She somewhere was

waiting for him, expecting him, calling to him softly from those

leagues of moonlit mountain. He remembered the touch of that cool, dry

hand; the soft and icy breath against his cheek; the hush and softness

of her presence in the way she came and the way she had gone

again—like a flurry of snow the wind sent gliding up the slopes. She,

like himself, belonged out there. He fancied that he heard her little

windy voice come sifting to him through the snowy branches of the

trees, calling his name … that haunting little voice that dived

straight to the centre of his life as once, long years ago, two other

voices used to do….

But nowhere among the costumed dancers did he see her slender

figure. He danced with one and all, distrait and absent, a stupid

partner as each girl discovered, his eyes ever turning towards the door

and windows, hoping to catch the luring face, the vision that did not

come … and at length, hoping even against hope. For the ball-room

thinned; groups left one by one, going home to their hotels and

chalets; the band tired obviously; people sat drinking lemon-squashes

at the little tables, the men mopping their foreheads, everybody ready

for bed.

It was close on midnight. As Hibbert passed through the hall to get

his overcoat and snow-boots, he saw men in the passage by the

“sport-room,” greasing their ski against an early start. Knapsack

luncheons were being ordered by the kitchen swing doors. He sighed.

Lighting a cigarette a friend offered him, he returned a confused reply

to some question as to whether he could join their party in the

morning. It seemed he did not hear it properly. He passed through the

outer vestibule between the double glass doors, and went into the

night.

The man who asked the question watched him go, an expression of

anxiety momentarily in his eyes.

“Don’t think he heard you,” said another, laughing. “You’ve got to

shout to Hibbert, his mind’s so full of his work.”

“He works too hard,” suggested the first, “full of queer ideas and

dreams.”

But Hibbert’s silence was not rudeness. He had not caught the

invitation, that was all. The call of the hotel-world had faded. He no

longer heard it. Another wilder call was sounding in his ears.

For up the street he had seen a little figure moving. Close against

the shadows of the baker’s shop it glided—white, slim, enticing.

VI

And at once into his mind passed the hush and softness of the

snow—yet with it a searching, crying wildness for the heights. He knew

by some incalculable, swift instinct she would not meet him in the

village street. It was not there, amid crowding houses, she would speak

to him. Indeed, already she had disappeared, melted from view up the

white vista of the moonlit road. Yonder, he divined, she waited where

the highway narrowed abruptly into the mountain path beyond the

chalets.

It did not even occur to him to hesitate; mad though it seemed, and

was—this sudden craving for the heights with her, at least for open

spaces where the snow lay thick and fresh—it was too imperious to be

denied. He does not remember going up to his room, putting the sweater

over his evening clothes, and getting into the fur gauntlet gloves and

the helmet cap of wool. Most certainly he has no recollection of

fastening on his ski; he must have done it automatically. Some faculty

of normal observation was in abeyance, as it were. His mind was out

beyond the village—out with the snowy mountains and the moon.

Henri Defago, putting up the shutters over his cafe windows,

saw him pass, and wondered mildly: “Un monsieur qui fait du ski a cette

heure! Il est Anglais, done …!” He shrugged his shoulders, as though

a man had the right to choose his own way of death. And Marthe Perotti,

the hunchback wife of the shoemaker, looking by chance from her window,

caught his figure moving swiftly up the road. She had other thoughts,

for she knew and believed the old traditions of the witches and

snow-beings that steal the souls of men. She had even heard, ‘twas

said, the dreaded “synagogue” pass roaring down the street at night,

and now, as then, she hid her eyes. “They’ve called to him … and he

must go,” she murmured, making the sign of the cross.

But no one sought to stop him. Hibbert recalls only a single

incident until he found himself beyond the houses, searching for her

along the fringe of forest where the moonlight met the snow in a

bewildering frieze of fantastic shadows.