Chapter XXI

In half an hour Mr. Bruno and his daughter were on the jetty watching the boat approaching from Treib. Their labelled luggage waited by them. It was a sunny morning now that the clouds and mists had dispersed, but Daphne felt cold and at length put on the white coat which had hung over her arm. She gathered it tight about her for warmth and comfort. Often she looked back at the great hotel and the windows that had been hers and his, and the horse-chestnuts about the tennis-court, and the long terrace where they had sat in the evenings. If was a relief when the boat came alongside and they had to bustle with the crowd on to its decks. They mounted to the higher deck of the first-class passengers, and Daphne, passing the saloon and the engines down in the well, saw with a pang that the ship was a twin to the pleasure-steamer of the night before. There were the same "_Avis aux Voyageurs_" in the alley-ways, and a stairway to the deck exactly similar to that down which Henry, ten or eleven hours earlier, had taken her in search of coffee. Perhaps it was the same boat. On deck she walked straight to a seat in the stern, where she sat sideways, with her elbow on the seat's back, her face in the cup of her hand, and her eyes towards the hotel. She gathered the coat farther about her.

The siren sounded and the boat swung away from the pier. The engines throbbed and the paddles chuffed out on to the lake, while Daphne stared at the hotel to watch it recede. Fast now it diminished and lost its exactness and detail. There was a pulling at her heart and throat, and warmth behind her ears and over the skin of her face.

"The world is small and time is big. Who knows what may happen? ... Oh, there's nothing can happen."

She turned and commenced to talk cheerfully to her father and kept it up for quite a while, till she felt caught in it, anxious to escape from it, and to lose herself again in her pain. Her answers became abstracted, and her father, saying something about the view from the bows, got up and strolled away, doubtless on purpose. Once more her chin went into her hand and her elbow rested on the seat's back, and she stared in the ship's wake--not at the hotel, for it had disappeared, but at the twin points of the Mythen, which could still be seen. The boat plied from station to station along the lake; from Treib to Gersau and Beckenried and Vitznau and Weggis. Each time it left the station's pier the gazing crowd waved to the departing steamer, and the people on board, whether or not they had friends ashore, waved back. At first Daphne had no heart to wave. Then she remembered how she prided herself on her courage and waved to them regularly.

At Alpnachstad they took the train to go over the Brunig Pass. Their car was an observation car with galleries for viewing the scenery. A kindly conductor came and told them that if they wanted to see the best of the valleys and the pass they should sit on the right of the carriage. So, opposite her father, with her face towards the train's progress, she sat in her corner, her elbow on the window out of which she stared. Sometimes her father ventured a sportive remark, and she looked up and answered with a smile. Sometimes she sank so deep into the gulf of despair that she shook her shoulders and told herself she must have courage. Then instantly, at the effort of her will, all the pain would disappear, and she would want to whistle or hum.... But then she missed the beloved pain. It was better to suffer it than to annihilate it with the will.

So she let herself fall back, trying to see again Henry's face and tracing in her imagination the line of his hair, brow, nose and chin.

"Isn't it beastly cold?" she said to her father.

"Not at all. You're getting the first breath from the snow-fields."

"Well, I feel shivery," she laughed, and snuggled farther into her coat.

To herself she was thinking, "I wonder if I'm going to be ill. Didn't Dante nearly die when he lost Beatrice? If I'm ill I hope Henry hears of it."

There were two English women in the carriage who were discussing with enthusiasm their climbs and excursions while staying at Lucerne. Daphne listened to their talk. She envied their capacity to find happiness in scenery and strange buildings; and at the same time she was sorry for them, since their holiday had given them no such ecstasy as hers.

All the while her father's sham wall of naturalness was the very proof of his understanding; and through this humbug tacitly agreed upon, she felt the strength of his support. She could feel his unspoken love and rest in it. Once she even caught herself playing up to the part of a cruelly wounded girl; and it struck her as strange and horrible that in the midst of a mental pain which was the most awful that had ever come to her, she could yet be pleased with it as an object of interest to some one else--and to some one, moreover, who was kind.

There was a pendulum swing in and out of despair. Sometimes she felt she would be able to get rid of her harrowing love and that already the healing had begun; she would take an interest in the train's slow climb among the pines, with the valley far below; and then the sudden memory of some movement of Henry's mouth would make her start and cry inwardly, "Never again to see him.... Oh, it won't be thought.... I can't think it."

At Brunig the train stopped for half an hour to allow the passengers to have lunch at the station restaurant.

"I don't think I want any," said she. "I don't know why it is. Perhaps it's the change in the air."

"Well, have a good stiff _café-au-lait_," said Mr. Bruno.

Back in the train to proceed to Brienz. She relapsed into her corner seat and her thoughts. The people on the platforms as the train arrived relieved her mind by occupying it. She studied the middle-aged married couples with their children. Too old for first love, these people; they had to exchange this emotion for the love of children. And that wasn't the same; it might be nobler, but it couldn't be so wonderful to suffer and to enjoy. None the less, she found herself looking forward to her own middle age, when all the wounds of love would be healed by time and she could smile and be gay and pleasant. Once she saw a tweed shoulder and the back of a head that gave her a stab and a shudder--it was like Henry's. But no. At that moment he was climbing towards the Furka Pass.... Never probably to be met with again.

At Interlaken they crossed to the Bernese Oberland Railway, and this train dragged them to Grindelwald. The snow caps and shawls of the Jungfrau, the Eiger and the Monch came into view. There was a new bracing freshness in the air. And she thought:

"I must get well here. I must drink in this tonic air and make a real holiday of my stay. I'll have some really good weeks."

They were at their station, and she jumped up, feeling quite natural and lively, with only a dull memory of some recent anguish. Immediately she drew back about her the pain she had thrown off. "Oh, not this annihilation of feeling," she told herself as she stepped on to the busy platform. "I would rather feel..."

"Now, then," said her father, laying down a bag and looking for his tickets. "Where the devil----?"

But she, holding her properties, was thinking, "I can't stand it. Never will I do what I've often fancied I'd like to do--what I tried to do with Roger--try to make men love me whether I love them or not. The pain is too awful. I wouldn't give it to any one...."

She followed her father through the exit of the station and up the glaring gravel path of the hotel.

She was shown to her room, and this changed place of sleeping, with its different furniture, stressed her exile from the story of Brunnen. She stood there, staring at the snow-line of the mountains. Soon the porter brought her trunks and laid them on the trestle support and on a chair. Mechanically she opened one and began to take out her dresses. Each carried a memory of some evening on the terrace at Brunnen.

Having hung them mechanically in the wardrobe, she stopped unpacking and stood again to stare vacantly before her. She hardly knew whether she was thinking or whether she had suspended thought; whether this was the uttermost despair or an atrophy of feeling. Once she heard herself saying, "O God, give me some rest--some rest from all this...."