"I have telegraphed to Zurich...."
"I am expecting a telegram from Basle...."
"We hired a carriage from Tiraboschi to descend...."
"Frau Goertz has given up her places in the wagons-lits to me: she is returning to Italy by carriage from the Bernina...."
"If I am unable to find places in wagons-lits I shall descend to Chiavenna, and go from thence to the frontier at Chiasso."
Never had the Upper Engadine been so beautiful. Its surrounding colours and its breezes had indescribable charms in those last days of August. It seemed to change its aspect a hundred times, each more graceful than the other, it was a medley of the brightest colours, it appeared to be swimming in a divine, crystalline air, and to be poised amidst the most vivid freshness. So sensitive souls, hearts secretly pierced, spirits being poisoned by slow poison—some rare soul, some rare heart and spirit—at such exquisite beauty felt themselves trembling with a new, mysterious life, felt themselves in those last days healed of all their old bleeding wounds and freed from gall and bitterness, as if a powerful and unknown medicine had performed such a miracle. But when even for them the hour of departure drew near, a great regret, a great grief, and an immense nostalgia oppressed and suffocated their hearts.
But if by chance a long sigh of nostalgia for the Engadine land escaped their oppressed hearts, where they had found a balm for all their wounds, if this sigh became a word or an expression, scandalised, the crowd would turn and brutally tell the poor man or woman that it was ridiculous, yes, ridiculous, to want to remain even a single day longer. Brutally the crowd reduced to silence the timid man or tender woman who would still have liked, in those few beautiful September days, to console, heal, and free themselves amidst the grace, purity, and simplicity of the Engadine. Silently timid man and tender woman bowed the head, expressing all the grief of broken dreams, the nostalgia for things that would have consoled, healed, and freed them and which they must implacably leave.
Implacably the crowd bustled, racketing everywhere, with hurry, anxiety, and despair, to arrange its departure. In hotel rooms there was a dull and continuous shock of boxes being put down and lifted, of heavy luggage being filled and strapped, of opening and closing of wardrobes, with a continuous, nervous ringing of electric bells. The coming and going in corridors and salons of managers, waiters, chambermaids, servants, and porters was vertiginous; the offices of the hotels were in a continuous bustle, getting ready bills and cashing money at all hours; the porters no longer had a minute's peace, taking a hundred orders, at the same time, for a hundred things incidental to departure, and every evening, at the great desk of the head porter, on a long black board, written in chalk, were the numbers of the rooms which would be free on the following day, and the number of passengers who would be leaving. Joyfully, brutally, the crowd jostled before the blackboard and read there that a part of them, an ever greater part, would be leaving to-morrow by such and such a train, by such and such a post-carriage.
"Twenty-seven people left this morning."
"To-morrow, see, thirty-eight are leaving."