THE WISDOM OF MRS. TREVANNA .sx I .sx FOR thirty years I have lived out of the world .sx I mean the great world that keeps itself on the go and has fashions and ` movements ' and things that ` everybody is doing' and faces that everybody is making .sx I am a game-keeper in Africa :sx not in the part where such a crowd of the ` best people' from England are squatting , to get away from the Reds and the Rads :sx I work more inland , nearer the Equator .sx It's very rural thereabouts , and the tsetse fly is king of the place ; but England has now been given the job of swatting him , if she can , and running the show in his stead .sx And I am in England's pay .sx Some day we shall fall on that fly as soon as we know what he most hates to be hit with .sx Meantime , I run down the fellows who kill too many elephants .sx It's quite a good life for a hale man of fifty like me :sx all out of doors ; walking all day through the wilds with your file of black porters ; sleeping under the stars with a lion , perhaps , coughing confidentially in the jungle .sx Any boy would jump at it .sx And yet it is work , in a way .sx You have to be wary with good old Nature :sx she bites .sx Miss your way to a well and you and your string of black boys may be dried meat surprisingly soon .sx Besides little famines blow all about Central Africa like the squalls on a sea .sx If you butt into one you'll be for it .sx So mind your Intelligence work .sx Then there's tact to be shown .sx Use a word in some playful , fanciful way and some sizeable king may think that you're just the rude sort of beast that would put the evil eye on his cattle :sx then you're booked , too .sx And all the time you mustn't let down the good name of the whites .sx Of course our good name is a bit of a bluff , you may say .sx We're not the demigods the natives want to think us not by a long chalk .sx Still , a lot hangs on our not being swine in their sight .sx And it isn't always so easy .sx There's plenty of prime stuff to steal , all over the place ; and in some parts a chief who is putting you up for the night will offer you , last thing , the run of his wives .sx You see the sort of life all a muck of cause and effect , and all deuced simple and quick in the working ; play the fool and you're starved ; talk through your hat and you're knived ; do yourself well , beyond reason , and somebody else is done in , if not you .sx It's like Judgment Day in full blast on the premises .sx I fear it gets you into a cramped way of talking every word used with a literal , obvious meaning ; no playful crying up of a thing unless you're game to go through with it .sx This may make you rather unfit for good talk among brilliant people ; so much of their game is a starting of hares that they can't be bothered to hunt .sx So each time I come home on leave I fight more and more shy of the wits and good talkers .sx I can't keep it up on their lines .sx I bore them and they dazzle me , and I have to ask too many questions that they think ironic or somehow offensive , although I only just want to know .sx So I go back more and more to the Alps when I am on leave .sx The good old peaks and passes don't do the brilliant nor put on fine manners .sx Give me mine ancient ice-axe , a pocketful of food , and a few rocks or a glacier to play with , and I shall be all right for the day .sx II .sx That was how I came to be walking alone , one hot after-noon this last August , up the rough track from the village and .sx valley of Saas to the wee Weissmies Inn on the snow-line above .sx It's a four-hour walk , and the rise is some four thousand feet .sx The slope faces West and my rucksack was full .sx So I fried happily in my fat as I walked and thought how good it would all look about six o'clock , when I ought to be at the inn the sun just dipping behind the Mischabel's high snows , the cool Saas valley darkening below , the glacier streams falling silent with frost and the air getting crackly with crispness ; and then hot food and mulled red wine , and perhaps two or three decent strangers at table , men of the kind you do meet at such places , plain fellows that laugh at small jokes and will talk about routes and short cuts by the hour .sx I can get on with such men .sx Half-way up , I was roused from these pleasant thoughts by the sight of some little flag of a thing , about half a mile further on .sx I made out with the glass a young woman's light skirt .sx At her side was a man in plus fours .sx They were not going strong .sx I don't care to hustle past people .sx Still you couldn't walk more slowly than that pair .sx When I drew level each of them had taken a seat on a baking hot boulder .sx They seemed to be working each other up to despair of ever reaching the inn .sx The man was damning ` this bad eminence ' I think he meant the whole eastern wall of the valley .sx The girl was widening still further the scope of this malison .sx ` All mountains,' she shouted , ` are bloody .sx ' She seemed to shout what-ever she said , as it were in disdain of anything so pusillanimous as reticence .sx Both were of the long , straight , loosely jointed English make the well-to-do one .sx Both had a rather standardised sort of good looks .sx While the girl cursed the day she was born , she re-whitened , with a few broad flowing touches of a powder-puff , the sepulchre of a deceased complexion , .sx The man and I exchanged the straight-flung words and few that are prescribed by British custom in such places .sx At the end of this rite he asked , ` Is there any serious ground , sir , for believing that an inn was ever hoisted up this foul gradient ?sx ' .sx As a dull man I could only tell him that I had slept there last week and could now see the building .sx I felt that it was a witless and bald thing to say .sx Still , you can't get water to rise higher than its source .sx They certainly looked as if I had committed a pretty bad gaff , calling for tact on their part .sx ` Well,' the man forbearingly said , ` as the House of Loretto sailed across seas I suppose a pub may go up a ladder .sx ' The girl had taken my offered Zeiss glass and was looking through it up-hill .sx Espying the inn she shouted , ` Built , I .sx perceive , in the Street Lavatory style of architecture .sx ' She still kept the glass to her eyes .sx ` The beastly thing,' she hallooed , ` seems to be real .sx Clothes-line and washing and all .sx Realistic , in fact the landlady's undies are out in great force .sx ' She dropped the glass and glared at the man and me as if these words ought to have told on us somehow or other .sx The man , at any rate , exhibited no reaction to the stimulus .sx Real ?sx ' he grunted wearily .sx ` Of course it is .sx That's just the vice of this damn perpendicular Sahara .sx The mountains really go up ; the sun is real hot ; my feet are real sore .sx Jill , I tell thee flat I'm out of love with all these overdone realities .sx What I want is more unsubstantial reverie .sx ' ` Well , you are a filthy disheartener , Jack,' bellowed Jill .sx They smoked cheerlessly for some moments .sx Then the girl shouted to Jack , ` Say , you are we to leave our old bones here , or a bit further on ?sx ' .sx Jack scarcely looked at her .sx ` Leave your prabbles , .sx 'oman,' he said .sx Then he turned to me .sx ` You , sir,' he said with suavity , ` are a strong and determined man .sx Should you win to yonder height and find there a Mrs. Trevanna ' .sx ` Trevanna !sx ' I feared I must have bellowed like well like a girl of the period .sx For I too have my Mrs. Trevanna .sx ` A lady,' he said , ` lightly stricken in years .sx Tell her , from her daughter and the least deserving of her friends , to bid the management not to wait dinner for us unless this can be done without injury to the food .sx One other word tell her , if we should not turn up at all , that we died as we had lived , each true to his or her self and no other .sx Say ' .sx ` Chuck it , Jack , before you make me vomit,' yelled the fair Jill .sx For myself I felt that a little of Jack's persiflage would go quite a long way towards supplying my needs .sx Besides , I was doing no good where I was .sx The distinguished cross-chat of this couple would go all the better without me .sx So I waited no more than to give them the basic facts that the inn dined at seven , that all its staff were always snoring by nine and that it was still a good two-hour walk to the door .sx Then I stumped on up the track .sx III .sx The shadows were fantastically long when I topped the last sharp rise to the inn and stood to take breath at that door .sx The sun was just dipping , according to programme , behind the white peak of the Balfrin , throwing out wild and rather sensational shafts of horizontal light .sx Romance , you know beauty mixed with strangeness .sx Joylessly eyeing this pomp , from four iron chairs on the inn's tiny terrace , were two men and two women .sx One man and one woman were quite young .sx The two others must havebeen forty or so .sx All were legibly stamped upper middle-class English the brainy variety , not the purely gold-digging sort , nor yet the horsy .sx I caught the characteristic intonation of Oxford , familiar in my youth .sx This exquisite falsetto was still echoing pleasantly down the corridors of memory when there was granted to me a yet more agreeable resurrection of the past .sx Out of the inn door stepped , serenely genial as ever , only sunnily mellowed as with a fine autumn , the one , the authentic Mrs. Trevanna , mine and my friends' , not seen for nearly thirty years .sx As the young , ardent and beautiful wife of one of our dons at Skimmery , Mrs. Trevanna had elder-sistered us all when I was at that famous college .sx Unpriggishly , unprudishly , merciful to our absurd conceits and inflations , a tender solvent of shy petrifactions , a banisher of boyish glooms , a diviner and disengager of any high impulse concealed by the vapours of hobbledehoydom , Mrs. Trevanna had made us all talk , get it out , clear our breasts of the perilous stuff , while she listened with genius , the kindest of comrades , confessors and confidants .sx There must be middle-aged men all over the world who remember Mrs. Trevanna as the friend who helped them more than any other to get the full use of their own latent .sx powers .sx There's eloquence for you !sx But really , when one thinks of what that woman did for us well , I suppose I mustn't begin .sx all over again .sx Her face had ripened rather than changed .sx Genial lines that used to come to it for a second or two , as occasional means of expression , had etched themselves lastingly now :sx her friendly life was printed upon her in those letters .sx Afterwards I half thought her voice was almost too perfect in its habitual use of certain tones of warming frankness .sx Some of the kind .sx heart's sudden improvisations , as they had seemed long ago , came almost wearily now .sx Can a divine benignness become too much of a custom ?sx But I am a beast to say this .sx True to the habits of the race , I betrayed the least that I could of my .sx surprise and joy .sx