第44章 THE FOURTH(17)

I stared stockishly at the girl, who passed with an indifferent face.

That sticks in my mind as a picture remains in a room, it has kept there bright and fresh as a thing seen yesterday, for twenty years....

I flirted hesitatingly once or twice with comely serving girls, and was a little ashamed lest Willersley should detect the keen interest I took in them, and then as we came over the pass from Santa Maria Maggiore to Cannobio, my secret preoccupation took me by surprise and flooded me and broke down my pretences.

The women in that valley are very beautiful--women vary from valley to valley in the Alps and are plain and squat here and divinities five miles away--and as we came down we passed a group of five or six of them resting by the wayside.Their burthens were beside them, and one like Ceres held a reaping hook in her brown hand.She watched us approaching and smiled faintly, her eyes at mine.

There was some greeting, and two of them laughed together.

We passed.

"Glorious girls they were," said Willersley, and suddenly an immense sense of boredom enveloped me.I saw myself striding on down that winding road, talking of politics and parties and bills of parliament and all sorts of dessicated things.That road seemed to me to wind on for ever down to dust and infinite dreariness.I knew it for a way of death.Reality was behind us.

Willersley set himself to draw a sociological moral."I'm not so sure," he said in a voice of intense discriminations, "after all, that agricultural work isn't good for women.""Damn agricultural work!" I said, and broke out into a vigorous cursing of all I held dear."Fettered things we are!" I cried."Iwonder why I stand it!"

"Stand what?"

"Why don't I go back and make love to those girls and let the world and you and everything go hang? Deep breasts and rounded limbs--and we poor emasculated devils go tramping by with the blood of youth in us!...""I'm not quite sure, Remington," said Willersley, looking at me with a deliberately quaint expression over his glasses, "that picturesque scenery is altogether good for your morals."That fever was still in my blood when we came to Locarno.

Along the hot and dusty lower road between the Orrido of Traffiume and Cannobio Willersley had developed his first blister.And partly because of that and partly because there was a bag at the station that gave us the refreshment of clean linen and partly because of the lazy lower air into which we had come, we decided upon three or four days' sojourn in the Empress Hotel.

We dined that night at a table-d'hote, and I found myself next to an Englishwoman who began a conversation that was resumed presently in the hotel lounge.She was a woman of perhaps thirty-three or thirty-four, slenderly built, with a warm reddish skin and very abundant fair golden hair, the wife of a petulant-looking heavy-faced man of perhaps fifty-three, who smoked a cigar and dozed over his coffee and presently went to bed."He always goes to bed like that," she confided startlingly."He sleeps after all his meals.Inever knew such a man to sleep."

Then she returned to our talk, whatever it was.

We had begun at the dinner table with itineraries and the usual topographical talk, and she had envied our pedestrian travel."My husband doesn't walk," she said."His heart is weak and he cannot manage the hills."There was something friendly and adventurous in her manner; she conveyed she liked me, and when presently Willersley drifted off to write letters our talk sank at once to easy confidential undertones.

I felt enterprising, and indeed it is easy to be daring with people one has never seen before and may never see again.I said I loved beautiful scenery and all beautiful things, and the pointing note in my voice made her laugh.She told me I had bold eyes, and so far as I can remember I said she made them bold."Blue they are," she remarked, smiling archly."I like blue eyes." Then I think we compared ages, and she said she was the Woman of Thirty, "George Moore's Woman of Thirty."I had not read George Moore at the time, but I pretended to understand.

That, I think, was our limit that evening.She went to bed, smiling good-night quite prettily down the big staircase, and I and Willersley went out to smoke in the garden.My head was full of her, and I found it necessary to talk about her.So I made her a problem in sociology."Who the deuce are these people?" I said, and how do they get a living? They seem to have plenty of money.He strikes me as being--Willersley, what is a drysalter? I think he's a retired drysalter."Willersley theorised while I thought of the woman and that provocative quality of dash she had displayed.The next day at lunch she and I met like old friends.A huge mass of private thinking during the interval had been added to our effect upon one another.We talked for a time of insignificant things.

"What do you do," she asked rather quickly, "after lunch? Take a siesta?""Sometimes," I said, and hung for a moment eye to eye.

We hadn't a doubt of each other, but my heart was beating like a steamer propeller when it lifts out of the water.

"Do you get a view from your room?" she asked after a pause.

"It's on the third floor, Number seventeen, near the staircase.My friend's next door."She began to talk of books.She was interested in Christian Science, she said, and spoke of a book.I forget altogether what that book was called, though I remember to this day with the utmost exactness the purplish magenta of its cover.She said she would lend it to me and hesitated.

Wlllersley wanted to go for an expedition across the lake that afternoon, but I refused.He made some other proposals that Irejected abruptly." I shall write in my room," I said.

"Why not write down here?"