German inn, and was happy.
There was a tall thin young man, whose face was red and inflamed from
the sun. I thought he was a German tourist. He had just come in; and he
was eating bread and milk. He and I were alone in the eating-room. He
was looking at an illustrated paper.
'Does the steamer stop here all night?' I asked him in German, hearing
the boat bustling and blowing her steam on the water outside, and
glancing round at her lights, red and white, in the pitch darkness.
He only shook his head over his bread and milk, and did not lift his
face.
'Are you English, then?' I said.
No one but an Englishman would have hidden his face in a bowl of milk,
and have shaken his red ears in such painful confusion.
'Yes,' he said, 'I am.'
And I started almost out of my skin at the unexpected London accent. It
was as if one suddenly found oneself in the Tube.
'So am I,' I said. 'Where have you come from?'
Then he began, like a general explaining his plans, to tell me. He had
walked round over the Furka Pass, had been on foot four or five days. He
had walked tremendously. Knowing no German, and nothing of the
mountains, he had set off alone on this tour: he had a fortnight's
holiday. So he had come over the Rhône Glacier across the Furka and down
from Andermatt to the Lake. On this last day he had walked about thirty
mountain miles.
'But weren't you tired?' I said, aghast.
He was. Under the inflamed redness of his sun- and wind- and snow-burned
face he was sick with fatigue. He had done over a hundred miles in the
last four days.
'Did you enjoy it?' I asked.
'Oh yes. I wanted to do it all.' He wanted to do it, and he _had_ done
it. But God knows what he wanted to do it for. He had now one day at
Lucerne, one day at Interlaken and Berne, then London.
I was sorry for him in my soul, he was so cruelly tired, so perishingly
victorious.
'Why did you do so much?' I said. 'Why did you come on foot all down the
valley when you could have taken the train? Was it worth it?'
'I think so,' he said.
Yet he was sick with fatigue and over-exhaustion. His eyes were quite
dark, sightless: he seemed to have lost the power of seeing, to be
virtually blind. He hung his head forward when he had to write a post
card, as if he felt his way. But he turned his post card so that I
should not see to whom it was addressed; not that I was interested; only
I noticed his little, cautious, English movement of privacy.
'What time will you be going on?' I asked.
'When is the first steamer?' he said, and he turned out a guide-book
with a time-table. He would leave at about seven.
'But why so early?' I said to him.
He must be in Lucerne at a certain hour, and at Interlaken in the
evening.
'I suppose you will rest when you get to London?' I said.
He looked at me quickly, reservedly.
I was drinking beer: I asked him wouldn't he have something. He thought
a moment, then said he would have another glass of hot milk. The
landlord came--'And bread?' he asked.
The Englishman refused. He could not eat, really. Also he was poor; he
had to husband his money. The landlord brought the milk and asked me,
when would the gentleman want to go away. So I made arrangements between
the landlord and the stranger. But the Englishman was slightly
uncomfortable at my intervention. He did not like me to know what he
would have for breakfast.
I could feel so well the machine that had him in its grip. He slaved for
a year, mechanically, in London, riding in the Tube, working in the
office. Then for a fortnight he was let free. So he rushed to
Switzerland, with a tour planned out, and with just enough money to see
him through, and to buy presents at Interlaken: bits of the edelweiss
pottery: I could see him going home with them.
So he arrived, and with amazing, pathetic courage set forth on foot in a
strange land, to face strange landlords, with no language but English at
his command, and his purse definitely limited. Yet he wanted to go among
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