Were this a story, I should tell at length how much we were helped
by the good fortune of picking up a Utopian coin of gold, how at
last we adventured into the Utopian inn and found it all
marvellously easy. You see us the shyest and most watchful of
guests; but of the food they put before us and the furnishings of
the house, and all our entertainment, it will be better to speak
later. We are in a migratory world, we know, one greatly accustomed
to foreigners; our mountain clothes are not strange enough to
attract acute attention, though ill-made and shabby, no doubt, by
Utopian standards; we are dealt with as we might best wish to be
dealt with, that is to say as rather untidy, inconspicuous men. We
look about us and watch for hints and examples, and, indeed, get
through with the thing. And after our queer, yet not unpleasant,
dinner, in which we remark no meat figures, we go out of the house
for a breath of air and for quiet counsel one with another, and
there it is we discover those strange constellations overhead. It
comes to us then, clear and full, that our imagination has realised
itself; we dismiss quite finally a Rip-Van-Winkle fancy we have
entertained, all the unfamiliarities of our descent from the
mountain pass gather together into one fullness of conviction, and
we know, we know, we are in Utopia.
We wander under the trees by the main road, watching the dim
passers-by as though they were the phantoms of a dream. We say
little to one another. We turn aside into a little pathway and come
to a bridge over the turbulent Reuss, hurrying down towards the
Devil's Bridge in the gorge below. Far away over the Furka ridge a
pallid glow preludes the rising of the moon.
Two lovers pass us whispering, and we follow them with our eyes.
This Utopia has certainly preserved the fundamental freedom, to
love. And then a sweet-voiced bell from somewhere high up towards
Oberalp chimes two-and-twenty times.
I break the silence. "That might mean ten o'clock," I say.
My companion leans upon the bridge and looks down into the dim river
below. I become aware of the keen edge of the moon like a needle of
incandescent silver creeping over the crest, and suddenly the river
is alive with flashes.
He speaks, and astonishes me with the hidden course his thoughts
have taken.
"We two were boy and girl lovers like that," he says, and jerks a
head at the receding Utopians. "I loved her first, and I do not
think I have ever thought of loving anyone but her."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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