"It's exactly," said I, talking of the compartments of the diligence, "as if Isabel and Dicky had the first floor front, momma and poppa the dining room, and you and I the second floor back."
It was one of those things that one lives to repent if one survives them five seconds; but my remorse was immediately swallowed up in consequences. I do not propose to go into the details of Mr. Mafferton's second attempt upon my insignificant hand—to be precise, I wear fives and a quarter—but he began by saying that he thought we could do better than that, meaning the second floor back, and he mentioned Park Lane. He also said that ever since Dicky, doubtless before his affections had become involved, had told him that there was a possibility of my changing my mind—I was nearly false to Dicky at this point—he had been giving the matter his best consideration, and he had finally decided that it was only fair that I should have an opportunity of doing so. These were not his exact words, but I can be quite sure of my impression. We were trotting past the lake at Maloja when this came upon me, and when I reflected that I owed it about equally to poppa and to Dicky Dod I felt that I could have personally chastised them—could have slapped them—both. What I longed to do with Mr. Mafferton was to hurl him, figuratively speaking, down an abyss, but that would have been to send him into Mrs. Portheris's beckoning arms next morning, and I had little faith in any floral hat and pink bun once its mamma's commands were laid upon it. I thought of my cradle companion—not tenderly, I confess—and told Mr. Mafferton that I didn't know what I had done to deserve such an honour a second time, and asked him if he had properly considered the effect on Isabel. I added that I fancied Dicky was generalising about American girls changing their minds, but I would try and see if I had changed mine and would let him know in six days, at Harwich. Any decision made on this side of the Channel might so easily be upset. And this I did knowing quite well that Dicky and Isabel and I were all to elope from Boulogne, Dicky and Isabel for frivolity and I for propriety; for this had been arranged. In writing a description of our English tour I do not wish to exculpate myself in any particular.
We arrived late at St. Moritz, and the little German, on a very fraternal footing, was still talking as the party descended from the intérieur. He spoke of the butterflies the day before in Pontresina, and he laughed with delight as he recounted.
"Vorty maybe der vas, vifty der vas, mit der diligence vlying along; und der brittiest of all I catch; he vill come at my nose"
CHAPTER XXIV.
Leaving out the scenery—the Senator declares that nothing spoils a book of travels like scenery—the impressions of St. Moritz which remain with me have something of the quality, for me, of the illustrations in a French novel. I like to consult them; they are so crisp and daintily defined and isolated and individual. Yet I can only write about an upper class German mamma eating brodchen and honey with three fair square daughters, young, younger, youngest, and not a flaxen hair mislaid among them, and the intelligent accuracy with which they looked out of the window and said that it was a horse, the horse was lame, and it was a pity to drive a lame horse. Or about the two American ladies from the south, creeping, wrapped up in sealskins, along the still white road from the Hof to the Bad, and saying one to the other, "Isn't it nice to feel the sun on yo' back?" Or about the curio shops on the ridge where the politest little Frenchwomen endeavour to persuade you that you have come to the very top of the Engadine for the purpose of buying Japanese candlesticks and Italian scarves to carry down again. It was all so clear and sharp and still at St. Moritz; everything drew a double significance from its height and its loneliness. But, as poppa says, a great deal of trouble would be saved if people who feel that they can't describe things would be willing to consider the alternative of leaving them alone; and I will only dwell on St. Moritz long enough to say that it nearly shattered one of Mr. Mafferton's most cherished principles. Never in his life before, he said, had he felt inclined to take warm water in his bath in the morning. He made a note of the temperature of his tub to send to the Times. "You never can tell," he said, "the effect these little things may have." I was beginning to be accustomed to the effect they had on me.
Before we got to Coire the cool rushing night had come and the glaciers had blotted themselves out. I find a mere note against Coire to the effect that it often rains when you arrive there, and also that it is a place in which you may count on sleeping particularly sound if you come by diligence; but there is no reason why I should not mention that it was under the sway of the Dukes of Swabia until 1268, as momma wishes me to do so. We took the train there for Constance, and between Coire and Constance, on the Bodensee, occurred Rorshach and Romanshorn; but we didn't get out, and, as momma says, there was nothing in the least individual about their railway stations. We went on that Bodensee, however, I remember with animosity, taking a small steamer at Constance for Neuhausen. It was a gray and sulky Bodensee, full of little dull waves and a cold head wind that never changed its mind for a moment. Isabel and I huddled together for comfort on the very hard wooden seat that ran round the deck, and the depth of our misery may be gathered from the fact that, when the wind caught Isabel's floral hat under the brim and cast it suddenly into that body of water, neither of us looked round! Mrs. Portheris was very much annoyed at our unhappy indifference. She implied that it was precisely to enable Isabel to stop a steamer on the Bodensee in an emergency of this sort that she had had her taught German. Dicky told me privately that if it had happened a week before he would have gone overboard in pursuit, for the sake of business, without hesitation, but, under the present happy circumstances, he preferred the prospect of buying a new hat. Nothing else actually transpired during the afternoon, though there were times when other events seemed as precipitant, to most of us, as upon the tossing Atlantic, and we made port without having realised anything about the Bodensee, except that we would rather not be on it.
Neuhausen was the port, but Schaffhausen was of course the place, two or three dusty miles along a river the identity of which revealed itself to Mrs. Portheris through the hotel omnibus windows as an inspiration. "Do we all fully understand," she demanded, "that we are looking upon the Rhine?" And we endeavoured to do so, though the Senator said that if it were not so intimately connected with the lake we had just been delivered from he would have felt more cordial about it. I should like to have it understood that relations were hardly what might be called strained at this time between the Senator and myself. There were subjects which we avoided, and we had enough regard for our dignity, respectively, not to drop into personalities whatever we did, but we had a modus vivendi, we got along. Dicky maintained a noble and pained reserve, giving poppa hours of thought, out of which he emerged with the almost visible reflection that a Wick never changed his mind.
There was a garden with funny little flowers in it which went out of fashion in America about twenty years ago. There was also a châlet in the garden, where we saw at once that we could buy cuckoo clocks and edelweiss and German lace if we wanted to. There was a big hotel full of people speaking strange languages—by this time we all sympathised with Mr. Mafferton in his resentment of foreigners in Continental hotels; as he said, one expected them to do their travelling in England. There were the "Laufen" foaming down the valley under the dining room windows, there were the Swiss waitresses in short petticoats and velvet bodices and white chemisettes, and at the dinner table, sitting precisely opposite, there were the Malts. Mr. Malt, Mrs. Malt, Emmeline Malt, and Miss Callis, not one of them missing. The Malts whom we had left at Rome, left in the same hotel with Count Filgiatti, and to some purpose apparently, for seated attentively next to Mrs. Malt there also was that diminutive nobleman.