XL.

Lord de Jones had been in a hurry to cross over to the Continent, for there was no means at all of knowing how much of it had disintegrated to date. The uncertainty of the whole business appalled him. The stationmaster at Victoria might not be able to cummunicate with the _chef de la gare du Nord_. Yet he had no means of knowing whether this was because Paris-Nord (or, for that matter, Paris) had disintegrated, or whether it was because the number was engaged.

There was of course an aeroplane service for abroad, but people still clung to the _terra firma_, Lord de Jones thought, without good cause. Moreover, they were travelling with luggage--a good deal of luggage. It was indeed difficult to know how much luggage to take with one--Eva could not take enough--to last one to the end of one’s days in time. The sight of passengers reclining in the easy luxury of the Pullmans, looking trim and hard, appalled him. They would not come back, he mused. Never come back from this last journey into space whither they were travelling _de luxe_, over viaducts, away, away, urbane materialists melting into air....

And on the French side, against all the easy felicity of the language, the sinuous tones of the restaurant-car attendant who sang out as he squeezed himself along the swaying corridors: “_Prière de prendre place pour le premier déjeuner!_” contrasting favourably with the brisk “First luncheon!” of the British dining-car attendant, the incorrigible insularity of the English passengers who said they wanted to shut out, if possible, French passengers from the coupé (forgetting that they were travelling across France in a French train), stood out a black and reeking ghost of shame which made him think the world was doomed because it lacked all manners. In the night the train stood still, emitting long sighs at intervals; and his heart beat loud within him with foreboding.

Images passed through his mind, of a life _à la_ Jean Jacques Rousseau, in which he must rely on his dexterity of arm and on nature’s bounty. A hardened hunter he is, building her a hut. Eva with only furs from furry animals which he had hunted down for her to hide her nudeness. Primeval love and lust. Long days of bliss. But what is this? The roar of a lion. Bother! He must get up and see about it. He had been dozing, and opening his eyes, she was there indeed, not in the wilderness as yet, but facing him in the coupé, and smiling at him.

But what if it fail him? She, the child,--no more than she could understand how, having undone one atom, he had automatically undone the world,--had not the remotest comprehension of how he could now isolate a specific portion of it from destruction. Yet when he had, to illustrate the process, said to her that all he had to do was to vaccinate the hill they had selected as their future world, she said: “Of course! How silly of me not to think of it myself!”

But even if it fail, then death. And what was death? A change of outlook. He remembered once crossing a wide river somewhere, and as he landed on the other side, straying into a bathing place where lots of naked people sat about on benches in the garden and on chairs in the adjoining restaurant, smoking, eating, chatting, listening to music--but with nothing on them. It was uncanny. And he thought that landing on the other side of death must be as strange: for everything seemed different, yet everything the same.

Dusk fell as the train raced across Austria, and sheaves of corn in the vast whirling fields looked like humans stealing away one by one in the twilight. “Escaping,” he thought.

And, waking in the morning suddenly, they saw the mountains.

In the station square at Innsbruck, a fat German who looked like a pig waved his whip at his dog and threatened it: “_Ach, du Schweinhund!_”

“Disgraceful!” said Eva, and as she passed him she gave him an icy look over her slim shoulder. It was a beautiful day in June. They hired a victoria and drove, at first through the old mellow town with its cloistered streets, domes, turrets, and pinnacles; then by the side of the river, angry and turbulent. A faint hazy summer afternoon was drawing to its close, and as, at sundown, they came to a hanging bridge chained between rocks and the foaming green river rushing angrily under the horse’s hoofs, Christopher’s eyes filled with tears: the beauty of it all was more than he could bear.

And when, at the Pension Kogl, they came out on to their balconies, they were stunned with rapture by the view which opened out on to the mountain scenery. Below was the river, the passionate Inn, and the bridges, the funicular slowly climbing the mountain slope, and all around were pine trees, birches, roses, villas hidden in lanes lined with foliage; and at night when they walked by the river, where lanterns shone forth from between secretive trees, it was as if a wonderful secret, long dreamt and forgotten, awaited one round the corner.