the mountains, to cross a glacier. So he had walked on and on, like one
possessed, ever forward. His name might have been Excelsior, indeed.
But then, when he reached his Furka, only to walk along the ridge and to
descend on the same side! My God, it was killing to the soul. And here
he was, down again from the mountains, beginning his journey home again:
steamer and train and steamer and train and Tube, till he was back in
the machine.
It hadn't let him go, and he knew it. Hence his cruel self-torture of
fatigue, his cruel exercise of courage. He who hung his head in his milk
in torment when I asked him a question in German, what courage had he
not needed to take this his very first trip out of England, alone,
on foot!
His eyes were dark and deep with unfathomable courage. Yet he was going
back in the morning. He was going back. All he had courage for was to go
back. He would go back, though he died by inches. Why not? It was
killing him, it was like living loaded with irons. But he had the
courage to submit, to die that way, since it was the way allotted
to him.
The way he sank on the table in exhaustion, drinking his milk, his will,
nevertheless, so perfect and unblemished, triumphant, though his body
was broken and in anguish, was almost too much to bear. My heart was
wrung for my countryman, wrung till it bled.
I could not bear to understand my countryman, a man who worked for his
living, as I had worked, as nearly all my countrymen work. He would not
give in. On his holiday he would walk, to fulfil his purpose, walk on;
no matter how cruel the effort were, he would not rest, he would not
relinquish his purpose nor abate his will, not by one jot or tittle. His
body must pay whatever his will demanded, though it were torture.
It all seemed to me so foolish. I was almost in tears. He went to bed. I
walked by the dark lake, and talked to the girl in the inn. She was a
pleasant girl: it was a pleasant inn, a homely place. One could be
happy there.
In the morning it was sunny, the lake was blue. By night I should be
nearly at the crest of my journey. I was glad.
The Englishman had gone. I looked for his name in the book. It was
written in a fair, clerkly hand. He lived at Streatham. Suddenly I hated
him. The dogged fool, to keep his nose on the grindstone like that. What
was all his courage but the very tip-top of cowardice? What a vile
nature--almost Sadish, proud, like the infamous Red Indians, of being
able to stand torture.
The landlord came to talk to me. He was fat and comfortable and too
respectful. But I had to tell him all the Englishman had done, in the
way of a holiday, just to shame his own fat, ponderous, inn-keeper's
luxuriousness that was too gross. Then all I got out of his enormous
comfortableness was:
'Yes, that's a _very_ long step to take.'
So I set off myself, up the valley between the close, snow-topped
mountains, whose white gleamed above me as I crawled, small as an
insect, along the dark, cold valley below.
There had been a cattle fair earlier in the morning, so troops of cattle
were roving down the road, some with bells tang-tanging, all with soft
faces and startled eyes and a sudden swerving of horns. The grass was
very green by the roads and by the streams; the shadows of the mountain
slopes were very dark on either hand overhead, and the sky with snowy
flanks and tips was high up.
Here, away from the world, the villages were quiet and obscure--left
behind. They had the same fascinating atmosphere of being forgotten,
left out of the world, that old English villages have. And buying apples
and cheese and bread in a little shop that sold everything and smelled
of everything, I felt at home again.
But climbing gradually higher, mile after mile, always between the
shadows of the high mountains, I was glad I did not live in the Alps.
The villages on the slopes, the people there, seemed, as if they _must_
gradually, bit by bit, slide down and tumble to the water-course, and be
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