The friendly sentry on duty again that night proved
singularly blind. Thus it happened that, although
the night was clear when the twin dials of the Votivkirche
showed nine o’clock, he did not notice a cab
that halted across the street from the hospital.
Still more strange that, although Peter passed within
a dozen feet of him, carrying a wriggling and excited
figure wrapped in a blanket and insisting on uncovering
its feet, the sentry was able the next day to say
that he had observed such a person carrying a bundle,
but that it was a short stocky person, quite lame,
and that the bundle was undoubtedly clothing going
to the laundry.
Perhaps—it is just possible—the
sentry had his suspicions. It is undeniable that
as Jimmy in the cab on Peter’s knee, with Peter’s
arm close about him, looked back at the hospital, the
sentry was going through the manual of arms very solemnly
under the stars and facing toward the carriage.
For two days at Semmering it rained. The Raxalpe
and the Schneeberg sulked behind walls of mist.
From the little balcony of the Pension Waldheim one
looked out over a sea of cloud, pierced here and there
by islands that were crags or by the tops of sunken
masts that were evergreen trees. The roads were
masses of slippery mud, up which the horses steamed
and sweated. The gray cloud fog hung over everything;
the barking of a dog loomed out of it near at hand
where no dog was to be seen. Children cried and
wild birds squawked; one saw them not.
During the second night a landslide occurred on the
side of the mountain with a rumble like the noise
of fifty trains. In the morning, the rain clouds
lifting for a moment, Marie saw the narrow yellow
line of the slip.
Everything was saturated with moisture. It did
no good to close the heavy wooden shutters at night:
in the morning the air of the room was sticky and
clothing was moist to the touch. Stewart, confined
to the house, grew irritable.
Marie watched him anxiously. She knew quite well
by what slender tenure she held her man. They
had nothing in common, neither speech nor thought.
And the little Marie’s love for Stewart, grown
to be a part of her, was largely maternal. She
held him by mothering him, by keeping him comfortable,
not by a great reciprocal passion that might in time
have brought him to her in chains.
And now he was uncomfortable. He chafed against
the confinement; he resented the food, the weather.
Even Marie’s content at her unusual leisure
irked him. He accused her of purring like a cat
by the fire, and stamped out more than once, only to
be driven in by the curious thunderstorms of early
Alpine winter.
On the night of the second day the weather changed.
Marie, awakening early, stepped out on to the balcony
and closed the door carefully behind her. A new
world lay beneath her, a marvel of glittering branches,
of white plain far below; the snowy mane of the Raxalpe
was become a garment. And from behind the villa
came the cheerful sound of sleigh-bells, of horses’
feet on crisp snow, of runners sliding easily along
frozen roads. Even the barking of the dog in
the next yard had ceased rumbling and become sharp
staccato.
