Free Contango (Ill Wind) by James Hilton

dreaded.
For, if the weather were thus fine, she had to take some of her people for
that same Jungfraujoch excursion. She felt suddenly that she could not bear
to go there again, to make her little speech about the construction of the
railway, to watch the skiers through the telescopes, to see that ledge of
rock overlooking the snow. She felt, indeed, as she faced her people at
breakfast, that she could not endure anything, even a continuation of life
itself, without relaxing the strain that held her passionately taut. And it
was then, during breakfast, that the last vestige of a sense of humour
deserted her.
    She left the table abruptly, dashed upstairs to her room, packed a small
handbag with a few necessities, ran out of the Hôtel Magnifique de
l’Univers without saying a word to anyone, scampered to the station,
and booked a single ticket to Mürren.
    In the funicular that climbs up the mountain from Lauterbrunnen, Miss
Faulkner became calm enough to face certain obvious realities of the
situation. She had, she perceived, most comprehensively burned her boats.
Even after the greatest ingenuity of explanation, she could scarcely hope to
escape condemnation for leaving her people in the lurch. Poor things, some
arrangements would be made for them, no doubt; but they would certainly
complain to the travel agency, and she would never be offered a cheap August
holiday again. It didn’t matter, of course. Nor did it matter that she
owed the hotel a few small sums for tips and extras, while they, on the other
hand, had possession of most of her clothes. Details of that sort could all
be ignored for the time being, since far more urgent was the problem of what
to do when she arrived at Mürren.
    One thing was clear enough: having burned her boats, she must make the
burning worth while by risking everything, if necessary. It was no time for
half-measures. She would have the great advantage of being free, at any
rate—no longer tied to a routine of times and places. And her
programme was, in a sense, quite simple. She would go to the
“Edelweiss” like an ordinary private visitor, book accommodation,
and then—well, she would meet him. She was bound to, staying at the
same hotel in a small place like Mürren. She would have to compose some
plausible story to account for her being there—lies, of course, but
again that didn’t matter. (Afterwards, in that sublime imagined
afterwards which her efforts were to make real, how good it would be to
confess all these subterfuges—to say: “My dear, you’ve no
notion how utterly unscrupulous I was—I lied right and left—I
was absolutely conscienceless about you. Do you forgive me?” And he,
perhaps, would make a return confession that he had gone to Mürren to forget,
if he could, an attraction by which, at that early stage, he had been
unwilling to be enslaved…. Oh dear, oh dear, how wonderful it would all be
then!)
    She arrived at Mürren before noon, and walked from the station to the
hotel. In that midday glory of sunlight the mountains across the valley
dazzled and were monstrous. She had seen them from Mürren before, but never
on such a day and with such eagerness to yield to rapture. She put on her
sun-glasses and found them wet immediately with tears that had sprung to her
eyes; oh, this beauty, this beauty everywhere and in everything—did it
really exist, apart from her sensing it?—was it all no more than Freud
or Havelock Ellis could explain in half a page? And this pity she felt for
every suffering being, for soldiers in trenches and work-girls in asbestos-
factories and the pigeons at Monte Carlo and the hunted stag on
Exmoor—was all this, too, conditioned by no more than secretions and
ductless glands? She was passing a shop and went inside to buy a two-
day’s-old English newspaper—anything to break the spell of such
intolerable sensitiveness; but the spell took hold of the printed words and