great boots: their little grey jackets faced with green, and their
green hats with the proud chamois-brush behind. They seemed to
stray about like lost souls, and the proud chamois-brush behind
their hats, this proud, cocky, perking-up tail, like a mountain-
buck with his tail up, was belied by the lost-soul look of the men,
as they loitered about with their hands shoved in the front pockets
of their trousers. Some women also were creeping about: peasant
women, in the funny little black hats that had thick gold under the
brim and long black streamers of ribbon, broad, black, water-wave
ribbon starting from a bow under the brim behind and streaming
right to the bottom of the skirt. These women, in their thick,
dark dresses with tight bodices and massive, heavy, full skirts,
and bright or dark aprons, strode about with the heavy stride of
the mountain women, the heavy, quick, forward-leaning motion. They
were waiting for the town-day to begin.
Hepburn had a knapsack on his back, with food for the day. But
bread was wanting. They found the door of the bakery open, and got
a loaf: a long, hot loaf of pure white bread, beautifully sweet
bread. It cost seventy kronen. To Hepburn it was always a mystery
where this exquisite bread came from, in a lost land.
In the little square where the clock stood were bunches of people,
and a big motor-omnibus, and a motor-car that would hold about
eight people. Hepburn had paid his seven hundred kronen for the
two tickets. Hannele tied up her head in a thin scarf and put on
her thick coat. She and Hepburn sat in front by the peaked driver.
And at seven o'clock away went the car, swooping out of the town,
past the handsome old Tyrolese Schloss, or manor, black-and-white,
with its little black spires pricking up, past the station, and
under the trees by the lakeside. The road was not good, but they
ran at a great speed, out past the end of the lake, where the reeds
grew, out into the open valley mouth, where the mountains opened in
two clefts. It was cold in the car. Hepburn buttoned himself up
to the throat and pulled his hat down on his ears. Hannele's scarf
fluttered. She sat without saying anything, erect, her face fine
and keen, watching ahead. From the deep Pinzgau Valley came the
river roaring and raging, a glacier river of pale, seething ice-
water. Over went the car, over the log bridge, darting towards the
great slopes opposite. And then a sudden immense turn, a swerve
under the height of the mountain-side, and again a darting lurch
forward, under the pear trees of the high-road, past the big old
ruined castle that so magnificently watched the valley mouth, and
the foaming river; on, rushing under the huge roofs of the
balconied peasant houses of a village, then swinging again to take
another valley mouth, there where a little village clustered all
black and white on a knoll, with a white church that had a black
steeple, and a white castle with black spires, and clustering,
ample black-and-white houses of the Tyrol. There is a grandeur
even in the peasant houses, with their great wide passage halls
where the swallows build, and where one could build a whole English
cottage.
So the motor-car darted up this new, narrow, wilder, more sinister
valley. A herd of almost wild young horses, handsome reddish
things, burst around the car, and one great mare with full flanks
went crashing up the road ahead, her heels flashing to the car,
while her foal whinneyed and screamed from behind. But no, she
could not turn from the road. On and on she crashed, forging
ahead, the car behind her. And then at last she did swerve aside,
among the thin alder trees by the wild riverbed.
'If it isn't a cow, it's a horse,' said the driver, who was thin
and weaselish and silent, with his ear-flaps over his ears.
But the great mare had shaken herself in a wild swerve, and
screaming and whinneying was plunging back to her foal. Hannele
had been frightened.
The car rushed on, through water-meadows, along a naked, white bit
of mountain road. Ahead was a darkness of mountain front and pine
trees. To the right was the stony, furious, lion-like river,
tawny-coloured here, and the slope up beyond. But the road for the
moment was swinging fairly level through the stunned water-meadows
of the savage valley. There were gates to open, and Hepburn jumped
down to open them, as if he were the footboy. The heavy Jews of
the wrong sort, seated behind, of course did not stir.
At a house on a knoll the driver sounded his horn, and out rushed
children crying Papa! Papa!--then a woman with a basket. A few
brief words from the weaselish man, who smiled with warm, manly
blue eyes at his children, then the car leaped forward. The whole
bearing of the man was so different when he was looking at his own
family. He could not even say thank you when Hepburn opened the
gates. He hated and even despised his human cargo of middle-class
people. Deep, deep is class hatred, and it begins to swallow all
human feeling in its abyss. So, stiff, silent, thin, capable, and
neuter towards his fares, sat the little driver with the flaps over
his ears, and his thin nose cold.
The car swept round, suddenly, into the trees: and into the ravine.
The river shouted at the bottom of a gulf. Bristling pine trees
stood around. The air was black and cold and forever sunless. The
motor-car rushed on, in this blackness under the rock-walls and the
fir trees.
Then it suddenly stopped. There was a huge motor-omnibus ahead,
drab and enormous-looking. Tourists and trippers of last night
coming back from the glacier. It stood like a great rock. And the
smaller motor-car edged past, tilting into the rock gutter under
the face of stone.
So, after a while of this valley of the shadow of death, lurching
in steep loops upwards, the motor-car scrambling wonderfully,
struggling past trees and rock upwards, at last they came to the
end. It was a huge inn or tourist hotel of brown wood: and here
the road ended in a little wide bay surrounded and overhung by
trees. Beyond was a garage and a bridge over a roaring river: and
always the overhung darkness of trees and the intolerable steep
slopes immediately above.
Hannele left her big coat. The sky looked blue above the gloom.
They set out across the hollow-sounding bridge, over the
everlasting mad rush of ice-water, to the immediate upslope of the
path, under dark trees. But a little old man in a sort of sentry-
box wanted fifty or sixty kronen: apparently for the upkeep of the
road, a sort of toll.
The other tourists were coming--some stopping to have a drink
first. The second omnibus had not yet arrived. Hannele and
Hepburn were the first two, treading slowly up that dark path,
under the trees. The grasses hanging on the rock face were still
dewy. There were a few wild raspberries, and a tiny tuft of
bilberries with bla
ck berries here and there, and a few tufts of
unripe cranberries. The many hundreds of tourists who passed up
and down did not leave much to pick. Some mountain harebells, like
bells of blue water, hung coldly glistening in their darkness.
Sometimes the hairy mountain-bell, pale-blue and bristling, stood
alone, curving his head right down, stiff and taut. There was an
occasional big, moist, lolling daisy.
So the two climbed slowly up the steep ledge of a road. This
valley was just a mountain cleft, cleft sheer in the hard, living
rock, with black trees like hair flourishing in this secret, naked
place of the earth. At the bottom of the open wedge for ever
roared the rampant, insatiable water. The sky from above was like
a sharp wedge forcing its way into the earth's cleavage, and that
eternal ferocious water was like the steel edge of the wedge, the
terrible tip biting in into the rocks' intensity. Who could have
thought that the soft sky of light, and the soft foam of water
could thrust and penetrate into the dark, strong earth? But so it
was. Hannele and Hepburn, toiling up the steep little ledge of a
road that hung half-way down the gulf, looked back, time after
time, back down upon the brown timbers and shingle roofs of the
hotel, that now, away below, looked damp and wedged in like
boulders. Then back at the next tourists struggling up. Then down
at the water, that rushed like a beast of prey. And then, as they
rose higher, they looked up also at the livid great sides of rock,
livid, bare rock that sloped from the sky-ridge in a hideous sheer
swerve downwards.
In his heart of hearts Hepburn hated it. He hated it, he loathed
it, it seemed almost obscene, this livid, naked slide of rock,
unthinkably huge and massive, sliding down to this gulf where
bushes grew like hair in the darkness and water roared. Above,
there were thin slashes of snow.
So the two climbed slowly on, up the eternal side of that valley,
sweating with the exertion. Sometimes the sun, now risen high,
shone full on their side of the gulley. Tourists were trickling
downhill too: two maidens with bare arms and bare heads and huge
boots: men tourists with great knapsacks and edelweiss in their
hats: giving Bergheil for a greeting. But the captain said Good-
day. He refused this Bergheil business. People swarming touristy
on these horrible mountains made him feel almost sick.
He and Hannele also were not in good company together. There was a
sort of silent hostility between them. She hated the effort of
climbing; but the high air, the cold in the air, the savage cat-
howling sound of the water, those awful flanks of livid rock, all
this thrilled and excited her to another sort of savageness. And
he, dark, rather slender and feline, with something of the physical
suavity of a delicate-footed race, he hated beating his way up the
rock, he hated the sound of the water, it frightened him, and the
high air hit him in the chest, like a viper.
'Wonderful! Wonderful!' she cried, taking great breaths in her
splendid chest.
'Yes. And horrible. Detestable,' he said.
She turned with a flash, and the high strident sound of the
mountain in her voice.
'If you don't like it,' she said, rather jeering, 'why ever did you
come?'
'I had to try,' he said.
'And if you don't like it,' she said, 'why should you try to spoil
it for me?'
'I hate it,' he answered.
They were climbing more into the height, more into the light, into
the open, in the full sun. The valley cleft was sinking below
them. Opposite was only the sheer, livid slide of the naked rock,
tipping from the pure sky. At a certain angle they could see away
beyond the lake lying far off and small, the wall of those other
rocks like a curtain of stone, dim and diminished to the horizon.
And the sky with curdling clouds and blue sunshine intermittent.
'Wonderful, wonderful, to be high up,' she said, breathing great
breaths.
'Yes,' he said. 'It IS wonderful. But very detestable. I want to
live near the sea-level. I am no mountain-topper.'
'Evidently not,' she said.
'Bergheil!' cried a youth with bare arms and bare chest, bare head,
terrific fanged boots, a knapsack and an alpenstock, and all the
bronzed wind and sun of the mountain snow in his skin and his
faintly bleached hair. With his great heavy knapsack, his rumpled
thick stockings, his ghastly fanged boots, Hepburn found him
repulsive.
'Guten Tag' he answered coldly.
'Gruss Gott,' said Hannele.
And the young Tannh�user, the young Siegfried, this young Balder
beautiful strode climbing down the rocks, marching and swinging
with his alpenstock. And immediately after the youth came a
maiden, with hair on the wind and her shirt-breast open, striding
in corduroy breeches, rumpled worsted stockings, thick boots, a
knapsack and an alpenstock. She passed without greeting. And our
pair stopped in angry silence and watched her dropping down the
mountain-side.
XV
Ah, well, everything comes to an end, even the longest up-climb.
So, after much sweat and effort and crossness, Hepburn and Hannele
emerged on to the rounded bluff where the road wound out of that
hideous great valley cleft into upper regions. So they emerged
more on the level, out of the trees as out of something horrible,
on to a naked, great bank of rock and grass.
'Thank the Lord!' said Hannele.
So they trudged on round the bluff, and then in front of them saw
what is always, always wonderful, one of those shallow, upper
valleys, naked, where the first waters are rocked. A flat,
shallow, utterly desolate valley, wide as a wide bowl under the
sky, with rock slopes and grey stone-slides and precipices all
round, and the zig-zag of snow-stripes and ice-roots descending,
and then rivers, streams and rivers rushing from many points
downwards, down out of the ice-roots and the snow-dagger-points,
waters rushing in newly-liberated frenzy downwards, down in
waterfalls and cascades and threads, down into the wide, shallow
bed of the valley, strewn with rocks and stones innumerable, and
not a tree, not a visible bush.
Only, of course, two hotels or restaurant places. But these no
more than low, sprawling, peasant-looking places lost among the
stones, with stones on their roofs so that they seemed just a part
of the valley bed. There was the valley, dotted with rock and
rolled-down stone, and these two house-places, and woven with
innumerable new waters, and one hoarse stone-tracked river in the
desert, and the thin road-track winding along the desolate flat,
past first one house, then the other, over one stream, then
another, on to the far rock-face above which the glacier seemed to
loll like some awful great tongue put out.
'Ah, it is wonderful!' he said, as if to himself.
And she looked quick
ly at his face, saw the queer, blank, sphinx-
look with which he gazed out beyond himself. His eyes were black
and set, and he seemed so motionless, as if he were eternal facing
these upper facts.
She thrilled with triumph. She felt he was overcome.
'It IS wonderful,' she said.
'Wonderful. And forever wonderful,' he said.
'Ah, in WINTER--' she cried.
His face changed, and he looked at her.
'In winter you couldn't get up here,' he said.
They went on. Up the slopes cattle were feeding: came that
isolated tong-tong-tong of cow-bells, dropping like the slow clink
of ice on the arrested air. The sound always woke in him a
primeval, almost hopeless melancholy. Always made him feel navr�.
He looked round. There was no tree, no bush, only great grey rocks
and pale boulders scattered in place of trees and bushes. But yes,
clinging on one side like a dark, close beard were the alpenrose
shrubs.
'In May,' he said, 'that side there must be all pink with
alpenroses.'
'I MUST come. I MUST come!' she cried.
There were tourists dotted along the road: and two tiny low carts
drawn by silky, long-eared mules. These carts went right down to
meet the motor-cars, and to bring up provisions for the Glacier
Hotel: for there was still another big hotel ahead. Hepburn was
happy in that upper valley, that first rocking cradle of early
water. He liked to see the great fangs and slashes of ice and snow
thrust down into the rock, as if the ice had bitten into the flesh
of the earth. And from the fang-tips the hoarse water crying its
birth-cry, rushing down.
By the turfy road and under the rocks were many flowers: wonderful
harebells, big and cold and dark, almost black, and seeming like
purple-dark ice: then little tufts of tiny pale-blue bells, as if
some fairy frog had been blowing spume-bubbles out of the ice: then
the bishops-crosier of the stiff, bigger, hairy mountain-bell: then
many stars of pale-lavender gentian, touched with earth colour: and
then monkshood, yellow, primrose yellow monkshood and sudden places
full of dark monkshood. That dark-blue, black-blue, terrible
colour of the strange rich monkshood made Hepburn look and look and
look again. How did the ice come by that lustrous blue-purple
intense darkness?--and by that royal poison?--that laughing-snake
gorgeousness of much monkshood.
XVI
By one of the loud streams, under a rock in the sun, with scented
minty or thyme flowers near, they sat down to eat some lunch. It
was about eleven o'clock. A thin bee went in and out the scented
flowers and the eyebright. The water poured with all the lust and
greed of unloosed water over the stones. He took a cupful for
Hannele, bright and icy, and she mixed it with the red Hungarian
wine.
Down the road strayed the tourists like pilgrims, and at the closed
end of the valley they could be seen, quite tiny, climbing the cut-
out road that went up like a stairway. Just by their movements you
perceived them. But on the valley-bed they went like rolling
stones, little as stones. A very elegant mule came stepping by,
following a middle-aged woman in tweeds and a tall, high-browed man
in knickerbockers. The mule was drawing a very amusing little
cart, a chair, rather like a round office-chair upholstered in red
velvet, and mounted on two wheels. The red velvet had gone gold
and orange and like fruit-juice, being old: really a lovely colour.
And the muleteer, a little shabby creature, waddled beside
excitedly.
'Ach' cried Hannele, 'that looks almost like before the war: almost
as peaceful.'
'Except that the chair is too shabby, and that they all feel
exceptional,' he remarked.
There in that upper valley there was no sense of peace. The rush
of the waters seemed like weapons, and the tourists all seemed in a
The Captain's Dol Page 8
