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.
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.