The Silent Barrier Part 7

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 pa.s.sengers 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 pa.s.sengers 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 Perhaps, when British patronage is withdrawn from your railways and hotels, you will begin to consider our requirements."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 eyegla.s.ses 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 eyegla.s.ses again, and pa.s.sed 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? n.o.body ever travels that way."

By "n.o.body," 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 pa.s.sengers 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 pa.s.sing 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 eyegla.s.ses 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 cla.s.sify 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.