pupil of Metternich, who perceived but did not wish to confess the end of the diplomatic legend, the end of a policy made by ambassadors, a septuagenarian who already felt himself dead amongst his ancestors; the Baron de Loewy, from London, of the powerful Loewy bank, who sometimes held in his hand the whole of European finance, a handsome, robust man with white moustaches, full of spirit, who passed hours out of doors at golf, and who came there to find equilibrium for his winter life as a great banker; Madame Lesnoy, a woman of sixty-five, who had made her fortune thirty years ago, and though une grande bourgeoise, had married her sons and daughters to the greatest names in European heraldry, and who now had nothing else to do but play golf by day and bridge by night; the Marquis de Cléan, whose wife had been killed two years ago with her lover in an hotel at Montreux, a story which tortured his life of worldly scepticism and over which he dared not feign cynicism; the Contessa di Anagni, of the best society of Rome, who had been loved by a King and had been unable to fix the heart of the volatile sovereign; Max and Ludwig Freytag, for whom Karl Ehbehard, the great doctor, had ordered this exercise, as being excellent to stimulate their weakened temper; the Comtesse Fulvia Gioia, who thus even better preserved her health and mature beauty, like that of sappy, ripe fruit; and so many others who at two and three o'clock deserted their rooms and hotels and directed themselves to the links and shortly afterwards disappeared in every direction—great solitaries, true golfers.
Towards half-past four, in the meadow which skirts the high road from the Dorf and extends beneath the terrace of the Golf Club House, in that meadow which was almost like a stage, the players increased in number, in couples and groups, not going far-away, always returning to the meadow, where at that evening hour there was a pretence of playing golf. It was a theatre whose pit was the Dorf high road with its footpath and wall, behind which people who were passing stopped to watch, whose big and little boxes were the big and little terraces of the Golf Club, where tea was taken from half-past four to six. The keen and serious players had been away for two hours and perhaps had returned. The make-believe players at tea-time represented the comedy of the game under the eyes of a hundred spectators, turning continually to the terraces, greeting and smiling at a friend and beginning with an important air to hit mightily at a golf-ball which never left the ground, because they either missed it or gave it a laughable little hit.
Not far-away, in the spacious tennis-courts, where from the 18th August to the 24th the Engadine Cup was contested in the Tournament, games of tennis, singles and doubles, proceeded at every hour, from lunch-time till the evening. Truly, tennis was played everywhere, at every hour, by hundreds of enthusiasts throughout the Bad; in front and behind the hotels, and everywhere one went, in the beautiful broad roads of the Bad, amongst the beautiful broad gardens of the Hôtel du Lac, around the "Kurhaus," around the "Victoria," appeared courts with players of both sexes, dressed in white, and the fatiguing exclamation was to be heard—"Play!" But where this passion became delirious was down below at the Tennis Tournament grounds near the "Kulm." Still, the tennis-court, like the golf links, became a theatrical scene towards half-past four in the afternoon. At that hour, on the left side of the Hôtel Kulm, the tea-tables, already set and decorated with flowers, were placed in the broad space which borders the courts. People began to climb from the Bad and to arrive from the other hotels and villas of the Dorf. Everywhere the crowd increased; some of the tables which had been placed together held twenty or thirty persons. The usual German element came and mingled with the great ladies and great snobs, their imitators, attired curiously, wearing rough garments and dusty boots, with a proud, mocking smile, as they talked loudly in German, and forcibly occupied the best seats, brutally turning their shoulders to the ladies, and sometimes smoking pipes. Play went on, but they were show games of young maidens who wished to be seen and admired, of women who affected the pose of sport after having tried so many poses. There were games as of a theatrical performance played by actors, if we may say so, for whom tennis was a pretext and an excuse for chatting and talking at liberty, for isolating themselves, for donning a different dress, for making acquaintances, and especially for showing themselves to all the princesses, marchionesses, ladies, and serene highnesses. That day in particular there was a game of great parade, because as Katinka Orloff, a beautiful young Russian of twenty, elegant and robust, the best player of the season, and champion of the Engadine for two years in succession, was retiring after having played a great deal in practice for the Tournament, an intermediary, an Austrian Baron, came to tell her that Her Imperial and Royal Highness, the Archduchess Maria Vittoria, desired to play with her, naturally only to learn, for she was so much weaker. Being very tired, the Russian hesitated for a moment, then she accepted.