The Silent Barrier
dreamed a week since that I should be able to visit this beautiful
country under the best conditions without giving a thought to the
cost."
Poor Helen! Had she delved in many volumes to obtain material that
would condemn her in the eyes of the tuft hunter she was addressing,
she could not have shocked so many conventions in so few words. She
was poor, unknown, unfriended! Worse than these negative defects, she
was positively attractive! Mrs. Vavasour almost shuddered as she
thought of the son "missed" at Lucerne, the son who would arrive at
Maloja on the morrow, in the company of someone whom he preferred to
his mother as a fellow traveler. What a pitfall she had escaped! She
might have made a friend of this impossible person! Nevertheless,
rendered wary by many social skirmishes, she did not declare war at
once. The girl was too outspoken to be an adventuress. She must wait,
and watch, and furbish her weapons.
Helen, whose brain was nimble enough to take in some of Mrs.
Vavasour's limitations, hoped that the preliminary inquiry into her
caste was ended. She went into the corridor. A man made room for
her with an alacrity that threatened an attempt to draw her into
conversation, so she moved somewhat farther away, and gave herself to
thought. If this prying woman was a fair sample of the people in the
hotel, it was obvious that the human element in the high Alps held a
suspicious resemblance to society in Bayswater, where each street is a
faction and the clique in the "Terrace" is not on speaking terms with
the clique in the "Gardens." Thus far, she owned to a feeling of
disillusionment in many respects.
Two years earlier, a naturalist in the Highlands had engaged von
Eulenberg to classify his collection, and Helen had gone to Inverness
with the professor's family. She saw something then of the glories of
Scotland, and her memories of the purple hills, the silvery lakes, the
joyous burns tumbling headlong through woodland and pasture, were not
dimmed by the dusty garishness of the Swiss scenery. True, Baedeker
said that these pent valleys were suffocating in midsummer. She could
only await in diminished confidence her first glimpse of the eternal
snows.
And again, the holiday makers were not the blithesome creatures of her
imagination. Some were reading, many sleeping, and the rest, for the
most part, talking in strange tongues of anything but the beauties
of the landscape. The Britons among them seemed to be brooding on
glaciers. A party of lively Americans were playing bridge, and a scrap
of gossip in English from a neighboring compartment revealed that some
woman who went to a dance at Montreux, "wore a cheap voile, my dear, a
last year's bargain, all crumpled and dirty. You never saw such a
fright!"
These things were trivial and commonplace; a wide gap opened between
them and Helen's day dreams of Alpine travel. By natural sequence of
ideas she began to contrast her present loneliness with yesterday's
pleasant journey, and the outcome was eminently favorable to Mark
Bower. She missed him. She was quite sure, had he accompanied her from
Zurich, that he would have charmed away the dull hours with amusing
anecdotes. Instead of feeling rather tired and sleepy, she would now
be listening to his apt expositions of the habits and customs of the
places and people seen from the carriage windows. For fully five
minutes her expressive mouth betrayed a little moue of disappointment.
And then the train climbed a long spiral which gave a series of
delightful views of a picturesque Swiss village,--exactly such a
cluster of low roofed houses as she had admired many a time in
photographs of Alpine scenery. An exclamation from a little boy who
clapped his hands in ecstasy caused her to look through a cleft in the
nearer hills. With a thrill of wonder she discovered there, remote
and solitary, all garbed in shining white, a majestic snow capped
mountain. Ah! this was the real Switzerland! Her heart throbbed, and
her breath came in fluttering gasps of excitement. How mean and
trivial were class distinctions in sight of nature's nobility! She was
uplifted, inspirited, filled with a sedate happiness. She wanted to
voice her gladness as the child had done. A high pitched female voice
said:
"Of course I had to call, because Jack meets her husband in the city;
but it is an awful bore knowing such people."
Then the train plunged into a noisome tunnel, and turned a complete
circle in the heart of the rock, and when it panted into daylight
again the tall square tower of the village church had sunk more deeply
into the valley. Far beneath, two bright steel ribbons--swallowed
by a cavernous mouth that belched clouds of dense smoke--showed the
strangeness of the route that led to the silent peaks. At times the
rails crossed or ran by the side of a white, tree lined track that
mounted ever upward. Though she could not recall the name of the pass,
Helen was aware that this was one of the fine mountain roads for which
Switzerland is famous. Pedestrians, singly or in small parties, were
trudging along sturdily. They seemed to be mostly German tourists,
jolly, well fed folk, nearly as many women as men, each one carrying
a rucksack and alpenstock, and evidently determined to cover a set
number of kilometers before night.
"That is the way in which I should like to see the Alps," thought
Helen. "I am sure they sing as they walk, and they miss nothing of
the grandeur and exquisite coloring of the hills. A train is very
comfortable; but it certainly brings to these quiet valleys a great
many people who would otherwise never come near them."
The force of this trite reflection was borne in on her by a loud
wrangle between the bridge players. A woman had revoked, and was quite
wroth with the man who detected her mistake.
At the next stopping place Helen bought some chocolates, and made a
friend of the boy, a tiny Parisian. The two found amusement in
searching for patches of snow on the northerly sides of the nearest
hills. Once they caught a glimpse of a whole snowy range, and they
shrieked so enthusiastically that the woman whose husband was also in
the city glanced at them with disapproval, as they interrupted a full
and particular if not true account of the quarrel between the Firs and
the Limes.
At last the panting engine gathered speed and rushed along a wide
valley into Samaden, Celerina, and St. Moritz. Mrs. Vavasour seemed to
be absorbed in a Tauchnitz novel till the last moment, and the next
sight of her vouchsafed to Helen was her departure from the terminus
in solitary state in a pair-horse victoria. It savored somewhat of
unkindness that she had not offered to share the roomy vehicle with
one who had befriended her.
"Perhaps she was afraid I might not pay my share of the hire," said
Helen to herself rather indignantly. But a civil hotel porter helped
her to clear the customs shed rapidly, secured a comfortable carriage,
advised her confidentially as to the amount that should be paid, and
promised to telephone to the hotel for a suitable room. She was
surprised to find how many of her fellow passengers were bound for
Maloja. Some she had encountered at various stages of the journey all
the way from London, while many, like Mrs. Vavasour, had joined the
train in Switzerland. She remembered too, with a quiet humor that had
in it a spice of sarcasm, that her elderly acquaintance had not come
from England, and had no more right to demand special accommodation at
Coire than the dozens of other travelers who put in an appearance at
each station after Basle.
She noticed that as soon as the luggage was handed to the driver to
be strapped behind each vehicle, the newcomers nearly all went to a
neighboring hotel for luncheon. Being a healthy young person, and
endowed with a sound digestion, Helen deemed this example too good not
to be followed. Then she began a two hours' drive through a valley
that almost shook her allegiance to Scotland. The driver, a fine
looking old man, with massive features and curling gray hair that
reminded her of Michelangelo's head of Moses, knowing the nationality
of his fare, resolutely refused to speak any other language than
English. He would jerk round, flourish his whip, and cry:
"Dissa pless St. Moritz Bad; datta pless St. Moritz Dorp."
Soon he announced the "Engelish kirch," thereby meaning the round
arched English church overlooking the lake; or it might be, with a
loftier sweep of the whip, "Piz Julier montin, mit lek Silvaplaner
See."
All this Helen could have told him with equal accuracy and even
greater detail. Had she not almost learned by heart each line of
Baedeker on the Upper Engadine? Could she not have reproduced from
memory a fairly complete map of the valley, with its villages,
mountains, and lakes clearly marked? But she would not on any account
repress the man's enthusiasm, and her eager acceptance of his quaint
information induced fresh efforts, with more whip waving.
"Piz Corvatsch! Him ver' big fellow. Twelf t'ousen foots. W'en me
guide him bruk ze leg."
She had seen that he was very lame as he hobbled about the carriage
tying up her boxes. So here was a real guide. That explained his
romantic aspect, his love of the high places. And he had been maimed
for life by that magnificent mountain whose scarred slopes were now
vividly before her eyes. The bright sunshine lit lakes and hills with
its glory. A marvelous atmosphere made all things visible with
microscopic fidelity. From Campfer to Silvaplana looked to be a ten
minutes' drive, and from Silvaplana to Sils-Maria another quarter of
an hour. Helen had to consult her watch and force herself to admit
that the horses were trotting fully seven miles an hour before she
realized that distances could be so deceptive. The summit of the
lordly Corvatsch seemed to be absurdly near. She judged it within the
scope of an easy walk between breakfast and afternoon tea from the
hotel on a tree covered peninsula that stretched far out into Lake
Sils-Maria, and she wondered why anyone should fall and break his leg
during such a simple climb. Just to make sure, she glanced at the
guidebook, and it gave her a shock when she saw the words, "Guides
necessary,"--"Descent to Sils practicable only for experts,"--"Spend
night at Roseg Inn,"--the route followed being that from Pontresina.
Then she recollected that the lovely valley she was traversing from
beginning to end was itself six thousand feet above sea level,--that
the observatory on rugged old Ben Nevis, which she had visited when in
Scotland, was, metaphorically speaking, two thousand feet beneath the
smooth road along which she was being driven, and that the highest
peak on Corvatsch was still six thousand feet above her head. All at
once, Helen felt subdued. The fancy seized her that the carriage was
rumbling over the roof of the world. In a word, she was yielding to
the exhilaration of high altitudes, and her brain was ready to spin
wild fantasies.
At Sils-Maria she was brought suddenly to earth again. It must not
be forgotten that her driver was a St. Moritz man, and therefore
at constant feud with the men from the Kursaal, who brought empty
carriages to St. Moritz, and went back laden with the spoil that would
otherwise have fallen to the share of the local livery stables. Hence,
he made it a point of honor to pass every Maloja owned vehicle on the
road. Six times he succeeded, but, on the seventh, reversing the moral
of Bruce's spider, he smashed the near hind wheel by attempting to
slip between a landau and a stone post. Helen was almost thrown into
the lake, and, for the life of her, she could not repress a scream.
But the danger passed as rapidly as it had risen, and all that