The Emigrants

Switzerland. One morning Dr. Selwyn came up to tell us that he had invited a friend with whom he had been close for many years to dinner and, if it was convenient, he would be delighted if we could make their twosome a petit comité. We went down shortly before eight. A fire was blazing against the distinct chill of evening in the vast hearth of the drawing room, which was furnished with a number of four-seater settees and cumbersome armchairs. High on the walls mirrors with blind patches were hung, multiplying the flickering of the firelight and reflecting shifting images. Dr. Selwyn was wearing a tie and a tweed jacket with leather patches at the elbows. His friend Edwin Elliott, whom he introduced to us as a well-known botanist and entomologist, was a man of a much slighter build than Dr. Selwyn himself, and, while the latter inclined to stoop, he carried himself erect. He too was wearing a tweed jacket. His shirt collar was too large for his scrawny, wrinkled neck, which emerged from it accordion-style, like the neck of certain birds or of a tortoise; his head was small, seeming faintly prehistoric, some kind of throwback; his eyes, though, shone with sheer wonderful life. At first we talked about my work and our plans for the next year or so, and of the impressions we had, coming from mountainous parts, of England, and particularly of the flat expanse of the county of Norfolk. Dusk fell. Dr. Selwyn stood up and, with some ceremony, preceded us into the dining room next door. On the oak table, at which thirty people could have been seated with no difficulty, stood two silver candelabra. Places were set for Dr. Selwyn and Edwin at the head and foot of the table, and for Clara and me on the long side facing the windows. By now it was almost dark inside the house, and outside, too, the greenery was thickening with deep, blue shadows. The light of the west still lay on the horizon, though, with mountains of cloud whose snowy formations reminded me of the loftiest alpine massifs, as the night descended. Elaine pushed in a serving trolley equipped with hotplates, some kind of patented design dating from the Thirties. She was wearing her grey full-length apron and went about her work in a silence which she broke only once or twice to mutter something to herself. She lit the candles and shuffled out, as she had come in, without a word. We served ourselves, passing the dishes along the table to one another. The first course consisted of a few pieces of green asparagus covered with marinated leaves of young spinach. The main course was broccoli spears in butter and new potatoes boiled with mint leaves. Dr. Selwyn told us that he grew his earlies in the sandy soil of one of the old glasshouses, where they reached the size of walnuts by mid April. The meal was concluded with creamed stewed rhubarb sprinkled with Demarara sugar. Thus almost everything was from the neglected garden. Before we had finished, Edwin turned our conversation to Switzerland, perhaps thinking that Dr. Selwyn and I would both have something to say on the subject. And Dr. Selwyn did indeed, after a certain hesitation, start to tell us of his stay in Berne shortly before the First World War. In the summer of 1913 (he began), he had completed his medical studies in Cambridge, and had forthwith left for Berne, intending to further his training there. In the event, things had turned out differently, and he had spent most of his time in the Bernese Oberland, taking more and more to mountain climbing. He spent weeks on end in Meiringen, and Oberaar in particular, where he met an alpine guide by the name of Johannes Naegeli, then aged sixty-five, of whom, from the beginning, he was very fond. He went everywhere with Naegeli — up the Zinggenstock, the Scheuchzerhorn and the Rosenhorn, the Lauteraarhorn, the Schreckhorn and the Ewigschneehorn — and never in his life, neither before nor later, did he feel as good as he did then, in the company of that man. When war broke out and I returned to England and was called up, Dr. Selwyn said, nothing felt as hard, as I realize now looking back, as saying goodbye to Johannes Naegeli. Even the separation from Elli, whom I had met at Christmas in Berne and married after the war, did not cause me remotely as much pain as the separation from Naegeli. I can still see him standing at the station at Meiringen, waving. But I may