CHAPTER IV

HOW HELEN CAME TO MALOJA

At Coire, or Chur, as the three-tongued Swiss often term it--German

being the language most in vogue in Switzerland--Helen found a

cheerful looking mountain train awaiting the coming of its heavy

brother from far off Calais. It was soon packed to the doors, for

those Alpine valleys hum with life and movement during the closing

days of July. Even in the first class carriages nearly every seat was

filled in a few minutes, while pandemonium reigned in the cheaper

sections.

Helen, having no cumbersome baggage to impede her movements, was swept

in on the crest of the earliest wave, and obtained a corner near the

corridor. She meant to leave her handbag there, stroll up and down the

station for a few minutes, mainly to look at the cosmopolitan crowd,

and perhaps buy some fruit; but the babel of English, German, French,

and Italian, mixed with scraps of Russian and Czech, that raged round

a distracted conductor warned her that the wiser policy was to sit

still.

An Englishwoman, red faced, elderly, and important, was offered a

center seat, facing the engine, in Helen's compartment. She refused

it. Her indignation was magnificent. To face the engine, she declared,

meant instant illness.

"I never return to this wretched country that I do not regret it!" she

shrilled. "Have you no telegraphs? Cannot your officials ascertain

from Zurich how many English passengers may be expected, and make

suitable provision for them?"

As this tirade was thrown away on the conductor, she proceeded to

translate it into fairly accurate French; but the man was at his

wits' end to accommodate the throng, and said so, with the breathless

politeness that such a _grande dame_ seemed to merit.

"Then you should set apart a special train for passengers from

England!" she declared vehemently. "I shall never come here

again--never! The place is overrun with cheap tourists. Moreover,

I shall tell all my friends to avoid Switzerland. Perhaps, when

British patronage is withdrawn from your railways and hotels, you

will begin to consider our requirements."

Helen felt that her irate fellow countrywoman was metaphorically

hurling large volumes of the peerage, baronetage, and landed gentry at

the unhappy conductor's head. Again he pointed out that there was a

seat at madam's service. When the train started he would do his best

to secure another in the desired position.

As the woman, whose proportions were generous, was blocking the

gangway, she received a forcible reminder from the end of a heavy

portmanteau that she must clear out of the way. Breathing dire

reprisals on the Swiss federal railway system, she entered

unwillingly.

"Disgraceful!" she snorted. "A nation of boors! In another second I

should have been thrown down and trampled on."

A stolid German and his wife occupied opposite corners, and the man

probably wondered why the _Englischer frau_ glared at him so fiercely.

But he did not move.

Helen, thinking to throw oil on the troubled waters, said pleasantly,

"Won't you change seats with me? I don't mind whether I face the

engine or not. In any case, I intend to stand in the corridor most of

the time."

The stout woman, hearing herself addressed in English, lifted her

mounted eyeglasses and stared at Helen. In one sweeping glance she

took in details. As it happened, the girl had expended fifteen of her

forty pounds on a neat tailor made costume, a smart hat, well fitting

gloves, and the best pair of walking boots she could buy; for, having

pretty feet, it was a pardonable vanity that she should wish them well

shod. Apparently, the other was satisfied that there would be no loss

of caste in accepting the proffered civility.

"Thank you. I am very much obliged," she said. "It is awfully sweet of

you to incommode yourself for my sake."

It was difficult to believe that the woman who had just stormed at

the conductor, who had the effrontery to subject Helen to that

stony scrutiny before she answered, could adopt such dulcet tones

so suddenly. Helen, frank and generous-minded to a degree, would

have preferred a gradual subsidence of wrath to this remarkable

_volte-face_. But she reiterated that she regarded her place in a

carriage as of slight consequence, and the change was effected.

The other adjusted her eyeglasses again, and passed in review the

remaining occupants of the compartment. They were "foreigners," whose

existence might be ignored.

"This line grows worse each year," she remarked, by way of a

conversational opening. "It is horrid traveling alone. Unfortunately,

I missed my son at Lucerne. Are your people on the train?"

"No. I too am alone."

"Ah! Going to St. Moritz?"

"Yes; but I take the diligence there for Maloja."

"The diligence! Who in the world advised that? Nobody ever travels

that way."

By "nobody," she clearly conveyed the idea that she mixed in the

sacred circle of "somebodies," carriage folk to the soles of their

boots, because Helen's guidebook showed that a diligence ran twice

daily through the Upper Engadine, and the Swiss authorities would not

provide those capacious four-horsed vehicles unless there were

passengers to fill them.

"Oh!" cried Helen. "Should I have ordered a carriage beforehand?"

"Most decidedly. But your friends will send one. They know you are

coming by this train?"

Helen smiled. She anticipated a certain amount of cross examination at

the hands of residents in the hotel; but she saw no reason why the

ordeal should begin so soon.

"I must take my luck then," she said. "There ought to be plenty of

carriages at St. Moritz."

Without being positively rude, her new acquaintance could not repeat

the question thus shirked. But she had other shafts in her quiver.

"You will stay at the Kursaal, of course?" she said.

"Yes."

"A passing visit, or for a period? I ask because I am going there

myself."

"Oh, how nice! I am glad I have met you. I mean to remain at Maloja

until the end of August."

"Quite the right time. The rest of Switzerland is unbearable in

August. You will find the hotel rather full. The Burnham-Joneses are

there,--the tennis players, you know,--and General and Mrs. Wragg and

their family, and the de la Veres, nominally husband and wife,--a most

charming couple individually. Have you met the de la Veres? No? Well,

don't be unhappy on Edith's account if Reginald flirts with you. She

likes it."

"But perhaps I might not like it," laughed Helen.

"Ah, Reginald has such fascinating manners!" A sigh seemed to deplore

the days of long ago, when Reginald's fascination might have displayed

itself on her account.

Again there was a break in the flow of talk, and Helen began to take

an interest in the scenery. Not to be balked, her inquisitor searched

in a _portmonnaie_ attached to her left wrist with a strap, and

produced a card.

"We may as well know each other's names," she cooed affably. "Here is

my card."

Helen read, "Mrs. H. de Courcy Vavasour, Villa Menini, Nice."

"I am sorry," she said, with a friendly smile that might have disarmed

prejudice, "but in the hurry of my departure from London I packed my

cards in my registered baggage. My name is Helen Wynton."

The eyeglasses went up once more.

"Do you spell it with an I? Are you one of the Gloucestershire

Wintons?"

"No. I live in town; but my home is in Norfolk."

"And whose party will you join at the Maloja?"

Helen colored a little under this rigorous heckling. "As I have

already told you, Mrs. Vavasour, I am alone," she said. "Indeed, I

have come here to--to do some literary work."

"For a newspaper?"

"Yes."

Mrs. Vavasour received this statement guardedly. If Helen was on the

staff of an important journal there was something to be gained by

being cited in her articles as one of the important persons

"sojourning" in the Engadine.

"It is really wonderful," she admitted, "how enterprising the great

daily papers are nowadays."

Helen, very new to a world of de Courcy Vavasours, and Wraggs, and

Burnham-Joneses, forgave this hawklike pertinacity for sake of the

apparent sympathy of her catechist. And she was painfully candid.

"The weekly paper I represent is not at all well known," she

explained; "but here I am, and I mean to enjoy my visit hugely. It is

the chance of a lifetime to be sent abroad on such a mission. I little

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

happened was that the carriage settled down lamely by the side of

the road, with its weight resting on one of her boxes.

The driver spoke no more English. He bewailed his misfortune in free

and fluent Italian of the Romansch order.

But he understood German, and when Helen demanded imperatively that

he should unharness the horses, and help to prop the carriage off a

crumpled tin trunk that contained her best dresses, he recovered his

senses, worked willingly, and announced with a weary grin that if the

_gnaedische fraeulein_ would wait a little half-hour he would obtain

another wheel from a neighboring forge.

Having recovered from her fright she was so touched by the poor

fellow's distress that she promised readily to stand by him until

repairs were effected. It was a longer job than either of them

anticipated. The axle was slightly bent, and a blacksmith had to bring

clamps and a jackscrew before the new wheel could be adjusted. Even

then it had an air of uncertainty that rendered speed impossible. The

concluding five miles of the journey were taken at a snail's pace, and

Helen reflected ruefully that it was possible to "bruk ze leg" on the

level high road as well as on the rocks of Corvatsch.

Of course, she received offers of assistance in plenty. Every carriage

that passed while the blacksmith was at work pulled up and placed a

seat therein at her command. But she refused them all. It was not that

she feared to desert her baggage, for Switzerland is proverbially

honest. The unlucky driver had tried to be friendly; his fault was due

to an excess of zeal; and each time she declined the proffered help

his furrowed face brightened. If she did not reach the hotel until

midnight she was determined to go there in that vehicle, and in none

other.

The accident threw her late, but only by some two hours. Instead of

arriving at Maloja in brilliant sunshine, it was damp and chilly when

she entered the hotel. A bank of mist had been carried over the summit

of the pass by a southwesterly wind. Long before the carriage crawled

round the last great bend in the road the glorious panorama of lake

and mountains was blotted out of sight. The horses seemed to be

jogging on through a luminous cloud, so dense that naught was visible

save a few yards of roadway and the boundary wall or stone posts on

the left side, where lay the lake. The brightness soon passed, as the

hurrying fog wraiths closed in on each other. It became bitterly cold

too, and it was with intense gladness that Helen finally stepped from

the outer gloom into a glass haven of warmth and light that formed a

species of covered-in veranda in front of the hotel.

She was about to pay the driver, having added to the agreed sum half

the cost of the broken wheel by way of a solatium, when another

carriage drove up from the direction of St. Moritz.

She fancied that the occupant, a young man whom she had never seen

before, glanced at her as though he knew her. She looked again to make

sure; but by that time his eyes were turned away, so he had evidently

discovered his mistake. Still, he seemed to take considerable

interest in her carriage, and Helen, ever ready to concede the most

generous interpretation of doubtful acts, assumed that he had heard

of the accident by some means, and was on the lookout for her.

It would indeed have been a fortunate thing for Helen had some Swiss

fairy whispered the news of her mishap in Spencer's ears during the

long drive up the mist laden valley. Then, at least, he might have

spoken to her, and used the informal introduction to make her further

acquaintance on the morrow. But the knowledge was withheld from him.

No hint of it was even flashed through space by that wireless

telegraphy which has existed between kin souls ever since men and

women contrived to raise human affinities to a plane not far removed

from the divine.

He had small store of German, but he knew enough to be perplexed by

the way in which Helen's driver expressed "beautiful thanks" for her

gift. The man seemed to be at once grateful and downhearted. Of

course, the impression was of the slightest, but Spencer had been

trained in reaching vital conclusions on meager evidence. He could not

wait to listen to Helen's words, so he passed into the hotel, having

the American habit of leaving the care of his baggage to the hall

porter. He wondered why Helen was so late in arriving that he had

caught her up on the very threshold of the Kursaal, so to speak. He

would not forget the driver's face, and if he met the man again, it

might be possible to find out the cause of the delay. He himself was

before time. The federal railway authorities at Coire, awaking to the

fact that the holiday rush was beginning, had actually dispatched a

relief train to St. Moritz when the second important train of the day

turned up as full as its predecessor.

At dinner Helen and he sat at little tables in the same section of the

huge dining hall. The hotel was nearly full, and it was noticeable

that they were the only persons who dined alone. Indeed, the head

waiter asked Spencer if he cared to join a party of men who sat

together; but he declined. There was no such general gathering of

women; so Helen was given no alternative, and she ate the meal in

silence.

She saw Mrs. Vavasour in a remote part of the salon. With her was a

vacuous looking young man who seldom spoke to her but was continually

addressing remarks to a woman at another table.

"That is the son lost at Lucerne," she decided, finding in his face

some of the physical traits but none of the calculating shrewdness of

his mother.

After a repast of many courses Helen wandered into the great hall,

found an empty chair, and longed for someone to speak to. At the first

glance, everybody seemed to know everybody else. That was not really

the case, of course. There were others present as neglected and

solitary as Helen; but the noise and merriment of the greater number

dominated the place. It resembled a social club rather than a hotel.

Her chair was placed in an alley along which people had to pass who

wished to reach the glass covered veranda. She amused herself by

trying to pick out the Wraggs, the Burnham-Joneses, and the de la

Veres. Suddenly she was aware that Mrs. Vavasour and her son were

coming that way; the son unwillingly, the mother with an air of

determination. Perhaps the Lucerne episode was about to be explained.

When young Vavasour's eyes fell on Helen, the boredom vanished from

his face. It was quite obvious that he called his mother's attention

to her and asked who she was. Helen felt that an introduction was

imminent. She was glad of it. At that moment she would have chatted

gayly with even a greater ninny than George de Courcy Vavasour.

But she had not yet grasped the peculiar idiosyncrasies of a

woman who was famous for snubbing those whom she considered to be

"undesirables." Helen looked up with a shy smile, expecting that the

older woman would stop and speak; but Mrs. Vavasour gazed at her

blankly--looked at the back of her chair through her body--and walked

on.

"I don't know, George," Helen heard her say. "There are a lot of new

arrivals. Some person of no importance, rather declassee, I should

imagine by appearances. As I was telling you, the General has

arranged----"

Taken altogether, Helen had crowded into portions of two days many new

and some very unpleasant experiences.