But what he could not bear was the darkness.The solid darkness confronting him drove him mad.So he rose, and made a light.He remained seated for a while, staring in front.He did not think of Gudrun, he did not think of anything.
Then suddenly he went downstairs for a book.He had all his life been in terror of the nights that should come, when he could not sleep.He knew that this would be too much for him, to have to face nights of sleeplessness and of horrified watching the hours.
So he sat for hours in bed, like a statue, reading.His mind, hard and acute, read on rapidly, his body understood nothing.In a state of rigid unconsciousness, he read on through the night, till morning, when, weary and disgusted in spirit, disgusted most of all with himself, he slept for two hours.
Then he got up, hard and full of energy.Gudrun scarcely spoke to him, except at coffee when she said:
`I shall be leaving tomorrow.'
`We will go together as far as Innsbruck, for appearance's sake?' he asked.
`Perhaps,' she said.
She said `Perhaps' between the sips of her coffee.And the sound of her taking her breath in the word, was nauseous to him.He rose quickly to be away from her.
He went and made arrangements for the departure on the morrow.Then, taking some food, he set out for the day on the skis.Perhaps, he said to the Wirt, he would go up to the Marienhutte, perhaps to the village below.
To Gudrun this day was full of a promise like spring.She felt an approaching release, a new fountain of life rising up in her.It gave her pleasure to dawdle through her packing, it gave her pleasure to dip into books, to try on her different garments, to look at herself in the glass.She felt a new lease of life was come upon her, and she was happy like a child, very attractive and beautiful to everybody, with her soft, luxuriant figure, and her happiness.Yet underneath was death itself.
In the afternoon she had to go out with Loerke.Her tomorrow was perfectly vague before her.This was what gave her pleasure.She might be going to England with Gerald, she might be going to Dresden with Loerke, she might be going to Munich, to a girl-friend she had there.Anything might come to pass on the morrow.And today was the white, snowy iridescent threshold of all possibility.All possibility -- that was the charm to her, the lovely, iridescent, indefinite charm, -- pure illusion All possibility -- because death was inevitable, and nothing was possible but death.
She did not want things to materialise, to take any definite shape.
She wanted, suddenly, at one moment of the journey tomorrow, to be wafted into an utterly new course, by some utterly unforeseen event, or motion.
So that, although she wanted to go out with Loerke for the last time into the snow, she did not want to be serious or businesslike.
And Loerke was not a serious figure.In his brown velvet cap, that made his head as round as a chestnut, with the brown-velvet flaps loose and wild over his ears, and a wisp of elf-like, thin black hair blowing above his full, elf-like dark eyes, the shiny, transparent brown skin crinkling up into odd grimaces on his small-featured face, he looked an odd little boy-man, a bat.But in his figure, in the greeny loden suit, he looked chetif and puny, still strangely different from the rest.
He had taken a little toboggan, for the two of them, and they trudged between the blinding slopes of snow, that burned their now hardening faces, laughing in an endless sequence of quips and jests and polyglot fancies.
The fancies were the reality to both of them, they were both so happy, tossing about the little coloured balls of verbal humour and whimsicality.
Their natures seemed to sparkle in full interplay, they were enjoying a pure game.And they wanted to keep it on the level of a game, their relationship: such a fine game.
Loerke did not take the toboganning very seriously.He put no fire and intensity into it, as Gerald did.Which pleased Gudrun.She was weary, oh so weary of Gerald's gripped intensity of physical motion.Loerke let the sledge go wildly, and gaily, like a flying leaf, and when, at a bend, he pitched both her and him out into the snow, he only waited for them both to pick themselves up unhurt off the keen white ground, to be laughing and pert as a pixie.She knew he would be making ironical, playful remarks as he wandered in hell -- if he were in the humour.And that pleased her immensely.It seemed like a rising above the dreariness of actuality, the monotony of contingencies.
They played till the sun went down, in pure amusement, careless and timeless.Then, as the little sledge twirled riskily to rest at the bottom of the slope, `Wait!' he said suddenly, and he produced from somewhere a large thermos flask, a packet of Keks, and a bottle of Schnapps.
`Oh Loerke,' she cried.`What an inspiration! What a comble de joie indeed! What is the Schnapps?'
He looked at it, and laughed.
`Heidelbeer!' he said.
`No! From the bilberries under the snow.Doesn't it look as if it were distilled from snow.Can you --' she sniffed, and sniffed at the bottle -- `can you smell bilberries? Isn't it wonderful? It is exactly as if one could smell them through the snow.'
She stamped her foot lightly on the ground.He kneeled down and whistled, and put his ear to the snow.As he did so his black eyes twinkled up.
`Ha! Ha!' she laughed, warmed by the whimsical way in which he mocked at her verbal extravagances.He was always teasing her, mocking her ways.
But as he in his mockery was even more absurd than she in her extravagances, what could one do but laugh and feel liberated.
She could feel their voices, hers and his, ringing silvery like bells in the frozen, motionless air of the first twilight.How perfect it was, how very perfect it was, this silvery isolation and interplay.
