The Passionate Friends
common purpose at all at that conference, no proposal to hold us
together. So much of it was like bleating on a hillside....
I wanted a holiday badly, and then came this war crisis and I felt
unable to go away for any length of time. Even bleating it seemed to me
was better than acquiescence in a crime against humanity. So to get
heart to bleat at Milan I snatched at ten days in the Swiss mountains en
route. A tour with some taciturn guide involving a few middling climbs
and glacier excursions seemed the best way of recuperating. I had never
had any time for Switzerland since my first exile there years ago. I
took the advice of a man in the club whose name I now forget--if ever I
knew it, a dark man with a scar--and went up to the Schwarzegg Hut above
Grindelwald, and over the Strahlegg to the Grimsel. I had never been up
into the central mass of the Bernese Oberland before, and I was amazed
and extraordinarily delighted by the vast lonely beauty of those
interminable uplands of ice. I wished I could have lingered up there.
But that is the tragedy of those sunlit desolations; one may not stay;
one sees and exclaims and then looks at a watch. I wonder no one has
ever taken an arctic equipment up into that wilderness, and had a good
healing spell of lonely exaltation. I found the descent from the
Strahlegg as much of a climb as I was disposed to undertake; for an hour
we were coming down frozen snow that wasn't so much a slope as a
slightly inclined precipice....
From the Grimsel I went over the Rhone glacier to the inn on the Furka
Pass, and then, paying off my guide and becoming frankly a pedestrian, I
made my way round by the Schöllenen gorge to Goeschenen, and over the
Susten Joch to the Susten Pass and Stein, meaning to descend to
Meiringen.
But I still had four days before I went on to Italy, and so I decided to
take one more mountain. I slept at the Stein inn, and started in the
morning to do that agreeable first mountain of all, the Titlis, whose
shining genial head attracted me. I did not think a guide necessary, but
a boy took me up by a track near Gadmen, and left me to my Siegfried map
some way up the great ridge of rocks that overlooks the Engstlen Alp. I
a little overestimated my mountaineering, and it came about that I was
benighted while I was still high above the Joch Pass on my descent. Some
of this was steep and needed caution. I had to come down slowly with my
folding lantern, in which a reluctant candle went out at regular
intervals, and I did not reach the little inn at Engstlen Alp until long
after eleven at night. By that time I was very tired and hungry.
They told me I was lucky to get a room, only one stood vacant; I should
certainly not have enjoyed sleeping on a billiard table after my day's
work, and I ate a hearty supper, smoked for a time, meditated emptily,
and went wearily to bed.
But I could not sleep. Usually, I am a good sleeper, but ever and again
when I have been working too closely or over-exerting myself I have
spells of wakefulness, and that night after perhaps an hour's heavy
slumber I became thinly alert and very weary in body and spirit, and I
do not think I slept again. The pain in my leg that the panther had torn
had been revived by the day's exertion. For the greater part of my life
insomnia has not been disagreeable to me. In the night, in the
stillness, one has a kind of detachment from reality, one floats there
without light, without weight, feeling very little of one's body. One
has a certain disembodiment and one can achieve a magnanimity of
thought, forgiveness and self-forgetfulness that are impossible while
the body clamors upon one's senses. But that night, because, I suppose,
I was so profoundly fatigued, I was melancholy and despondent. I could
feel again the weight of the great beast upon me as he clawed me down
and I clung--desperately, in that interminable instant before he lost
his hold....
Yes, I was extraordinarily wretched that night. I was filled with
self-contempt and self-disgust. I felt that I was utterly weak and vain,
and all the pretensions and effort of my life mere florid, fruitless
pretensions and nothing more. I had lost all control over my mind.
Things that had seemed secondary before became primary, difficult things
became impossible things. I had been greatly impeded and irritated in
London by the manoeuvres of a number of people who were anxious to make
capital out of the crisis, self-advertising people who wanted at any
cost to be lifted into a position of unique protest.... You see, that
unfortunate Nobel prize has turned the advocacy of peace into a highly
speculative profession; the qualification for the winner is so vaguely
defined that a vast multitude of voluntary idealists has been created
and a still greater number diverted from the unendowed pursuit of human
welfare in other directions. Such a man as myself who is known to
command a considerable publicity is necessarily a prey to those moral
_entrepreneurs_. All sorts of ridiculous and petty incidents had forced
this side of public effort upon me, but hitherto I had been able to say,
with a laugh or sigh as the case warranted, "So much is dear old
humanity and all of us"; and to remember the great residuum of nobility
that remained. Now that last saving consideration refused to be
credible. I lay with my body and my mind in pain thinking these people
over, thinking myself over too with the rest of my associates, thinking
drearily and weakly, recalling spites, dishonesties and vanities, feuds
and absurdities, until I was near persuaded that all my dreams of wider
human understandings, of great ends beyond the immediate aims and
passions of common everyday lives, could be at best no more than the
refuge of shy and weak and ineffective people from the failure of their
personal lives....
We idealists are not jolly people, not honest simple people; the strain
tells upon us; even to ourselves we are unappetizing. Aren't the burly,
bellowing fellows after all righter, with their simple natural hostility
to everything foreign, their valiant hatred of everything unlike
themselves, their contempt for aspiring weakness, their beer and lush
sentiment, their here-to-day-and-gone-tomorrow conviviality and
fellowship? Good fellows! While we others, lost in filmy speculations,
in moon-and-star snaring and the chase of dreams, stumble where even
they walk upright....
You know I have never quite believed in myself, never quite believed in
my work or my religion. So it has always been with me and always, I
suppose, will be. I know I am purblind, I know I do not see my way
clearly nor very far; I have to do with things imperfectly apprehended.
I cannot cheat my mind away from these convictions. I have a sort of
hesitation of the soul as other men have a limp in their gait. God, I
suppose, has a need for lame men. God, I suppose, has a need for blind
men and fearful and doubting men, and does not intend life to be
altogether swallowed up in staring sight. Some things are to be reached
best by a hearing that is not distracted by any clearer senses. But so
it is with me, and this is the innermost secret I have to tell you.
I go valiantly for the most part I know, but despair is always near to
me. In the common hours of my life it is as near as a shark may be near
a sleeper in a ship; the thin effectual plank of my deliberate faith
keeps me secure, but in these rare distresses of the darkness the plank
seems to become transparent, to be on the verge of dissolution, a sense
of life as of an abyssmal flood, full of cruelty, densely futile,
blackly aimless, penetrates my defences....
I don't think I can call these stumblings from conviction unbelief; the
limping man walks for all his limping, and I go on in spite of my falls.
"Though he slay me yet will I trust in him...."
I fell into an inconsecutive review of my life under this light that
touched every endeavor with the pale tints of failure. And as that flow
of melancholy reflection went on, it was shot more and more frequently
with thoughts of Mary. It was not a discursive thinking about Mary but a
definite fixed direction of thought towards her. I had not so thought of
her for many years. I wanted her, I felt, to come to me and help me out
of this distressful pit into which my spirit had fallen. I believed she
could. I perceived our separation as an irreparable loss. She had a
harder, clearer quality than I, a more assured courage, a readier, surer
movement of the mind. Always she had "lift" for me. And then I had a
curious impression that I had heard her voice calling my name, as one
might call out in one's sleep. I dismissed it as an illusion, and then I
heard it again. So clearly that I sat up and listened--breathless....
Mixed up with all this was the intolerable uproar and talking of a
little cascade not fifty yards from the hotel. It is curious how
distressing that clamor of running water, which is so characteristic of
the Alpine night, can become. At last those sounds can take the likeness
of any voice whatever. The water, I decided, had called to me, and now
it mocked and laughed at me....
The next morning I descended at some late hour by Swiss reckoning, and
discovered two ladies in the morning sunlight awaiting breakfast at a
little green table. One rose slowly at the sight of me, and stood and
surveyed me with a glad amazement.
§ 2
There she stood real and solid, a little unfamiliar in her tweeds and
with her shining eyes intimate and unforgettable, as though I had never
ceased to see them for all those intervening years. And bracing us both
and holding back our emotion was, quite unmistakably, Miss Summersley
Satchel, a blonde business-like young woman with a stumpy nose very
cruelly corrugated and inflamed by a pince-nez that savagely did much
more than its duty by its name. She remained seated, tilting her chair
a little, pushing herself back from the table and regarding
me--intelligently.
It was one of those moments in life when one is taken unawares. I think
our common realization of the need of masking the reality of our
encounter, the hasty search in our minds for some plausible face upon
this meeting, must have been very obvious to the lady who observed us.
Mary's first thought was for a pseudonym. Mine was to make it plain we
met by accident.
"It's Mr.--Stephen!" said Mary.
"It's you!"
"Dropped out of the sky!"
"From over there. I was benighted and go there late."
"Very late?"
"One gleam of light--and a yawning waiter. Or I should have had to break
windows.... And then I meet you!"
Then for a moment or so we were silent, with our sense of the immense
gravity of this position growing upon us. A little tow-headed waiter-boy
appeared with their coffee and rolls on a tray poised high on his hand.
"You'll have your coffee out here with us?" said Mary.
"Where else?" said I, as though there was no conceivable alternative,
and told the tow-headed waiter.
Belatedly Mary turned to introduce me to her secretary: "My friend Miss
Summersley Satchel. Mr.--Stephen." Miss Satchel and I bowed to each
other and agreed that the lake was very beautiful in the morning light.
"Mr. Stephen," said Mary, in entirely unnecessary explanation, "is an
old friend of my mother's. And I haven't seen him for years. How is
Mrs. Stephen--and the children?"
I answered briefly and began to tell of my climb down the Titlis. I
addressed myself with unnecessary explicitness to Miss Satchel. I did
perhaps over-accentuate the extreme fortuitousness of my appearance....
From where I stood, the whole course of the previous day after I had
come over the shoulder was visible. It seemed a soft little shining
pathway to the top, but the dangers of the descent had a romantic