'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.
She sipped the hot coffee, whose fragrance flew around them like bees murmuring around flowers, in the snowy air, she drank tiny sips of the Heidelbeerwasser, she ate the cold, sweet, creamy wafers. How good everything was! How perfect everything tasted and smelled and sounded, here in this utter stillness of snow and falling twilight.
'You are going away tomorrow?' his voice came at last.
'Yes.'
There was a pause, when the evening seemed to rise in its silent, ringing pallor infinitely high, to the infinite which was near at hand.
'Wohin?'
That was the question—wohin? Whither? Wohin? What a lovely word! She never wanted it answered. Let it chime for ever.
'I don’t know,' she said, smiling at him.
He caught the smile from her.
'One never does,' he said.
'One never does,' she repeated.
There was a silence, wherein he ate biscuits rapidly, as a rabbit eats leaves.
'But,' he laughed, 'where will you take a ticket to?'
'Oh heaven!' she cried. 'One must take a ticket.'
Here was a blow. She saw herself at the wicket, at the railway station. Then a relieving thought came to her. She breathed freely.
'But one needn’t go,' she cried.
'Certainly not,' he said.
'I mean one needn’t go where one’s ticket says.'
That struck him. One might take a ticket, so as not to travel to the destination it indicated. One might break off, and avoid the destination. A point located. That was an idea!
'Then take a ticket to London,' he said. 'One should never go there.'
'Right,' she answered.
He poured a little coffee into a tin can.
'You won’t tell me where you will go?' he asked.
'Really and truly,' she said, 'I don’t know. It depends which way the wind blows.'
He looked at her quizzically, then he pursed up his lips, like Zephyrus, blowing across the snow.
'It goes towards Germany,' he said.
'I believe so,' she laughed.
Suddenly, they were aware of a vague white figure near them. It was Gerald. Gudrun’s heart leapt in sudden terror, profound terror. She rose to her feet.
'They told me where you were,' came Gerald’s voice, like a judgment in the whitish air of twilight.
'Maria! You come like a ghost,' exclaimed Loerke.
Gerald did not answer. His presence was unnatural and ghostly to them.
Loerke shook the flask—then he held it inverted over the snow. Only a few brown drops trickled out.
'All gone!' he said.
To Gerald, the smallish, odd figure of the German was distinct and objective, as if seen through field glasses. And he disliked the small figure exceedingly, he wanted it removed.
Then Loerke rattled the box which held the biscuits.
'Biscuits there are still,' he said.
And reaching from his seated posture in the sledge, he handed them to Gudrun. She fumbled, and took one. He would have held them to Gerald, but Gerald so definitely did not want to be offered a biscuit, that Loerke, rather vaguely, put the box aside. Then he took up the small bottle, and held it to the light.
'Also there is some Schnapps,' he said to himself.
Then suddenly, he elevated the battle gallantly in the air, a strange, grotesque figure leaning towards Gudrun, and said:
'Gnadiges Fraulein,' he said, 'wohl—'
