The Silent Barrier

by Louis Tracy

  CHAPTER IV

  HOW HELEN CAME TO MALOJA

  At Coire, or Chur, as the three-tongued Swiss often term it--Germanbeing the language most in vogue in Switzerland--Helen found acheerful looking mountain train awaiting the coming of its heavybrother from far off Calais. It was soon packed to the doors, forthose Alpine valleys hum with life and movement during the closingdays of July. Even in the first class carriages nearly every seat wasfilled in a few minutes, while pandemonium reigned in the cheapersections.

  Helen, having no cumbersome baggage to impede her movements, was sweptin on the crest of the earliest wave, and obtained a corner near thecorridor. She meant to leave her handbag there, stroll up and down thestation 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 rounda distracted conductor warned her that the wiser policy was to sitstill.

  An Englishwoman, red faced, elderly, and important, was offered acenter seat, facing the engine, in Helen's compartment. She refusedit. 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!" sheshrilled. "Have you no telegraphs? Cannot your officials ascertainfrom Zurich how many English passengers may be expected, and makesuitable provision for them?"

  As this tirade was thrown away on the conductor, she proceeded totranslate it into fairly accurate French; but the man was at hiswits' end to accommodate the throng, and said so, with the breathlesspoliteness that such a _grande dame_ seemed to merit.

  "Then you should set apart a special train for passengers fromEngland!" she declared vehemently. "I shall never come hereagain--never! The place is overrun with cheap tourists. Moreover,I shall tell all my friends to avoid Switzerland. Perhaps, whenBritish patronage is withdrawn from your railways and hotels, youwill begin to consider our requirements."

  Helen felt that her irate fellow countrywoman was metaphoricallyhurling large volumes of the peerage, baronetage, and landed gentry atthe unhappy conductor's head. Again he pointed out that there was aseat at madam's service. When the train started he would do his bestto secure another in the desired position.

  As the woman, whose proportions were generous, was blocking thegangway, she received a forcible reminder from the end of a heavyportmanteau that she must clear out of the way. Breathing direreprisals on the Swiss federal railway system, she enteredunwillingly.

  "Disgraceful!" she snorted. "A nation of boors! In another second Ishould have been thrown down and trampled on."

  A stolid German and his wife occupied opposite corners, and the manprobably 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 theengine or not. In any case, I intend to stand in the corridor most ofthe time."

  The stout woman, hearing herself addressed in English, lifted hermounted eyeglasses and stared at Helen. In one sweeping glance shetook in details. As it happened, the girl had expended fifteen of herforty pounds on a neat tailor made costume, a smart hat, well fittinggloves, and the best pair of walking boots she could buy; for, havingpretty feet, it was a pardonable vanity that she should wish them wellshod. Apparently, the other was satisfied that there would be no lossof caste in accepting the proffered civility.

  "Thank you. I am very much obliged," she said. "It is awfully sweet ofyou to incommode yourself for my sake."

  It was difficult to believe that the woman who had just stormed atthe conductor, who had the effrontery to subject Helen to thatstony scrutiny before she answered, could adopt such dulcet tonesso suddenly. Helen, frank and generous-minded to a degree, wouldhave preferred a gradual subsidence of wrath to this remarkable_volte-face_. But she reiterated that she regarded her place in acarriage as of slight consequence, and the change was effected.

  The other adjusted her eyeglasses again, and passed in review theremaining occupants of the compartment. They were "foreigners," whoseexistence might be ignored.

  "This line grows worse each year," she remarked, by way of aconversational 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 travelsthat way."

  By "nobody," she clearly conveyed the idea that she mixed in thesacred circle of "somebodies," carriage folk to the soles of theirboots, because Helen's guidebook showed that a diligence ran twicedaily through the Upper Engadine, and the Swiss authorities would notprovide those capacious four-horsed vehicles unless there werepassengers to fill them.

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

  "Most decidedly. But your friends will send one. They know you arecoming by this train?"

  Helen smiled. She anticipated a certain amount of cross examination atthe hands of residents in the hotel; but she saw no reason why theordeal should begin so soon.

  "I must take my luck then," she said. "There ought to be plenty ofcarriages at St. Moritz."

  Without being positively rude, her new acquaintance could not repeatthe 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 theremyself."

  "Oh, how nice! I am glad I have met you. I mean to remain at Malojauntil the end of August."

  "Quite the right time. The rest of Switzerland is unbearable inAugust. You will find the hotel rather full. The Burnham-Joneses arethere,--the tennis players, you know,--and General and Mrs. Wragg andtheir family, and the de la Veres, nominally husband and wife,--a mostcharming couple individually. Have you met the de la Veres? No? Well,don't be unhappy on Edith's account if Reginald flirts with you. Shelikes it."

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

  "Ah, Reginald has such fascinating manners!" A sigh seemed to deplorethe days of long ago, when Reginald's fascination might have displayeditself on her account.

  Again there was a break in the flow of talk, and Helen began to takean interest in the scenery. Not to be balked, her inquisitor searchedin a _portmonnaie_ attached to her left wrist with a strap, andproduced a card.

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

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

  "I am sorry," she said, with a friendly smile that might have disarmedprejudice, "but in the hurry of my departure from London I packed mycards 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 GloucestershireWintons?"

  "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 havealready told you, Mrs. Vavasour, I am alone," she said. "Indeed, Ihave come here to--to do some literary work."

  "For a newspaper?"

  "Yes."

  Mrs. Vavasour received this statement guardedly. If Helen was on thestaff of an important journal there was something to be gained bybeing cited in her articles as one of the important persons"sojourning" in the Engadine.

  "It is really wonderful," she admitted, "how enterprising the greatdaily papers are nowadays."

  Helen, very new to a world of de Courcy Vavasours, and Wraggs, andBurnham-Joneses, forgave this hawklike pertinacity for sake of theapparent sympathy of her catechist. And she was painfully candid.

  "The weekly paper I represent is not at all well known," sheexplained; "but here I am, and I mean to
enjoy my visit hugely. It isthe chance of a lifetime to be sent abroad on such a mission. I littledreamed a week since that I should be able to visit this beautifulcountry under the best conditions without giving a thought to thecost."

  Poor Helen! Had she delved in many volumes to obtain material thatwould condemn her in the eyes of the tuft hunter she was addressing,she could not have shocked so many conventions in so few words. Shewas poor, unknown, unfriended! Worse than these negative defects, shewas positively attractive! Mrs. Vavasour almost shuddered as shethought of the son "missed" at Lucerne, the son who would arrive atMaloja on the morrow, in the company of someone whom he preferred tohis mother as a fellow traveler. What a pitfall she had escaped! Shemight have made a friend of this impossible person! Nevertheless,rendered wary by many social skirmishes, she did not declare war atonce. 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 hercaste was ended. She went into the corridor. A man made room forher with an alacrity that threatened an attempt to draw her intoconversation, so she moved somewhat farther away, and gave herself tothought. If this prying woman was a fair sample of the people in thehotel, it was obvious that the human element in the high Alps held asuspicious resemblance to society in Bayswater, where each street is afaction and the clique in the "Terrace" is not on speaking terms withthe clique in the "Gardens." Thus far, she owned to a feeling ofdisillusionment in many respects.

  Two years earlier, a naturalist in the Highlands had engaged vonEulenberg to classify his collection, and Helen had gone to Invernesswith the professor's family. She saw something then of the glories ofScotland, and her memories of the purple hills, the silvery lakes, thejoyous burns tumbling headlong through woodland and pasture, were notdimmed by the dusty garishness of the Swiss scenery. True, Baedekersaid that these pent valleys were suffocating in midsummer. She couldonly await in diminished confidence her first glimpse of the eternalsnows.

  And again, the holiday makers were not the blithesome creatures of herimagination. Some were reading, many sleeping, and the rest, for themost part, talking in strange tongues of anything but the beautiesof the landscape. The Britons among them seemed to be brooding onglaciers. A party of lively Americans were playing bridge, and a scrapof gossip in English from a neighboring compartment revealed that somewoman who went to a dance at Montreux, "wore a cheap voile, my dear, alast year's bargain, all crumpled and dirty. You never saw such afright!"

  These things were trivial and commonplace; a wide gap opened betweenthem and Helen's day dreams of Alpine travel. By natural sequence ofideas she began to contrast her present loneliness with yesterday'spleasant journey, and the outcome was eminently favorable to MarkBower. She missed him. She was quite sure, had he accompanied her fromZurich, that he would have charmed away the dull hours with amusinganecdotes. Instead of feeling rather tired and sleepy, she would nowbe listening to his apt expositions of the habits and customs of theplaces and people seen from the carriage windows. For fully fiveminutes her expressive mouth betrayed a little moue of disappointment.

  And then the train climbed a long spiral which gave a series ofdelightful views of a picturesque Swiss village,--exactly such acluster of low roofed houses as she had admired many a time inphotographs of Alpine scenery. An exclamation from a little boy whoclapped his hands in ecstasy caused her to look through a cleft in thenearer hills. With a thrill of wonder she discovered there, remoteand solitary, all garbed in shining white, a majestic snow cappedmountain. Ah! this was the real Switzerland! Her heart throbbed, andher breath came in fluttering gasps of excitement. How mean andtrivial were class distinctions in sight of nature's nobility! She wasuplifted, inspirited, filled with a sedate happiness. She wanted tovoice her gladness as the child had done. A high pitched female voicesaid:

  "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 completecircle in the heart of the rock, and when it panted into daylightagain the tall square tower of the village church had sunk more deeplyinto the valley. Far beneath, two bright steel ribbons--swallowedby a cavernous mouth that belched clouds of dense smoke--showed thestrangeness of the route that led to the silent peaks. At times therails crossed or ran by the side of a white, tree lined track thatmounted 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 whichSwitzerland is famous. Pedestrians, singly or in small parties, weretrudging along sturdily. They seemed to be mostly German tourists,jolly, well fed folk, nearly as many women as men, each one carryinga rucksack and alpenstock, and evidently determined to cover a setnumber of kilometers before night.

  "That is the way in which I should like to see the Alps," thoughtHelen. "I am sure they sing as they walk, and they miss nothing ofthe grandeur and exquisite coloring of the hills. A train is verycomfortable; but it certainly brings to these quiet valleys a greatmany people who would otherwise never come near them."

  The force of this trite reflection was borne in on her by a loudwrangle between the bridge players. A woman had revoked, and was quitewroth with the man who detected her mistake.

  At the next stopping place Helen bought some chocolates, and made afriend of the boy, a tiny Parisian. The two found amusement insearching for patches of snow on the northerly sides of the nearesthills. Once they caught a glimpse of a whole snowy range, and theyshrieked so enthusiastically that the woman whose husband was also inthe city glanced at them with disapproval, as they interrupted a fulland particular if not true account of the quarrel between the Firs andthe Limes.

  At last the panting engine gathered speed and rushed along a widevalley into Samaden, Celerina, and St. Moritz. Mrs. Vavasour seemed tobe absorbed in a Tauchnitz novel till the last moment, and the nextsight of her vouchsafed to Helen was her departure from the terminusin solitary state in a pair-horse victoria. It savored somewhat ofunkindness that she had not offered to share the roomy vehicle withone who had befriended her.

  "Perhaps she was afraid I might not pay my share of the hire," saidHelen to herself rather indignantly. But a civil hotel porter helpedher to clear the customs shed rapidly, secured a comfortable carriage,advised her confidentially as to the amount that should be paid, andpromised to telephone to the hotel for a suitable room. She wassurprised to find how many of her fellow passengers were bound forMaloja. Some she had encountered at various stages of the journey allthe way from London, while many, like Mrs. Vavasour, had joined thetrain in Switzerland. She remembered too, with a quiet humor that hadin it a spice of sarcasm, that her elderly acquaintance had not comefrom England, and had no more right to demand special accommodation atCoire than the dozens of other travelers who put in an appearance ateach station after Basle.

  She noticed that as soon as the luggage was handed to the driver tobe strapped behind each vehicle, the newcomers nearly all went to aneighboring hotel for luncheon. Being a healthy young person, andendowed with a sound digestion, Helen deemed this example too good notto be followed. Then she began a two hours' drive through a valleythat almost shook her allegiance to Scotland. The driver, a finelooking old man, with massive features and curling gray hair thatreminded her of Michelangelo's head of Moses, knowing the nationalityof his fare, resolutely refused to speak any other language thanEnglish. 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 roundarched English church overlooking the lake; or it might be, with aloftier sweep of the whip, "Piz Julier montin, mit lek SilvaplanerSee."

  All this Helen could have told him with equal accuracy and evengreater detail. Had she not almost learned by heart each line ofBaedeker on the Upper Engadine? Could she not have reproduced frommemor
y a fairly complete map of the valley, with its villages,mountains, and lakes clearly marked? But she would not on any accountrepress the man's enthusiasm, and her eager acceptance of his quaintinformation induced fresh efforts, with more whip waving.

  "Piz Corvatsch! Him ver' big fellow. Twelf t'ousen foots. W'en meguide him bruk ze leg."

  She had seen that he was very lame as he hobbled about the carriagetying up her boxes. So here was a real guide. That explained hisromantic aspect, his love of the high places. And he had been maimedfor life by that magnificent mountain whose scarred slopes were nowvividly before her eyes. The bright sunshine lit lakes and hills withits glory. A marvelous atmosphere made all things visible withmicroscopic fidelity. From Campfer to Silvaplana looked to be a tenminutes' drive, and from Silvaplana to Sils-Maria another quarter ofan hour. Helen had to consult her watch and force herself to admitthat the horses were trotting fully seven miles an hour before sherealized that distances could be so deceptive. The summit of thelordly Corvatsch seemed to be absurdly near. She judged it within thescope of an easy walk between breakfast and afternoon tea from thehotel on a tree covered peninsula that stretched far out into LakeSils-Maria, and she wondered why anyone should fall and break his legduring such a simple climb. Just to make sure, she glanced at theguidebook, and it gave her a shock when she saw the words, "Guidesnecessary,"--"Descent to Sils practicable only for experts,"--"Spendnight at Roseg Inn,"--the route followed being that from Pontresina.

  Then she recollected that the lovely valley she was traversing frombeginning to end was itself six thousand feet above sea level,--thatthe observatory on rugged old Ben Nevis, which she had visited when inScotland, was, metaphorically speaking, two thousand feet beneath thesmooth road along which she was being driven, and that the highestpeak on Corvatsch was still six thousand feet above her head. All atonce, Helen felt subdued. The fancy seized her that the carriage wasrumbling over the roof of the world. In a word, she was yielding tothe exhilaration of high altitudes, and her brain was ready to spinwild fantasies.

  At Sils-Maria she was brought suddenly to earth again. It must notbe forgotten that her driver was a St. Moritz man, and thereforeat constant feud with the men from the Kursaal, who brought emptycarriages to St. Moritz, and went back laden with the spoil that wouldotherwise 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 theroad. Six times he succeeded, but, on the seventh, reversing the moralof Bruce's spider, he smashed the near hind wheel by attempting toslip between a landau and a stone post. Helen was almost thrown intothe 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 thathappened was that the carriage settled down lamely by the side ofthe road, with its weight resting on one of her boxes.

  The driver spoke no more English. He bewailed his misfortune in freeand fluent Italian of the Romansch order.

  But he understood German, and when Helen demanded imperatively thathe should unharness the horses, and help to prop the carriage off acrumpled tin trunk that contained her best dresses, he recovered hissenses, worked willingly, and announced with a weary grin that if the_gnaedische fraeulein_ would wait a little half-hour he would obtainanother wheel from a neighboring forge.

  Having recovered from her fright she was so touched by the poorfellow's distress that she promised readily to stand by him untilrepairs were effected. It was a longer job than either of themanticipated. The axle was slightly bent, and a blacksmith had to bringclamps and a jackscrew before the new wheel could be adjusted. Eventhen it had an air of uncertainty that rendered speed impossible. Theconcluding five miles of the journey were taken at a snail's pace, andHelen reflected ruefully that it was possible to "bruk ze leg" on thelevel high road as well as on the rocks of Corvatsch.

  Of course, she received offers of assistance in plenty. Every carriagethat passed while the blacksmith was at work pulled up and placed aseat therein at her command. But she refused them all. It was not thatshe feared to desert her baggage, for Switzerland is proverbiallyhonest. The unlucky driver had tried to be friendly; his fault was dueto an excess of zeal; and each time she declined the proffered helphis furrowed face brightened. If she did not reach the hotel untilmidnight she was determined to go there in that vehicle, and in noneother.

  The accident threw her late, but only by some two hours. Instead ofarriving at Maloja in brilliant sunshine, it was damp and chilly whenshe entered the hotel. A bank of mist had been carried over the summitof the pass by a southwesterly wind. Long before the carriage crawledround the last great bend in the road the glorious panorama of lakeand mountains was blotted out of sight. The horses seemed to bejogging on through a luminous cloud, so dense that naught was visiblesave a few yards of roadway and the boundary wall or stone posts onthe left side, where lay the lake. The brightness soon passed, as thehurrying fog wraiths closed in on each other. It became bitterly coldtoo, and it was with intense gladness that Helen finally stepped fromthe outer gloom into a glass haven of warmth and light that formed aspecies of covered-in veranda in front of the hotel.

  She was about to pay the driver, having added to the agreed sum halfthe cost of the broken wheel by way of a solatium, when anothercarriage drove up from the direction of St. Moritz.

  She fancied that the occupant, a young man whom she had never seenbefore, glanced at her as though he knew her. She looked again to makesure; but by that time his eyes were turned away, so he had evidentlydiscovered his mistake. Still, he seemed to take considerableinterest in her carriage, and Helen, ever ready to concede the mostgenerous interpretation of doubtful acts, assumed that he had heardof the accident by some means, and was on the lookout for her.

  It would indeed have been a fortunate thing for Helen had some Swissfairy whispered the news of her mishap in Spencer's ears during thelong drive up the mist laden valley. Then, at least, he might havespoken to her, and used the informal introduction to make her furtheracquaintance on the morrow. But the knowledge was withheld from him.No hint of it was even flashed through space by that wirelesstelegraphy which has existed between kin souls ever since men andwomen contrived to raise human affinities to a plane not far removedfrom the divine.

  He had small store of German, but he knew enough to be perplexed bythe way in which Helen's driver expressed "beautiful thanks" for hergift. The man seemed to be at once grateful and downhearted. Ofcourse, the impression was of the slightest, but Spencer had beentrained in reaching vital conclusions on meager evidence. He could notwait to listen to Helen's words, so he passed into the hotel, havingthe American habit of leaving the care of his baggage to the hallporter. He wondered why Helen was so late in arriving that he hadcaught her up on the very threshold of the Kursaal, so to speak. Hewould not forget the driver's face, and if he met the man again, itmight be possible to find out the cause of the delay. He himself wasbefore time. The federal railway authorities at Coire, awaking to thefact that the holiday rush was beginning, had actually dispatched arelief train to St. Moritz when the second important train of the dayturned up as full as its predecessor.

  At dinner Helen and he sat at little tables in the same section of thehuge dining hall. The hotel was nearly full, and it was noticeablethat they were the only persons who dined alone. Indeed, the headwaiter asked Spencer if he cared to join a party of men who sattogether; but he declined. There was no such general gathering ofwomen; so Helen was given no alternative, and she ate the meal insilence.

  She saw Mrs. Vavasour in a remote part of the salon. With her was avacuous looking young man who seldom spoke to her but was continuallyaddressing remarks to a woman at another table.

  "That is the son lost at Lucerne," she decided, finding in his facesome of the physical traits but none of the calculating shrewdness ofhis 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 firstglance, everybody seemed to know everybody else.
That was not reallythe case, of course. There were others present as neglected andsolitary as Helen; but the noise and merriment of the greater numberdominated the place. It resembled a social club rather than a hotel.

  Her chair was placed in an alley along which people had to pass whowished to reach the glass covered veranda. She amused herself bytrying to pick out the Wraggs, the Burnham-Joneses, and the de laVeres. Suddenly she was aware that Mrs. Vavasour and her son werecoming that way; the son unwillingly, the mother with an air ofdetermination. Perhaps the Lucerne episode was about to be explained.

  When young Vavasour's eyes fell on Helen, the boredom vanished fromhis face. It was quite obvious that he called his mother's attentionto her and asked who she was. Helen felt that an introduction wasimminent. She was glad of it. At that moment she would have chattedgayly with even a greater ninny than George de Courcy Vavasour.

  But she had not yet grasped the peculiar idiosyncrasies of awoman who was famous for snubbing those whom she considered to be"undesirables." Helen looked up with a shy smile, expecting that theolder woman would stop and speak; but Mrs. Vavasour gazed at herblankly--looked at the back of her chair through her body--and walkedon.

  "I don't know, George," Helen heard her say. "There are a lot of newarrivals. Some person of no importance, rather declassee, I shouldimagine by appearances. As I was telling you, the General hasarranged----"

  Taken altogether, Helen had crowded into portions of two days many newand some very unpleasant experiences.